My clients, that is, those I represent and defend, are non-humans, Michael. I fight for whales, seals, wolves, trees, bees and plankton. I don't do much for people. People have enough champions.

99 cents out of every dollar going to charitable causes goes to people problems or issues, to combat disease, poverty, or to promote politics, religion, the arts blah blah, blah. Animals and nature get

the remaining penny and those who get the 99 cents are not happy with that. They also want that remaining penny. Your beloved social justice advocates who pester environmental organizations are simply greedy bastards with 99 cents in their pockets, trying to steal the remaining measly one cent from those who get hardly any sympathy at

all - the non-humans, most of whom are victims of the cruelty and insensitivity of humankind.

With all the tens of thousands of human charities, why must these people see cause to rob the piggy bank of the little piglets, the black-footed ferret and the lonely diminished community of redwoods? Leave them be already and be content with your 99 percent. It's bad enough that the Sierra Club has been corrupted into believing that the Club has an obligation to hunters, fishermen, and the poor

huddled masses, the same groups that daily trample the rights and habitats of so many persecuted species. Carl Pope says that the Sierra Club is a big tent although he does not wish us biocentrics to

enter but the problem with a big circus tent is that after the performance and the tent is taken down, there is nothing but mud and trampled vegetation. The other problem with the tent is that only people are allowed in and usually only those who have something to offer like money or agreement and conformity. No room for the persecuted species of the Earth.

It is from these species that we profit as we steal their carrying capacity and between the years 1980 and 2045, we will obliterate more species than the planet has lost in the last sixty-five million years

and we will do it in only 65 years. Ah what a piece of work is man! That is a crime that makes genocide pale in significance, in comparison. The stamping out, eradication, removal and wasting of tens of thousands of species, fellow citizens of the Earth just to satisfy our selfish desires. And the greatest crime is we remain unaware of what we are doing.

Gone is the Atlantic sea mink. Gone is the Eastern bison. Gone is the Buffalo wolf. Gone is the Carolina Parakeet. Gone is the European elephant. Gone is the Labrador duck. Gone is the Auk. Gone is the Stellar Sea cow. Gone is the Atlantic Grey whale. Gone are the great forests of Europe, the Americas, and Northern Africa. Gone are the great continuous kelp forests of the Western Pacific coast. Going steadily downward are the great coral reefs. An entire planet is being transformed and diminished. Gone, gone gone, hundreds of times over and few to remember that the species or habitats even existed. Slaughtered for fun, for profit, for food, or just for the hell of it.

People cause their own problems. They cause wars, they cause famine and disease because they don't know how to stop irresponsible reproduction and we seem to have evolved with a talent for hating each other. The planet is polluted with selfish hominid primates. Even those who try to solve the problem degenerate into feuding little bands of conversationalists posing as conservationists.

My world view changed three decades ago when a dying Sperm whale spared my life and left me contemplating the insanity of my own species that we could so ruthlessly slaughter such intelligent, socially complex, beautiful creatures to make an industrial oil

utilized in intercontinental ballistic missiles for the purpose of exterminating mass numbers of human beings. I thought then and I continue to believe that humanity is suffering from a collective insanity.

You of course will say that it is I who is insane and you are right. I do not detach myself from the collective malaise of my own species. But the first part of any recovery program is recognizing the problem.

My mind can not rid itself of the vision of live penguins being tossed into boiling vats on McQuarie Island for the lousy half litre of oil each produced. Or the tortoises of the enchanted islands, lying on their backs for weeks as a flipper is hacked off for a human meal one day and another a few days later. Or a mother harp seal watching helplessly as a thug kicks her pup in the face and skins it alive. It is the maddening stench of mass slaughter and the pitiful

screams of innocent creatures that stifles any sympathy I might have for the plights of my own species. When humanity begins to care for the world,

I will care for humanity but not until. Not that it matters really for in a world approaching seven billion of us, the opinions of any one of us are pretty much insignificant.

So what is the point of your question Michael? I have never denied my biocentric priorities. I have never pretended to put people first. So the answer to your question is "yes" I am a misanthrope and damn

proud of it.

