Iceland Imagined: Nature, Culture, and Storytelling in the North Atlantic

Epilogue: Whales and Men

152 I t is difficult, for outsiders anyway, to think about Iceland without dealing in metaphors and symbols. Whenever Iceland surfaces in the international press, journalists are apt to explain whatever the issue at hand might be in terms of sagas, Vikings, volcanoes, glaciers, earthquakes, poetry, or independence. Although these writers frequently acknowledge that visiting the geysers and the Blue Lagoon (Bláa Lónið) resort, and writing about the landscapes of volcanic rock surrounding the Leifur Eiríksson International Airport, have become clichés, it is nearly impossible to omit these obligatory stops on the Icelandic tour. And once the foreign traveler has stopped at the Blue Lagoon, sat in its muddy waters, looking up at the steam released by the geothermal plant, his or her mind seems to fixate We are in fact refugees from Europe, and the question is whether we want to return.—Jón Baldvin Hannibalsson, Iceland’s Social Democratic foreign minister, speaking to Icelanders living in Copenhagen (March 1990) ePilogue | Whales and men Contested scientific ethics and Cultural Politics in the north atlantic ePilogue 153 on concepts of Icelandic purity and nature-respecting technology that the spa appears to represent. The travel article that results then relates the spa experience or sighting of a puffin or a trip to a Reykjavík nightclub as being the key to understanding everything about Iceland. Depending on symbols to imagine Iceland, as tempting as it is, is also distorting. It tends to fit all Icelandic events into preexisting categories. Everything that happens in Iceland—and everything that will ever happen there—becomes predetermined by these signs.1 With this in mind, and having surveyed the historical origins and development of some of these symbols in the preceding chapters, I want to return to my point of departure for this story: Iceland at the close of the twentieth century. Around the same time that I was beginning to study and travel to Iceland, two native sons returned to the country. Kári Stefánsson, founder of the controversial biotech firm deCODE Genetics (Íslensk erfðagreining), worked at Harvard University and the University of Chicago before returning to Iceland in 1997. Keiko, the orca who stared in the three Free Willy movies, returned in September 1998 to the Icelandic waters where he was born, after his sojourns in Canada, Mexico City, and the Oregon coast.2 These two arrivals—occurring at the moment that I was paying increasingly more attention to the idea of “Icelandic arrival”—juxtaposed different understandings of Icelandic nature.3 The two controversies that unfolded around them—over deCODE’s proposed Health Sector Database (HSD) and North Atlantic whaling politics—brought issues of conflicting scientific standards and ethics to international attention. At the high points of these debates, Iceland became a site of international media attention, where foreign journalists camped out to make television documentaries about the developments . The return of these two travelers at the end of the millennium, and the international debates that surrounded them, drew upon the historic images and debates about Iceland and the rest of the North Atlantic. Although biotechnology and animal protection are issues of the twenty-first century, the cultural history of the different versions of Icelandic nature in these issues is now well over two hundred years old. When Kári declared that Iceland was a perfect laboratory for biotechnological experimentation and returned with promises of multimillion-dollar profits for its citizens and subjects, and when Keiko’s human companions claimed that the waters off Iceland were a nature preserve for him, these stories were convincing because they already existed. The promoters of these projects were not inventing new stories about the North Atlantic but were repeating old ones. 154 ePilogue In both the deCODE and the whaling episodes that I discuss in this chapter, the Icelandic government took a position that was perceived by some to contradict international conventions. Supporters argued that the government’s position was justified due to certain historical contingencies that set Iceland apart from other nations and regions. The standards that some international observers wished to apply to the Icelandic case did not fit, it was argued, because the realities of scientific research in Iceland had not been correctly understood. The allegedly objective standards had been developed for more mainstream cases that did not fit the unique Icelandic reality. Claiming to be special and claiming to be misunderstood by foreigners are...