After reading this article and contemplating the methods employed by one Paul Watson, I have come to the conclusion that what he does is perfectly acceptable, and if it is illegal it should not be. I have reached this conclusion not necessarily on behalf of the whales (though I oppose whaling), but because of what his tactics and activities represent. It seems that there are so many laws, regulations, restrictions, jurisdictions, and limitations (imposed by the few in power over the millions without) that the world is gradually being converted into some sort of very large clockwork toy to gather dust on the desk of some wealthy, influential individual. For example, this man (Watson) is diametrically oppose to whaling in all its forms and appears to delight in employing any means necessary to put a stop to it, yet he cannot legally resort to certain extremes. Why is this?
I find it interesting that he manages to do the things he does and avoid being labeled as a pirate (or worse) and thrown in jail (or worse). It seems that his publicity is a huge advantage to him, to the extent that he could not operate the way he does and retain any semblance of respectability without it.
During the process of reading this article, I was struck by a one of Watsons ideas, because it bore striking resemblance to an intellectual impass I had been pondering myself. It was the problem of population and how it relates to our dependence on nature. According to the article, Watson proposed reducing the worlds population to a billion through unspecified means. In my opinion, as the human population continues to expand, the problems we are seeing with greenhouse gasses, food, environmental balance, and animal life will progress apace. Even if we manage to rein in our most destructive habits and replace our inefficient, dirty technologies with green ones, eventually there will be so many people that even these new technologies will not be enough. What then will we do? Is there anything we could do at present to forestall this grim future? Of course, it is not difficult to predict which course mankind would take when all else fails, as all the evidence we need is in our past. I predict that either governments would instigate some sort of mass-culling process (which would lead to gigantic civil wars), or, with the lack of food and other resources, people will just start killing each other to make room (not exactly war, because civilization would essentially collapse, but pretty close to it), and possibly resorting to cannibalism. It certainly is a sticky situation, because no one would be prepared to regulate the population (and no one really has the right to either), but doing so could benefit the species, and indeed, the entire planet in the long run.
In the end, this article brought to my attention the futility of modern society. There are tangible benefits to be had by reverting to some sort of tribal structure, as doing so would address many of the problems plaguing our current system (disagreements would tend to lead more readily to fights, keeping the population in check). However, such a system would bring up just as many problems as it could potentially solve (nuclear weapons, wide-scale eco-devastation with nothing to prevent it but other tribe/clan opinions, genocide, etc.). It seems that we have become so dependent on laws and regulations keeping our world of technologically advanced weaponry in check that to remove them would open the doors to some psychopath amassing a nuclear arsenal and destroying inconceivable multitudes and causing potentially irreparable damage to the environment.
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