[LINK] "Save (most of) the whales"

[rfmcdonald]

Tristin Hopper's recent National Post article describing how Greenpeace's new support for limited native whale hunts among the Inuit, seen as necessary to enlist local allies against oil drilling in the Arctic, is actually not appreciated by locals who remember the past.

(Myself, I think Greenpeace should have stayed consistent and not made exceptions.)

“Our young men started committing suicide in the 1970s because people couldn’t feed their families anymore,” said Rosemarie Kuptana, a former president of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, an international organization representing the world’s 160,000 Inuit.

Greenpeace, she said, has never acknowledged “that there’s a whole generation of young people today who grew up without fathers.”

Only a few years after its 1971 founding in Vancouver, Greenpeace was at the forefront of efforts to condemn the Canadian seal hunt. By 1976, Greenpeacers were venturing out onto ice to physically push seals out of the way of East Coast sealing ships. Later, they would graduate to spraying the animals with non-toxic dye to make their coats unusable.

[. . .]

Driven by public pressure, Europe banned the import of whitecoat harp seal pups in 1983. Although the Inuit could still hunt, the ban demolished the market for seal skins. In some Northern communities, annual seal hunting revenue reportedly dropped from $50,000 to as low as $1,000.

“You could not find a more thoroughly discredited brand, from one end of the Arctic to the other, than Greenpeace,” said Madeleine Redfern, a former mayor of Iqaluit, writing in an email to the National Post.