She called from a ski slope in Japan.

I had been on the Bandero for almost five months. Five months of making content, organizing ship tours, bringing campaigns to Urbnsurf, doing interviews, building connections between the crew and the community on land. Five months of living on a boat waiting to depart for Antarctica to protect the krill. Five months of dates that kept changing and chaos that kept building and choosing every day to focus on what I could control.

Shannon called to tell me I was too much.

She had been postponing the call for weeks. Changing the time, not showing up, rescheduling. When she finally called, she was skiing. And she said, and I remember this almost word for word: I am sure everyone loves you and you are a great defender of animals. But don’t you think you are too much here?

That was it. No specific reason. No warning before that call. No conversation where someone said, Gala, this is not working. Just a voice from a ski slope in Japan telling me I was too much, and I had to leave.

I had one week left before the birthday party I had been organizing for the boat.

What those five months actually were

I came to the Captain Paul Watson Foundation because I believed in what Paul Watson had built. He is the person who co-founded Greenpeace, got pushed out, and started Sea Shepherd forty years ago because he refused to stop. When the same thing happened again three years ago and they pushed him out of his own organization, he started the Foundation. I had been in Sea Shepherd before, on the Vaquita Marina campaign in the Gulf of Mexico. I knew what this work looked like from the inside. I signed up because the ocean needs people who show up.

On the Bandero I was generating content they were happy with. Making videos of awareness, posting on their pages. Organizing ship tours so more people could come aboard, see the boat, understand what the campaign was about. Bringing the crew to Urbnsurf for events. Doing interviews. Building things that would outlast the campaign itself.

I also cared about the work going deeper. On Paul Watson’s birthday there was an internal video call, the first time many of us met him directly. He invited questions. I asked about collaboration. Not just within the Foundation but with scientists, with other organizations. I had been trying to connect with researchers to see if we could get more out of the citizen science work we were doing. There is no science position on the boat and for me that is a missed opportunity. We were going all the way to Antarctica and not collecting data systematically. I asked about it.

I found out later that mentioning I had been in Sea Shepherd Global was used against me. I had said it casually on that call. I was not supporting anyone over anyone else. I was there for the same reason Paul Watson started all of this in the first place. For the animals. Not for the politics.

No one told me that directly. No one told me anything directly.

The week before the party

The birthday party was something I had been putting together for weeks. I love doing that kind of thing. Bringing people together, creating something that makes a crew feel like a community. It was almost ready.

Shannon’s call came one week before.

There was also Kate. A volunteer in her fifties from the area who had been helping out for months. Bringing donations, helping me organize the ship tours, doing things without being asked. She had been in Antarctica before. She had a journalism background. I mentioned her to the crew because she seemed like exactly the kind of person you want on a campaign.

They said no to her. Then a week later they said yes, at the last minute, right around the time they were removing me. And when I talked to Kate before she left and asked her why she wanted to go to Antarctica, she said: because it is so exotic and beautiful. And I know from your experience that I should not raise my opinions until we set sail.

That hurt more than the phone call from Japan.

Until we stop prioritising our own interest over each other, nothing changes. In workplaces, people watch injustice happen every day and stay silent because they are afraid of losing their job. On the Bandero, everyone was a volunteer — no salary, no contract — and still nobody spoke because they were afraid of losing their place on the boat to Antarctica. The carrot does not have to be money. It just has to be something you are afraid to lose. And as long as that fear is bigger than the commitment to each other, movements will keep failing the people inside them.

Because that is not what I want to create in people. That is not what the ocean needs. It needs people who show up with their full voice, not people who have learned to stay quiet until they are safely at sea.

What happened after

The morning they asked me to leave, I gave a speech. I said what I needed to say. The Captain, Marco, was someone I had gotten along with since the beginning. He came to me and said: I don’t know why, but I have to tell you to leave. He did not have a reason. He had received an order and he was following it.

I asked him: where are your beliefs? You call yourself an anarchist. An anarchist who follows orders without understanding them is not an anarchist. He did not have an answer.

Luis, a crew member from Colombia, wrote a letter and had everyone sign it asking for me to come back. David, the chief engineer, gave a speech about my contributions. There were people on that boat who saw what I had given and said so publicly. And the organization said nothing back. No response. Nothing.

My name stopped being mentioned. The work continued. The party happened without me.

The pattern

Paul Watson was pushed out of Greenpeace. Then pushed out of Sea Shepherd. Then people he trusted built the Captain Paul Watson Foundation with him and some of them pushed him out too. I am not comparing what happened to me with what happened to him. But I am saying the pattern is the same one I saw with Glenda, the same one I see everywhere in movements that start with fire and end up protecting the organisation more than the cause.

Volunteers are everything, until they are not convenient. Then they are nothing. The speeches about sacrifice and dedication are real, until someone asks a question that makes the leadership uncomfortable, or mentions the wrong organisation, or takes up too much space.

Too much. That phrase stays with me. I have been told I am too much my whole life. Too passionate. Too direct. Too willing to speak when something is wrong. I used to think I needed to become less. I do not think that anymore.

The movements that are going to save anything on this planet are not going to be built by people who learned to stay quiet until they set sail. They are going to be built by people who bring their full selves and are not punished for it.

That is what Shikibuntu is trying to be. A place where being too much is not a reason to leave. Where volunteers are not resources to be used and discarded. Where if something is wrong you can say it and the response is a conversation, not a phone call from a ski slope.

I do not regret any of it. Not the Bandero, not Glenda, not any of it.

Every one of those experiences made the foundation of this clearer.

— Gala Villagran Dichiara