The damn human race as Mark Twain so colorfully described us, is a blight upon the planet, a scourge to all other life forms and is little more than a conceited arrogant naked pathetic little ape full

of grandiose ideas of being divine in our own minds, and so damn delusional that (s)he really believes in pie-in-the-sky fantasy worlds where you go when you die. The majority of our species suffers from a mass collective psychosis we call religion.

We have a world polluted with Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Scientologist and all sorts of similar mumbo jumbo silly rubbish that would have us believe that we crucified some God for our "sins", that if we don't pray to the East we won't get to see paradise, that we are a special people chosen by some ridiculous sky God, that we were seeded by flying saucers and don't even get me started on the stupid damn Mormons. If anyone can believe in magical

spectacles and golden tablets and angels named Moronic Moroni or macaroni or whatever, then people can believe in anything and they do. Everything except the living reality of the natural world, a once

paradise now turned to hellish misery by the self appointed demi-gods of humanity.

In this weird world of warped worshipping wackos we have people killed because of cartoons or because they thought the world was round or because they thought the egg should be cracked from the opposite end from the way someone else is cracking it. We live in countries that behave like hooligan football teams, our flags being our colours and woe be it to anyone born in a different geographical location than another. Crosses, crescent moons, star spangled

banners, union jacks, swastikas, all just rubbish symbols of a garbage society where symbology takes on more importance than life, where we worship neon and the internal combustion engines and want cheap energy as long as it is in someone else's yard and where it is okay to sell nuclear materials to India in exchange for Mangos but not to Iran because a dominant monkey hominid says so and where

communistic harmless Cubans are evil and communistic Tibetan torturing Chinese are good because they are good trade partners and where freedom is championed by denying freedom and democracy is defined by profits and corporate access to trade. It is all one great stinking cesspool of hominid madness.

And the madness never ends as millions of other species are ground into bloody mush to be forced fed to other species so we can eat their putrefying flesh. And as if being carrion devouring apes is not

bad enough we insult the lions and the wolves by thumping our chests and calling ourselves "meat -eaters". Our species does not eat meat; we eat dead decomposing animal flesh, usually pumped full of dye and chemicals.

Our pathetic whining self pitying species has become the AIDS of the Earth as we erode the immune systems of the planet itself. We pump the atmosphere full of green house gases and at the same time as we promote a few token hybrid cars, we champion the right of the billions to own cars, and refrigerators, and air conditioners and a thousand and one other luxuries which by themselves may not be so bad but magnified by the demands of billions becomes insane mass consumerism and a blight upon the planet as our numbers sprawl across the deserts and plains, over the hill and into the valleys like some cancerous

slime mold of plastic, steel, concrete and dead trees. And we manufacture great sounding laws and treaties that we ignore as we save the world from ourselves on paper at least while ignoring the dying

all around us. Kyoto is a piece of paper. It means nothing because the will to stop the madness is simply not there. It is all posing and posturing, smoke and mirrors.

Tell me Michael, just what is it about humanity you are proud of? This despicable little species of which you and I have the misfortune to belong to just went through a century of unimaginable mass murder of each other and we put up monuments to the killers and call the baby killing sons of bitches who napalmed children and defoliated the jungles of Vietnam - heroes.

And every one of our great historical figures - our heroes, are nothing more than mass murderers from Alexander to Caesar to Napoleon to Hitler to George Bush. They killed for the cross, for Allah, for the Emperor, for democracy and each and every one of them had some silly little God on their side. Occasionally we throw in a Gandhi or a Mandela to make ourselves look humble and kind but these rare examples of sanity are usually forgotten within a few generations

whereas the murderers evolve like Napoleon from monsters to romantic heroes.

At this very moment, all around the planet, out of sight and out of mind, tens of millions of innocent birds are being pulled violently from cages, tossed into pits, doused with gasoline and burnt alive

because the slaughter of chickens for our insatiable appetite for enslaved poultry has created a breeding ground for a virus that may well do a few hundred million of us in - not that we don't deserve it.

After all, we think nothing of feeding the brains of cattle to cows, turning herbivores into cannibalistic carnivores to provide a chunk of putrefying flesh to harden our arteries and weaken our hearts.

