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The Return of Whaling
The industry is on the cusp of winning a major victory over the global conservation movement that has fought for decades to bring this murderous practice to an end once and for all.
Jun 15, 2024
Whaling is seen as an evil of the past, memorialized in events like ritual recitations of Moby Dick. Or invented as a metaphor for the worst of humanity’s greed—the Tulkun hunts in Avatar: The Way of Water. But commercial whaling hasn’t actually stopped, it’s merely scaled back. Japan, Iceland, and Norway still engage in commercial whaling.
On May 9th, a spokesperson for the Japanese government announced that they were intending to set a hunting quota for fin whales. A week earlier, the Kangei Maru, a brand new, state of the art whaling factory ship, was launched. It’s almost four decades since the Japanese whaling industry felt the need for a new whaling mothership, and this one’s specifications will allow whalers to butcher fin whales on it. Plus, the KangeiMaru has the range and construction to work in Antarctic waters. Coincidentally, on exactly the same day as the Kangei Maru’s launch, a scientific paper was published, presenting the results of surveys conducted in one area of the Southern Ocean. The results suggest that there are around 50,000 fin whales in just that one site.
If the only way to regulate whaling internationally is under some gentlefolks’ non-binding agreements, how did commercial whaling almost disappear?
Then, on June 11th, the council of the Japanese Fisheries Agency announced a quota of 59 fin whales within the Japanese EEZ. On the same day, the Icelandic Minister of Fisheries issued a permit for a hunt of 128 fin whales by Hvalur, the Icelandic whaling company.
Fin whales are known—if they’re known at all—as being the second-largest of the great whales. Only blue whales are larger. Less well known is that they were also the whales hunted in the greatest numbers during industrial commercial whaling through the 20th Century. About 900,000 fin whales were killed across all ocean basins, nearly as many as the sum of all blue (~380,000), humpback (~250,000) and sei whales (~300,000) combined. Given their abundance and individual size, fins were where the real money was in high seas whaling.
This history is lost.
Most fin whales lived in the Southern Ocean, but they’re found throughout the polar and temperate regions of the world. Unlike humpback or right whales, they don’t engage in clearly defined annual migrations from feeding to breeding areas. They’re mostly offshore, beyond the reach of whale-watching operations. And they’re nowhere near as acrobatic as humpbacks. Fins don’t create their own PR value, the way that more visible and demonstrative whales do.
Currently, fin whales worldwide are categorized in the IUCN’s Red List as Vulnerable, one step down from Endangered, based on a review from 2018. However, a more recent (2023) IUCN review of fin whales in European waters listed them as being of Least Concern there. For the few places where data are available, most fin whale populations are increasing. Apart from the recent work showing about 50,000 whales in one small(ish) area of the Antarctic, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) lists about 40,000 fins in one part of the central North Atlantic (for 2015, so the estimate is almost a decade old). The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) provides estimates of around 7,000 off the east coast of North America, and 8,000 in the waters of California and Oregon. Added together, that’s over 100,000 fin whales—and it excludes most of the Southern Ocean, where fins are likely to be most abundant, and where other observations indicate that their numbers are on the rebound.
So, what about the Japanese whalers hunting fin whales? How can this happen? There are two international bodies primarily responsible for managing whaling internationally. The International Whaling Commission (IWC), oversees setting quotas for whaling, and the ways in which whaling is managed. At present, the IWC has quotas for commercial whaling set at zero, a moratorium that’s been in place since the mid-1980s. The other organization is the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) which regulates—as the name suggests—international trade in endangered species. Fin whales are listed under CITES Appendix I, meaning that they are judged to be threatened with extinction, so international trade in their products is prohibited. This is (more or less) based on the Red Listing of fin whales internationally as Vulnerable. Were that status to change, their CITES listing may well change in response.
Japan left the IWC at the end of 2018 and so is no longer bound by IWC regulations. There’s nothing stopping Japan from doing this under IWC rules. What about CITES? Japan has a reservation to the listing of fin whales, as do Iceland and Norway. So these nations are not bound by CITES provisions regarding fin whales, and are free to trade in their products. That’s why Hvalur hf., the Icelandic whaling company, has exported fin whale meat to Japan from the almost 1000 fin whales they’ve killed over the past 15 years.
