Now And Then: Hey, Remember When Those Whaling Ships Were Sunk?

Revisiting Iceland’s other core memory from 1986

There were two things that happened in Iceland in 1986 that have been engrained on the collective memory of the nation. First is the Reykjavík Summit between then U.S. president Ronald Reagan and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev, which took place in October of that year. There is currently a TV mini-series in post-production that was shot on location at Reykjavík’s Höfði House. With Michael Douglas as Reagan and Christopher Waltz as Gorbachev, it’ll surely rival the real deal.

The second milestone event of ‘86, as pictured here, took place within a month of the summit, on November 7, when anti-whaling activists from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society sank the Hvalur 6 and Hvalur 7 whaling vessels in Reykjavík harbour. Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson has subsequently become one of very few people to become persona non grata in Iceland. The sabotage was inspired by the International Whaling Commission’s implementation of a moratorium on commercial whaling in January 1986, which Iceland, Norway, Japan, the Faroe Islands and the Soviet Union ultimately ignored. International pressure and the subsequent boycott of Icelandic fish resulted in Iceland banning whaling in 1989.

That ban was revoked in 2006 and has been an ever present bone of political contention in Iceland (and elsewhere) since. During the summer of 2023 whaling was halted by then fisheries minister and Left-Green Movement MP Svandís Svavarsdóttir due to animal welfare concerns. That pause persisted until Iceland’s last coalition government imploded on October 13, 2024. With the Left-Green Movement announcing they wouldn’t partake in a caretaker government, control of  the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries went to interim prime minister Bjarni Benediktsson, who — under a cloud of scandal regarding whaling permits in general, which will not be elaborated here — decided to issue a five year whaling permit. Of course, he did this on December 5, after elections made clear his Independence Party wouldn’t be invited to form a new coalition.

So, whaling as a practice sank, metaphorically, and then emerged from the depths again. What is still on the ocean floor, so we don’t mix our metaphors here, is the economic and public relations aspects of whaling. The local culture wars around whaling are, however, very much afloat.