Paul Watson Quotes

Ships are expendable; the whales are not.

Until fishing is properly regulated and contained, we should withdraw our consent. Save your plastic bags by all means, but if you really want to make a difference, stop eating fish.

The ocean is like a checking account where everybody withdraws but nobody makes a deposit. This is what's happening because of overfishing.

We need to respect the oceans and take care of them as if our lives depended on it. Because they do.

We have been far too aggressive about extracting ocean wildlife, not appreciating that there are limits and even points of no return.

One fifth of human kind depend on fish to live. Today now 70 percent of the fish stock are over-exploited. According to FAO if we don't change our system of fishing the main sea resources will be gone in 2050. We don't want to believe what we know.

Maritime nations still respond automatically to the shibboleth of the "freedom of the seas." Professing to believe in the "inexhaustible resources of the oceans," they bring species after species of fish and whales closer to extinction.

'Cod' was a great story. It let me talk about the environment without putting people to sleep.

What we have now - a world without [marine] reserves - is like a debit account where we withdraw all the time and we never make any deposit. Reserves are like savings accounts.

We have reached the time in the life of the planet, and humanity's demand upon it, when every fisherman will have to be a river-keeper, a steward of marine shallows, a watchman on the high seas. We are beyond having to put back what we have taken out. We must put back more than we take out.

If we don't manage this resource, we will be left with a diet of jellyfish and plankton stew.

The fact that we're catching more fish per person than we've ever done before doesn't mean that there are not particular places where we've managed fisheries badly.

Eating a tuna roll at a sushi restaurant should be considered no more environmentally benign than driving a Hummer or harpooning a manatee.

On Cape Cod, great white shark stocks have been growing, or at least becoming more concentrated, because of the multiplying numbers of seals around Monomoy Island. We are fortunate to have such abundance of these sharks in our own waters. Around the globe, we are killing in excess of 100 million sharks each year.

We've built, drilled, and shipped indiscriminately across our oceans, with little consideration for the natural environment that is critical to the health of many of our other ocean uses, like food and recreation.

Fish banks are areas we set aside without fishing, reserves where we allow marine life to come back.

The concept of 'peak oil' has penetrated the hearts and minds of people concerned about energy for the future. 'Peak fish' occurred around the end of the 1980s.

European fisheries are a disaster. The American fisheries are well-kept.

In the Java Sea in Indonesia, I have seen fishers going out in the morning, six of them going out and coming back with five pounds of fish. That is the end point, a pound of fish per person per day to sell for rice. That's where fisheries go if you let it happen. That's where it stabilizes. These people cannot feed their families.

We are already perilously close to killing off the top of the oceanic food chain - with catastrophic consequences that we can't begin to imagine. Let us not, in the heat of anger, reduce the already devastated population of great white sharks by one more member.

I get a bit depressed if I walk into a restaurant and see shark-fin soup on the menu.

Why is it that scuba divers and surfers are some of the strongest advocates of ocean conservation? Because they've spent time in and around the ocean, and they've personally seen the beauty, the fragility, and even the degradation of our planet's blue heart.

The ocean is the lifeblood of our world. If we were to lose our fish that we appreciate so much by overfishing; or if we were to lose some of our favorite beaches to overbuilding and pollution, then how would we feel? It's become a case of not knowing what you've got until it's gone.

It's mainly the high-end luxury market now that drives much of the fishing in the sea. It's not feeding the starving millions. It's feeding a luxury market.

As an explorer, I know firsthand there are many places in the ocean so full of life that they should be protected. Coral reefs and mangrove coastlines are stressed already by climate change and ocean acidification, and poor planning will just make their plight worse.