So, if the only way to regulate whaling internationally is under some gentlefolks’ non-binding agreements, how did commercial whaling almost disappear? Whalers wiped out almost all populations of large whales, which played an important role. There wasn’t much left to hunt. But previously, the threat of US sanctions was also a factor. Under the Pelly Amendment of the US Fishermen's Protective Act, the Secretary of Commerce and/or the Secretary of the Interior, are required to let the President know if “nationals of a foreign country, directly or indirectly, are engaging in trade or taking which diminishes the effectiveness of any international program for endangered or threatened species.” This is supposedly an obligation, and it’s also meant to lead to a ban on importation of fisheries and wildlife products from that country. Needless to say, despite Japanese nationals obviously diminishing the effectiveness of the functioning of both the IWC and CITES, Japan has not been certified. Geopolitics trumps marine conservation.
There was rejoicing back in early 2019 when Japan appeared to be giving up on pelagic whaling. But Japan leaving the IWC was never “good news for whales,” as stated at the time by Patrick Ramage of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. Japanese whalers now get to ignore IWC-based rules on how many whales can be killed, where they can be killed, and who observes that the killing takes place in the manner that is claimed—something that has always been a problem with whaling.
There is nothing to stop Japanese whalers returning to much larger-scale commercial whaling. They are on the cusp of their comprehensive victory over the conservation movement.
Correction: An earlier version of this piece misstated the date of the Japanese Fisheries Agency's June announcement.
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A Nonviolent Revolution, Viking-Style
Could the United States actually be home to an organized movement to deliver its people a happier, healthier, and more egalitarian future?
Dec 18, 2023
In the first half of the 20th century the descendants of the Vikings did what we Americans have been hesitant to do. They waged a nonviolent revolution to take away the dominance of the economic elite.
In the U.S., even though the economic elite is okay with bringing climate emergencies to an increasing number of Americans, it maintains its control of both major parties. For the Nordics, overcoming elite control was a very big reach, but the Danes broke through in the 1920s and then the Swedes and Norwegians matched them in the 1930s. (Finns and Icelanders followed in the ‘50s.)
I personally experienced the payoff of a nonviolent revolution when as a young man I studied at a typically free Nordic university, in Oslo. Of my eleven books, the most pleasurable to write was Viking Economics, published in 2016 and still in use. When the book came out, an international association of Nordic economists invited me to keynote their conference, and I learned still more.
Few Americans seem to know that the 2023 World Happiness Report rates the people of Finland, Denmark, and Iceland as the top three countries in the world, with Sweden as sixth. The U.S. is fifteenth. The World Economic Forum’s measure of the gender gap among the nations puts Nordic countries in the top five, while the U.S. is 43rd. Racial Equity Rankings by US News and World Report puts the Nordics in the top ten. The United States? The U.S. comes in 73rd.
Yale University has created an Environmental Performance Index for rating national accomplishments. Four of the Nordics are in the top 10 while Norway follows at 20th. The U.S. is 43rd.
When an oligarchy is in charge, misery is widespread no matter how small and homogeneous you are!
In the 2022 Democracy Index rating, on a 10-point scale Nordics exceed 9.0. The U.S. is 7.85. In the 2019 rating of “best countries to raise a child,” the Nordics took the first four places, while the U.S. came in at 22nd.
Still, that was considerably better for the U.S. than the 2023 Global Peace Index: Nordic countries got the top two places while Sweden scored 28th. The U.S. scored 131st -- down ten places since the Democracy Index of three years ago!
I could continue with rankings but you get the idea. For Americans, the full potential of our energy, smarts, creativity, and yearning for justice remain hobbled by the power of the economic elite and its political culture maintained through mainstream mass media and the two major political parties.
The Vikings used to be in bad shape
If such ratings existed before the 1920s, the Nordics also would have been caught under-performing. In fact, they were in such trouble that their people were emigrating to the U.S. in large numbers.