For all the crying about slavery, we forget that Africans caught and sold Africans to Europeans to be transported to the Americas to work the land that was violently taken from Native Americans who themselves waged genocidal wars and practiced slavery upon each other. There are no innocent races and there are no innocent human beings. We are all guilty and we will all suffer the consequences for the ecological stupidity of our species.

And still we learned nothing as we enslave entire species using the same arguments as the racist human slavers that animals like the human slaves before them have no souls, do not feel pain and are simply placed here by the grace of some God for our use and pleasure - to kill to eat, to kill for sport or to kill because they annoy us. Or we force them to do tricks to entertain us - Anyway one looks at it, it is slavery and it is an affliction of horrific cruelty upon another sentient being. But we have an infinite capacity to rationalize and justify our own cruelty for we have dominion and they are submissive before us and live or die at our pleasure, that is,

when we even bother to think about it.

No Michael, I don't like people in general. I like some people as individuals because none of us are here by choice and some, a rare few, actually do care and do act and do deny the paradigm of human chauvinism. I detest our species when it congregates into crowds which become mobs or worse - governments or armies. And we lost our choices long ago when we allowed ourselves to be conditioned by the media, the churches, the government, our parents and our own primate weaknesses. But in general I have no real love for my fellow man. Nor do I hate my fellow man; I just wish we were not even here to continue with our despoiling of this wondrous planet of living rich

diversity of species that once flourished in ecological harmony. Sure species go extinct naturally. Sure there is cruelty in nature. But not since a meteorite unexpectedly smashed and transformed the living status quo sixty-five million years ago has there been such an unleashing of ecological destruction and our inflicted destruction,

unlike that cataclysmic impact so long ago, is arrogantly willful.

Is former Director Dorsey an arrogant Anthropocentric selfish little primate? It appears that he is but this of course makes him normal. For myself, I am thankful that I am not normal and that I still can see the value of natural diversity, species

interdependence and that I can acknowledge the ecological law of finite resources.

What we really have here Director Dorsey is a failure to communicate because my biocentric reality is as alien to you as your anthropocentric priorities are alien to me. In short you don't much like my views and I don't really care for your views. But I don't

hate you or even dislike you. In fact, I thank you for asking the question because it has given me an opportunity to express a view that you and most other hominids do not understand. Not that it matters. In death we are all equal and our time is so short on this planet. We are here one moment and swallowed into oblivion the next. The answer is that there is no answer - there is only life and it is as we make it

and my view is that we are not very good at making much of it. We as a species are experts at destroying life and not understanding it.

And rather than loneliness I have discovered a larger, richer world where I can see the passions, dreams, appreciation of life and understanding of nature in the eyes of a whale, a wolf, a bear or I hear it in the flow of the wind through the branches of the forest or the thunderous pounding of the surf upon the rocks. I have happily abandoned humanity for the fabulous reality of the greater world where I can share my citizenship on this planet of water and rock

with millions of other fellow Earthlings, all of whom belong intimately to the world behind the veil of our fantasies to the reality of the natural world, all of whom are biding time, trying to survive until nature rebels against humanity to the point where we go too far and trigger our own end from ecological consequences for our actions.

In the end it is the "lesser" species that prevail and the virus and the microbe rule the world we only think we dominate.

But I do understand the losses that non-humanity suffers Michael and I mourn the loss of so much at our hands that I cannot find any room in my heart for compassion for a species that encircles the globe in

a web of deceit and horror. The world is better off without us and that is a refrain that is echoed in the canyons, whispered over the heaving swells of the sea and thundered down from the clouds as we preside over an Empire of ecological destruction as we remain locked into our suffering with our pleasures as the seal.

So Michael, there you are. I am indeed a Misanthrope. Why do you ask?

Captain Paul Watson


Founder and President - Sea Shepherd Conservation Society


Director - Sierra Club USA


Director - The Farley Mowat Institute


Director - Atlantic Grey Whale Society


President - Oceanic Research and Conservation Action Force


P.O. Box 2616


Friday Harbor, WA 98250


Tel: 360-370-5650 Cell: 310-701-3096


E-mail: Paulwatson@earthlink.net


Website: http://www.seashepherd.org/

Posted on SHARE Yahoo group 3/21/06