Monthly Archives: October 2006

War. Huh!Good Lord! What is it good for? Well here’s a better use for an AK47 than I’ve ever seen: slap six strings on it, tune up, add a Bazooka restrung as a bass, missile casing drum kit, and you got yerself a three-Peace Band.

Now all we need to do is figure out some similarly useful musical repurposing of those 480 US nuclear weapons in Europe and we’ll be laughing. Tell you what, let’s just tell the lead vocalists in Germany, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey, and the UK to send them home while we think about that, shall we.

What’s the matter with Iceland?  Years ago, I was there on the Iceland Whales Pledge tour with Marnee Benson and Tomakint — our online activists who were representing 50,000 of their closest friends who had promised to visit Iceland if the government stopped whaling.

I heard a recurring theme, fed by the Edda-esque image of the Icelander as, well, Islander: “We survive close to nature. We kill whales.  All this environmental stuff is coming from you urbanites who know nothing of what it is to live from the sea.”

But whaling has about as much to do with “living from the sea” in today’s world as panning for gold has to do with financial planning.  Romantic, rooted deep in the past, but nothing to do with food.

Yesterday, the Icelandic government  granted one whaler a license to catch 30 minke and 0 fin whales — the first commercial license for whale hunting in Iceland in decades.  Fins are on the endangered species list.

This despite the fact that less than 1% of Icelanders eat whale, and current stocks of unsold  meat are simply sitting frozen in warehouses.
And THAT on top of the fact that the demographic of Icelandic tourists: largely American, largely nature and wilderness lovers, is exactly the demographic that believes whales should not be hunted.  Where is the economic logic in threatening a huge and profitable tourist industry with a tiny unprofitable throwback kill?
I used the Icelandic Whales Pledge recently as a textbook example of how to design a campaign in which supporters of your cause do the heavy lifting:

The Iceland whales pledge was an audience-and-supporter-powered success story. It had online/offline elements, it went viral (somewhat), and it won a campaign objective. The idea was to show the people of Iceland that whale tourism is a better alternative than whaling. We created an online pledge, encouraging people to promise to visit Iceland if whaling stopped.

We wanted 50,000 people to make the pledge. We asked for suggestions from our cyber-activists about how to get the word out. “Bugbabe” suggested that we charter a ship to Iceland and fill it with people who had made the pledge. This was refined in the discussion forum to a proposal to run a friend-tell-a-friend contest and offer a bunk on one of our ships as the prize for the hardest working cyber-activist.

It worked. Greenpeace websites in many countries promoted the contest, and within a short time of announcing the competition our numbers began to climb. We added 12,000 pledges in a week and met our 50,000 overall target a month early. We selected five top recruiters as finalists, posted their biographies on our website, and let our audience decide who was going to represent them in Iceland. They chose two finalists whose blogs from Iceland were among the most popular we’d ever run.

In the offline world, our German supporters were encouraged to write directly to individuals in Iceland letting them know how strongly they felt about whaling, and about their support for the pledge concept. By the end of the campaign, they had written letters to a quarter of the Icelandic population.

We turned the Icelandic tourist industry into an ally in this campaign by recruiting more than 70 million dollars in potential tourist income for Iceland, as against a commercial whaling operation that was only worth 4 million annually in its heyday.

And partially due to that domestic pressure, on June 1, 2004, Iceland stepped back from plans to kill 500 minke, sei, and fin whales over two years, announcing a quota of only 25 minkes for the year.

We’re still holding the line against that 500. But it’s a step backward to license a blatantly commercial hunt even for small numbers, and ESPECIALLY a hunt which includes whales recognised globally as endangered.

The now 69,299 people who pledged to visit Iceland are still waiting for the day when we send them all a message inviting them to go whale watching in Husavik from a hot-tub overlooking an arctic bay glittering in the midnight sun.  That day won’t come until Iceland gives up whaling for the anachronism it is.

I wish they’d hurry up.  I want to show my son a blue whale in the wild.