Environmentalist stresses teamwork

Captain Paul Watson, founder of Sea Shepherd and co-founder of Greenpeace, spoke to an audience of all ages last night in the Michigan Union's Pendleton Room, thanks to the colluded efforts of the Michigan Student Assembly's Environmental Issues Committee, LSA Student Government and the Michigan Animal Rights Society.

This is the first time EIC and MARS worked together to bring a speaker to the University. The teamwork was not only helpful to pay the speaker fee, it was also apt for Sea Shepherd.

Sea Shepherd is primarily a marine mammal conservation society, but Watson said he believes that just as "the strength of an ecosystem is dependent on its diversity, diversity is the strength in a movement."

JESSICA JOHNSON/Daily Greenpeace Founder Captain Paul Watson addresses students in the Pendleton Room of the Michigan Union last night. Watson emphasized the importance of environmental conservation and animal rights.

Last night, Watson didn't try to tell people what they can specifically do, but he told people to "do what (they) do best" in the service of future generations, with the goal of making Earth "a better planet." Environmental conservation and animal rights, he explained, can come together because any differences are unessential.

The message was simple and earnest. But the audience applauded Watson's ironic comments about how the media works, why corporate structures have too much of a conflict of interests to achieve anything beyond a profit, his anecdotes about his adventures and his belief in the importance of knowing and living in the natural world.

"We live in a media culture," Watson said, that "chooses what we're concerned about." He explained that everyone, even McDonald's and Union Carbide, were environmentalists in 1990, but only because it was the 20th anniversary of Earth Day. By November 1990, he said, the Gulf War was the main issue. Earth Day was forgotten and every states' environmental initiatives had failed, he claimed.

In 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, during the United Nations Conference on the Environment, the panel leading a discussion on biodiversity was composed of actors and singers.

Corporations, fisheries and whalers, Watson said, squeeze the last dollar out of natural resources and move on to gobble up more.

When asked if he thought corporations had any solutions, Watson admitted Paul Mitchell and Patagonia are two corporations doing something to

04-13-99