Студопедия — Guardian, October 27, 2001, abridged
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Guardian, October 27, 2001, abridged






It's nine o'clock on a brilliant summer morning as Captain Leif Karlsen and his five-man crew steer the 55ft Sofie towards the landing dock at the island of Skorva, in Norway's Lofoten Islands, 200 miles within the Arctic Circle. The fishing has been long and hard. The Sofie has been gone from port for six weeks in the dangerous freezing seas of the north-east Atlantic. But Karlsen and the crew are happy; Sofie's holds are packed to bursting with a catch worth £52,000 and the unloading of nature's harvest begins. Once they've moored, two fishermen lift back the hold covers and the first load rises high out of the Sofie and toward the fish-processing factory.

To many, the whale is a mythical creature worthy of protection. But to the whalers of Norway's Lofoten Islands they're merely a resource by which their community can survive. So which life is more important - man or beast?

"Whales are just big fish," says crewman Edvardson. "The scientists say there are plenty of whales, so why should we not harvest them. This is just another natural resource." Edvardson's banal comparison is shocking to most Western ears. Who wants to eat whale? It has long become an accepted truth that whales are special, mythic creatures. Whales are intelligent, almost akin to humans. Killing and eating them is morally wrong, unnecessary and cruel. Silhouettes of dolphins and whales now adorn hundreds of consumer products, a symbol of lost natural innocence. The adventures of Wally Whale have replaced Charlie the Clown for children's bedtime reading. "Whales are symbols of our abuse of the planet, symbols of something forced to the brink of extinction by our abuse of natural resources," says Simon Reddy, an anti-whaling campaigner for Greenpeace.

Norway's open defiance of the 1986 international whaling ban enrages environmentalists. In the eyes of most of the outside world, Karlsen and his crew are akin to genocidal murderers. They are pursuing an endangered species to extinction just to satisfy the perverted tastes of the few prepared to pay $100 a plate for raw whale meat.

But for the Norwegian whalers, the battle for the minke is also a battle for the cultural and economic survival of an endangered species. Except the endangered species is the Lofoten islanders themselves. "The only reason people live on Lofoten is that we get our income from the sea. There is no agriculture here. If you deny us the right to take our income from the sea we will have to leave, every one of us. We are a small people on the margins who are being picked upon," one islander said. It might be easier to win sympathy for the devil than a Norwegian whaler. And the resources of the anti-whaling forces ranged against the Lofoten islanders are virtually limitless.

Every major nation is opposed to whaling and Norway has been seriously threatened with trade boycotts. Banning whaling is also a priority for every major environmental group, including Greenpeace, whose annual budget exceeds $120m, the World Wildlife Fund ($320m), the International Fund for Animal Welfare ($64m), the Humane Society of the United States ($106m), the RSPCA[1] (£64m), and other smaller groups. Vast sums are spent, and vast sums are raised from the public, in a determined propaganda battle to outlaw all whaling.

For decades the environmentalists had an incontestable case. The history of whaling is the history of man's exploitation of the world's largest mammals. In the 19th and 20th centuries, many whale species were hunted to the point of extinction in huge factory ship operations in the southern ocean. Some species such as the Blue whale, last hunted in the 1960s, are still not expected to recover. But not all whales are endangered. The minke whale, both in the northern Atlantic and the southern ocean, is relatively plentiful. Counting stock spread over the ocean is never going to be an exact science but it is now accepted, based on independent data from the International Whaling Commission (IWC), that the north-east Atlantic minke population is greater than 120,000. The minke population in Antarctica, where the Japanese whaling fleet hunts, ranges from 400,000 to 1m. With such high stock levels, it is clearly possible to sustain ably hunted minkes.

To the embattled Lofoteners this is not just an argument over whale numbers. For them it is a clash of civilisations, a clash between the romantic dreams about nature cherished by soft, "chicken-in-the-microwave" urbanites and the stark reality of life in the heart of a natural wilderness. "The people who live in big cities give the whale a soul. They make it a kind of human being. It's the same with dolphins, and the dog at home. 'It's wrong to kill them.' But they have lost touch with nature," says Sofie crew member Raymond Tor. "Killing whales is not for fun, it's for income. We do not see the whale as a big piece of meat. It's a living creature and you have to have respect for it. But I don't feel I'm a criminal. If all hunters are criminal then all humans are criminal because we are all born from the same root of people who killed animals for a living." It is also a struggle for economic survival.