Some people believe the Nordics do well these days because they are small and relatively homogeneous. But in the Nordic “bad old days” they were smaller, and much more homogeneous. They performed poorly because their economic elites were running things. When an oligarchy is in charge, misery is widespread no matter how small and homogeneous you are!
What changed among the Nordics to generate today’s high ratings? Their people who didn’t leave figured out how to use nonviolent direct action campaigns to force their oligarchies to give up control.
But why not make a violent revolution?
To many Finns in 1918, armed struggle seemed the obvious choice. Their violent insurgency turned into civil war. The capitalists and conservatives crushed the socialist uprising: the result in that small population was at least 35,000 dead.
The Finnish people’s defeat delayed their movement’s eventual victory over the economic elite, which they finally achieved through nonviolent struggle. (Another of the many cases in history where violence failed to reach an objective, then nonviolent struggle succeeded.)
The Finnish direct action climaxed in the 1950s: a nationwide 10-day metalworkers’ strike was followed by a general strike of half a million workers, and at last the Finns could put themselves in the same league with their Scandinavian comrades.
While many Danes in the early 1920s were also tempted by violence, sufficient activists noted the failure of the Finnish violence and also became disillusioned with how their “next door leftists” in Germany were handling their struggle for revolution.
Danish radicals chose first to build on the credibility of the co-op movement and on their common-sense vision of what Denmark could look like if Danes took away the dominance of the economic elite. They then plunged into nonviolent campaigning. By 1924 the Danes obtained their first social democratic prime minister.
Impressed, Swedish workers and others followed this Danish recipe: create a clear vision of a new society, escalate community organizing (via co-ops + unions, in their case), and launch campaign after campaign of nonviolent struggle, through which the movement grows more massive.
By 1931 the Swedish economic elite was desperate to hold onto power. They used their government’s military and killed workers in a local but important strike. The labor movement responded to the killings by calling a national general strike, supported by middle-class progressives, and took power.
Norwegian workers and farmers, eager to learn from both Danes and Swedes, then upped their level of struggle. The Norwegians had a more radical vision than did the Swedes—Lenin even invited Norwegian Labor Party leaders to join Russian revolutionary meetings in Moscow. The labor movement increased the level of strike activity, aiming to end the elite’s ownership of the means of production.
By then, however, Norway was caught by the 1930s’ Great Depression. Norwegians in poverty were starving while still trying to maintain their strikes. Given the pain and hardship, the Labor Party decided not to continue the struggle to make a full-scale victory and instead to settle for social democracy, which was less expansive than their version of a new society.
The coalition of workers and farmers agreed to let the capitalists continue to own and manage their means of production, but required them to accept complete unionization, a high degree of regulation, huge taxes on large incomes and capital, and accept a large sector of co-ops as well as many municipally-owned and nationally-owned enterprises.
Most importantly, the Norwegian economic elite would have to give up their power to run the economy as a whole: big-picture decisions would be made by the working class and family farmers, through their dominance in parliament.
A growing number of mass strikes forced the Norwegian economic elite to surrender. The Labor Party—the most socialist of the Nordic workers parties—then basically ran the country for half a century.
Icelanders show Americans what we could do here
An observer might guess—since today’s Vikings have it so good—that their capacity for nonviolent struggle would have vanished through disuse. Wrong.
After decades of basic Icelander contentment with their social democracy, in 2008 Icelanders found most of the bankers—in league with the government—had become so corrupt that the country’s economy collapsed. Even the ATM’s no longer worked!
Icelanders quickly built a nonviolent direct action campaign powerful enough to oust the bankers and major party politicians alike. The media called it “the pots and pans revolution” because people massing outside parliament banged their kitchen pots so loud that the parliamentarians couldn’t debate!
The movement refused to allow Iceland to cooperate with the capitalist International Monetary Fund, whose job is to aid countries in bankruptcy. Instead, the movement itself rebuilt political and economic structures on a sound basis. (The women’s banks were uncorrupted and didn’t need to start over.)
