Gee, did I not write just three days ago:
with continued slow, steady pressure, I’m confident Iceland will come around to realizing stopping whaling isn’t simply a rainbow-colored item on some foreign hippy agenda, it’s a sound economic move.
Well begosh and begorin’ if news doesn’t come hurtling down the stormpipe today that Iceland’s fisheries minister has finally put the kebosh on the silly fiction that Iceland’s whaling industry is going to make a comeback by killing whales that nobody wants to eat:
“The whaling industry, like any other industry, has to obey the market. If there is no profitability there is no foundation for resuming with the killing of whales,” he said.
He declared there would be no more commercial quotas in the absence of evidence the meat could actually be sold.
Well now there’s a refreshing bit of homespun wisdom that the heavily subsidized Japanese whalers, sitting on several thousand tonnes of surplus whale meat they can’t even give away, ought to listen to.
Iceland stands to gain so much by abandoning whaling. 112,000 of us have pledged to visit if the government just hangs up those harpoons forever — collectively, we’d spend approximately 116 million US dollars.
The government didn’t quite definitively announce an end to whaling.
There’s an outstanding scientific quota of 6 minke whales that Icelandic whalers still may catch in the one month remaining of the Icelandic whaling season.
But at 20 million dollars apiece in foregone tourist income, that seems a lot of money to blow on whale steaks that are going to sit unsold in a freezer.
It’s time to go have a glass of champagne, and raise a toast to Remi, who sailed on the first Greenpeace mission to stop Icelandic whaling, and woke up from a siesta today to the news that he’d finally won. Then it’s time to toast Frode, and Arni, and Frizell, and McTaggart, and Thornton, and Gerd, and Adele, and Andrew, and Lisa, and Marnee and Tomakint, and all 112,000 Icelandic pledgers.
I am going to have one whale of a hangover tomorrow.
