If you only know conservationist Peter Brown from his appearance on Whale Wars, you only know a sliver of his story.

The bigger picture is contained in Brown’s documentary, Confessions of an Eco-Terrorist, which compiles three decades of the director’s exploits with Capt. Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, the marine activist group made famous by the Animal Planet show.

“I’ve been here long before Whale Wars and all these other people who are jumping in because they think it makes great TV,” Brown says in the Wired.com video above. “After they’re gone, I’ll still be there doing the same thing.”

Brown began filming Watson and his band of “eco-pirates” nearly three decades ago and pretty much never stopped. Confessions of an Eco-Terrorist collects hundreds of hours of footage of the Sea Shepherd team, much of it from back when few outside the environmental community had ever heard about them.

‘The camera is the greatest weapon in the world.’

“The camera is the greatest weapon in the world,” Brown says. “Without the camera no one would know two guys stood in front of an icebreaker — there would be no environmental movement.”

Since 1982, Brown’s camera has captured everything from the sinking of whaling ships in Reykjavík harbor, to the punching of activists by angry sealers, to being fired upon by the Royal Norwegian Navy. Brown’s documentary serves up these moments as snapshots and presents a film that both educates and entertains.

The director is clearly passionate about his life’s work exposing horrors on the high seas.

“We’re called environmental terrorists, but are we the terrorists?” Brown asks. “My film answers that question.”

Confessions of an Eco-Terrorist will premiere in Germany in October. Brown hopes to bring the film to U.S. theaters by the end of the year.