25/05/2026
One more sign of the transition in planetary energies. Slowly but surely, the planet becomes inhospitable to distorted darkness. 🌍🐋☀️
This is the kind of news that makes you breathe out and smile.
Iceland won't be sending its whaling ships to sea this year. The country's main whaling company has called off the season entirely — and what that means for the fin whales of the North Atlantic is exactly as simple and as significant as it sounds.
Potentially hundreds of them get to keep swimming with their families.
The decision was not made out of politics or a sudden change of heart, and that matters more than it might seem. It came down to money. Prices for whale meat in Japan, the primary market, have fallen. Shipping and storage costs have risen. The economics of the hunt simply no longer add up, and when the hunt stops making financial sense, the ships stay in port regardless of anything else.
But here is the detail that carries a different kind of weight.
Last summer also passed without a hunt. Two quiet seasons in a row feel different from a single pause — they feel like a door slowly closing on a chapter that many people believed should have ended long before this. Whether that door keeps closing is still an open question. There is ongoing debate inside Iceland about jobs connected to the industry on shore, and about what the future of coastal communities looks like without it. Those conversations are real and they are not finished.
What others in Iceland point to is this: whale watching has grown into a significant part of the country's appeal to visitors, and a living whale seen from a boat generates economic value repeatedly, across years, for multiple communities. A dead whale generates it once. That argument is gaining ground.
But today is not about arguments. Today, mothers and calves will surface together in cold North Atlantic water. Breaths will rise into the air. The ocean, just for this season, feels a little kinder than it did last year.
Share this because two quiet seasons in a row is the kind of quiet worth celebrating while it lasts.