When I later interviewed the rebellion’s leader at the key site of the struggle, I learned that 3% of Iceland’s population actively engaged in the direct action. I began to fantasize what ten million Americans (3 percent of the U.S. population) might do given a crisis—a climate disaster, for example—PLUS strategic nonviolent leadership.
The Icelanders’ story raises this question: Will Americans and other activists prepare our vision and strategy now, for large-scale nonviolent struggle when a climate emergency or other crisis arrives that makes it possible?Keep ReadingShow Less
Tens of Thousands of Women Strike in Iceland Over Pay Gap, Gender-Based Violence
"An 'equality paradise' should not have a 21% wage gap and 40% of women experiencing gender-based or sexual violence in their lifetime," said one organizer.
Oct 24, 2023
Schools, health systems, and television broadcasters in Iceland were among the businesses that said they would have to close or reduce services on Tuesday due to the country's first full-day women's strike in nearly 50 years—potentially helping to prove the point that tens of thousands of women and non-binary workers are hoping to make by demonstrating that their labor is vital and must be paid accordingly.
Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir is among the women taking part in the "kvennafrí," or "women's day off," and told reporters she expects women in her cabinet to strike as well, as organizers push to close Iceland's gender pay gap and end gender-based violence.
While Iceland has been recognized for 14 straight years as having the smallest gap in gender equality among the countries in the World Economic Forum's annual rankings, strike organizer Freyja Steingrímsdóttir toldThe Guardian it is hardly an "equality paradise," and women are demanding greater action from the government to ensure true parity.
On average, Icelandic women still earn about 10% less than men, and as much as 21% less in some professions. Forty percent of women report experiencing gender-based violence.
"An 'equality paradise' should not have a 21% wage gap and 40% of women experiencing gender-based or sexual violence in their lifetime," said Steingrímsdóttir, communications director for the Icelandic Federation for Public Workers. "That's not what women around the world are striving for."
Taking place 48 years after the last full-day women's strike, in which 25,000 people rallied in Reykjavík and 90% of women staged a work stoppage affecting paid and unpaid labor, this year's protest has adopted the slogan, "Kallarðu þetta jafnrétti?" or "You call this equality?"
Icelandic President Gudni Th. Johannesson expressed his support for the strike, saying women's "activism for equality has changed Icelandic society for the better and continues to do so today."
The country's trade unions—which count 90% of Icelandic workers as members—are key organizers of the action and are calling on women and nonbinary workers to join the strike.
The 1975 action was tied to passage of an equal rights law the following year and the election of the country's first female president—the first woman to be democratically elected president in any country—in 1980. Other successes have followed in recent years, such as the passage of a law that requires some companies to prove they're paying people of different genders equally for equal work.
Former Climate Minister Kolbrún Halldórsdóttir toldThe Guardian that men continue to fail to take responsibility for domestic labor, leaving unpaid work such as childcare to women who are also attempting to succeed in the workplace.
"If you look at it economically women seem to be punished for taking these extra burdens, which is not righteous," Halldórsdóttir told the outlet. "It's something that we need to look into and need to change."
Organizers are calling for the wages of workers in female-dominated professions to be made public and for the federal government to take greater action against gender-based violence, ensuring perpetrators are held accountable. One 2018 University of Iceland study found that only 12% of survivors of sexual assault press charges, and those who do have their cases dismissed nearly 75% of the time. Women told researchers they feared the "shame, guilt, and condemnation" that would come with having their cases tried in the justice system.
"We are now trying to connect the dots, saying that violence against women and undervalued work of women in the labor market are two sides of the same coin and have an effect on each other," Drífa Snædal, spokesperson for Stígamót, an anti-sexual violence group, told The Guardian.
Kate Jarman, a director of corporate affairs at a National Health Service hospital in the United Kingdom, said a similar women's strike in the U.K. would force numerous workplaces with majority-female staff to "recognize our worth."
The Left in the European Parliament also expressed support for the action.
"Solidarity with the strikers," the progressive political party said.
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