Lofoten, the centre of the Norwegian whaling fleet, is home to 10,000 people. In the summer the spectacular, bleak landscape of soaring cliffs, rocks and red houses is bathed in perpetual sunlight. The atmosphere is so clear and unpolluted that the island's fishermen dry their cod catch on long poles in the open air. But the Arctic summer is brief and for most of the year the temperature in Lofoten rarely rises above 10C. It's wet and windy at sea level and there is always snow on the ridges of the 2,000 m-high peaks that rise sheer and straight from the northern Atlantic. In the winter the sun disappears for two months, setting in early December and briefly rising above the horizon in late January. The temperature in this winter of perpetual darkness hovers somewhere between -10C and freezing. Force 10 storms regularly batter the way ashore, polish the land and destroy anything that is not tied down. Lofoten is an inhospitable place for humans.

Norwegian whaling is coastal. The whalers never stray too far from their home waters and use adapted fishing trawlers rather than custom-built deep-sea factory ships. Unlike the British, Russian, Japanese and American industrial whaling fleets of the 1950s that hunted the Antarctic whale population to the point of extinction, it has always been a small-scale fishery. The boats are too small to be at sea longer than a few weeks or to catch and process larger whales. There are over 80 species of whales, but the Norwegians have traditionally hunted minke. Minkes are one of the 14 great whales which include the blue whale, the largest mammal that has ever lived.

"If whaling was done in an unsustainable way then I could understand their campaign. But when you look at the facts you can see that whaling is sustainable. They just use us for their propaganda. We all know that Greenpeace has made a lot of money out of these campaigns and that is why they are still doing it. No matter how we try to address their objections on killing times, on inspections, they always raise more. Their goal is to make whaling so expensive that it's not possible to do it."

To the oil-rich Norwegian government, whaling is an embarrassing economic anachronism. But to the Lofoten fishermen, whaling means a boost to their income of 30%. Under pressure from the fishing communities, the Norwegian government relented and allowed whaling to recommence.

The hunters make no apologies for the bloodshed. "You can't eat it when it's living. You have to kill it," says one whale hunter. I asked Tor why he wanted to become a whale killer but the question puzzled him - the answer was self-evident. "Why? Because it's a hunt. It's exciting. You can't tell what's going to happen. Each time Frode, the harpooner, kills a whale, he is shaking with nerves and then five minutes after he is okay. That is because you are respecting the animal you kill."

There's nothing fishy about whale meat. Minkes might live in the sea but their meat has the same texture, taste and colour as a land mammal. The final product is a solid reddish block of meat that is darker than beef. Like all wild animal flesh, whale has a low fat content; it is easily overcooked and quickly acquires a liverish aftertaste. As a meat, it's a poor rival to beef steak.

Eating whale meat, and fishing their waters, are intrinsic parts of the self-declared Norwegian cultural soul. "People are convinced they have the right to harvest from nature. Whales might be special to people in Berlin, London, Paris and the US but they are special to me here in Lofoten as well - they taste lovely. I would not tell you what to eat and I do not expect you to tell me. We want to do what we have always done, harvest from nature as long as it's sustainable. And it is sustainable and therefore the right to whale is worth fighting for. The environmental lobby wanted a symbol and they found one in whales. They do not care what affects our lives. Whaling is important to our community and for those doing it."

For years, simple slogans such as "Saving the Whale" were enough to help reverse man's huge ecological crime in the mass slaughter of whale species. But simple slogans wear out over time because they mask complex realities. Can we "Save the Whale" and "Save the Lofoten islanders" at the same time? Is there a rightful place for man-in-nature rather than man-against-nature? Do those who live in the warm urban centres of humanity, London, Paris, Washington, have the right to dictate the lives, and meal menus, of small communities in the colder, wilder places of the planet. And can we bring an end to the futile battle of extinction between environmentalist and whaler?

 







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