Iceland and Images of the North

The Image of Iceland in the Local and Global Nexus of Whaling Politics

Karen Oslund, “The Image of Iceland in the Local and Global Nexus of Whaling Politics,” in Iceland and Images of the North, ed. Sumarliði R. Ísleifsson with the collaboration of Daniel Chartier, Québec: Presses de l’Université du Québec, “Droit au Pôle” series, and Reykjavík: ReykjavíkurAkademían, 2011. The Image of Iceland in the Local and Global Nexus of Whaling Politics Karen Oslund Towson University (Maryland, United States) Abstract – This paper looks at the development of the whaling debates and their contribution to the international image of Iceland. It traces the debates through two stages: an “era of peaceful protest” from ca. 1978 to 1985 and a “battle-lines” period after 1985, explaining the positions of both sides and the images each produced. For the anti-whaling side, the Icelanders were “bloodthirsty hunters,” while the pro-whalers portrayed themselves as citizens of a small nation bullied by “sentimental ecoterrorists .” The paper concludes by commenting on the development of the Icelandic whale watching industry after 1995 and how this industry has promoted an international image of Icelanders as whale-protectors rather than whale-hunters to foreign tourists. Keywords – Whales, whaling, Iceland, Norway, International Whaling Commission, Greenpeace, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, environmentalism, indigenous rights, whale watching Who is endangered, and who must be protected? In the globally interconnected 21st-century world, these are fundamental and complex moral questions for which the answers are not easy or clear. When the issue of species protection is raised, one thinks first and foremost of animals whose lives or environments are being threatened by human actions. Since the environmental campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s, which urged concerned citizens of rich Western nations to donate money or to take action to “save” certain animals, it has been tacitly understood that human actions have placed animals at risk of extinction and in need of protection, and that the rights of animals for survival should assume precedence over the desires of humans for meat, leather, fur, or other such products. But the Greenlandic politician and indigenous rights activist Finn Lynge turned the usual formulation of this moral claim on its head when he identified “carnivorous humans” as an endangered population deserving protection. Lynge, who made this statement in response to ICELAND AND IMAGES OF THE NORTH [ 286 ] the Greenpeace anti-sealing and anti-whaling campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s, was not, of course, referring to carnivorous humans in general—a group so large that it could hardly be thought of as endangered—but to indigenous people as a group with a particular relationship to meat consumption, to hunting, and ultimately to nature. According to his argument, indigenous people have a direct connection to nature, and this particular relationship with nature is not comprehensible to people who have separated their consciousness from the natural world—that is, by most of the rest of the carnivorous and non-carnivorous humans on earth, who purchase their food from stores in exchange for money. This relationship of indigenous people to nature, Lynge argued, makes their cultures distinctive and deserving of protection from the threats to their traditional food supplies posed by industrialized nations and nongovernmental organizations such as Greenpeace. By saving the animals, we endanger our fellow humans and their cultures.1 Since the 1985–1986 hunting season, a voluntary international agreement negotiated and regulated by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) has maintained a commercial hunting quota of whales set at zero (this zero-catch quota is often referred to as a “ban” in media discussions of whaling, although this is not technically accurate), with exceptions for certain cases defined as indigenous hunting.2 This agreement attempts to satisfy both of these moral principles: animals deserve to be protected from humans, and minority groups deserve to be protected from majority ones. The global discussion about whales and whaling since the 1960s has resulted in an uneasy consensus on both of these principles, and the current policy attempts to balance the two ideals. This consensus, however, is not the result of a fundamental philosophical agreement between parties, but has emerged from a history marked by negotiation, protests, even violent protests, and compromise in which the sides not only disagreed, but misunderstood each other’s philosophical position. This article traces the history of these whaling debates in and around Iceland and, to a lesser degree, as they have applied to the other whaling nations in the North Atlantic, including 1 Lynge 1992. 2 International Whaling Commission,; see...