TORSHÁVN, Faroe Islands — “Whales in the fjord!”
So called out a polar researcher, catching my eye as she rushed through a crowd of conference-goers, pointing toward the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Við Tjarnir Arena. Pivoting away from my path to the next panel discussion, I hastily followed the dozens already jostling for a glimpse.
On this late May afternoon on the Danish North Atlantic archipelago, early gloom had broken into uncommon brilliance. From the hilltop event center, east-facing windows framed a view of the neighboring island’s wind-beaten emerald slopes, sliced through by a long blue channel that opened to the glimmering ocean to the south. From that horizon, a flock of swooping gulls was tailing what looked like a moving storm of whitecaps into the strait. As they approached, the wave-breakers came into breathtaking focus: This was a pod of pilot whales, their long dorsal fins and slick black backs alternately surfacing and submerging in powerful respiratory rhythm.
The moment felt almost too perfect: We were among 1,400 people assembled for the flagship Ocean Connectivity Conference, launched this year by the Kingdom of Denmark’s Arctic Council Chairship in partnership with the UArctic Congress. It marked the largest-ever international event on the Faroe Islands, which is, after Greenland, Denmark’s much-smaller overseas territory, a tunnel-connected archipelago rising from the rough seas between northern Scotland, Iceland and Norway. Tórshavn, the capital, is a portside town on the southeast end of the largest island, home to 14,000 of the archipelago’s 55,000 citizens.
For a conference spotlighting the Arctic Ocean’s planetary connections, the setting was strategic. In the great map of global ocean circulation, these islands sit along a crucial Arctic-Atlantic threshold. As the Arctic Ocean warms, the water’s circulation here is slowing, with potentially catastrophic implications for both local ecosystems and global climate. For four days at the end of May, researchers of the UArctic network—a consortium of 221 institutions dedicated to studying the high north—joined Arctic Indigenous leaders, Faroese and Danish politicians and Arctic-based NGOs to discuss the changes and their consequences. The timing was also strategic, planned to just precede World Ocean Week in June. Some moments, however, you simply can’t plan.
Suddenly, oohs and ahhs were drowned out by the roar of motors as two small fishing vessels sped from the mouth of Tórshavn Bay. As they approached, they slowed, then began drawing wide circles around the dark bodies. Over the next few hours, an ever-growing fleet of dozens of private fishing craft and speedboats would appear, circling close to and then behind the pod, strategically coaxing the creatures into ever-shallower waters. Among the window-onlookers, explanations were hastily whispered. Expressions changed. Some uneasily tucked their phones back in pockets and walked away. The next few hours would provide sights not intended for weak stomachs.
We had glimpsed the launch of the grindadráp, or “pilot whale killing” in Faroese. The ancient local tradition, dating back to early Viking settlers, is a community-led whale and dolphin drive that culminates in mass onshore butchering. The Grind, as it’s colloquially known, is not a fixed calendar event nor does it always take place in the tiny nation’s capital. Depending on whale migration, it can happen any day between March and October in any of 23 approved bays across the archipelago. Few expected the event to coincide in both timing and location with a massive international gathering spotlighting the fragility of marine systems and species.
The contrast was striking, not least because the conference logo depicts two dolphins. These graceful cetaceans, swimming along the walls as projected animations and stamped on tote bags slung from many shoulders, eerily resembled the creatures being herded toward mass slaughter. Reactions among attendees contrasted, too. In some corners, I heard shock, disdain or measured critique. In other spaces, the day was celebrated as a fortuitous coincidence, highlighting the distinction between commercial exploitation and cultural-continuity practices that many had traveled here to discuss.
I was careful not to take a hasty stance. After all, we were a meeting of mostly outsiders, temporarily adding 10 percent to Tórshavn’s population. Speaking with locals, I encountered more complex views about the politics of grindadráp embedded in colonial legacies, economic vulnerabilities and the disruption of long-held dynamics across genders and generations. And, rather than contrasting with the conference, I found, the event added new valences to many questions raised in its halls. All seemed to swirl around the same problem: As we work toward better relations with each other and the natural world, who decides which practices we hold onto, which can be adapted and which to entirely leave behind?
A bay of blood: That was my first thought when I saw the deep scarlet hue in Tórshavn Bay. By the time I got to shore later that still-bright evening, the uncanny crimson of the lapping waves was the only remaining sign of what had transpired. But its resemblance to a Homeric post-battle scene didn’t feel far off: 402 pilot whales and four bottlenose dolphins had died on that beach, marking the capital’s largest single drive in 147 years. Astonishingly, the entire process was over in less than 30 minutes.
I had never heard of the whale drive prior to that eventful afternoon. Indeed, I can admit to only a superficial awareness of this entire corner of the Danish realm. Since 1812, when Denmark conquered Norway and took both Greenland and the Faroe Islands along with it, a parallel colonial history has linked two vastly different geographies and cultures. Both nations are self-governing, with additional representation in the Danish Parliament. But compared to the world’s largest island, this sub-Arctic archipelago is miniscule, spanning an area roughly the equivalent size of Los Angeles. And unlike the Inuit, who are native to Greenland, the Faroese developed a singular culture since the first Celtic and Nordic settlers sailed to these previously uninhabited islands between 500 and 1000 AD. (The language, too, remains a fascinating mix of Old Norse and Gaelic.)
Many others at the conference knew exactly what was going on, however. One colleague of mine in particular had spent much of her career preparing for this moment. I was at the conference thanks to UArctic’s Environmental Humanities network, an international research group bridging environmental science and the humanities. Officially launched last year, it was the brainchild of researchers I know at the Arctic University of Norway in my base, Tromsø. They quickly adopted me as one of their own, and in regular online meetings, I have benefited from their discipline-weaving discussions. That week in Tórshavn, I got to meet many of them in person for the first time.
Among them was Sonja Åman, a postdoctoral researcher at the Oslo Center of the Environmental Humanities, who happens to focus on the international politics of Indigenous whaling practices. She’s currently working on a book chapter about the grindadráp, with research she presented at the conference. From the first sign of boats speeding across the sound, Sonja told me, she couldn’t believe her good luck. She knew exactly where to go: straight back into town for an unexpected day of field work.
“Imagine you’re a medieval historian and you’re suddenly watching a live jousting,” she said. “It was a quite visceral experience.”
Later, she filled me in. The drive, or boat chase to the shallows, is a male-only activity that can take hours. Once it’s underway, radio announcements and phone call chains spread the word like wildfire, triggering a fire-drill-like response as the town empties toward shore. Soon, the white-crescent beach fills with a picture of society temporarily suspended: nurses in scrubs, teachers leading children directly from classrooms and everyone from toddlers to the elderly commencing a centuries-honed preparation process. Together, they line the beach with hundreds of hook-ended ropes and set up butchering stations. That was happening when Sonja and her colleagues arrived at the beach.
As the boat-pressured, thrashing pod swam toward the beach, they watched several locals wade into the water, hooks in hand, a massive wake from boats and beasts already crashing against them. With hundreds of animals flailing in shallow waters, the trained and licensed fleet of slaughterers, or grindamenn, thrust hooks through blowholes, swiftly paralyzed the creatures with spine lances, then slit their throats. Blood poured into the bay and lines of rope-tuggers dragged the schoolbus-sized dark bodies onshore.
Thus commenced a remarkably efficient collective process: Hundreds of people sorted into lines of slicing and passing, wheelbarrow-loading and bucket-carrying as thousands of variously sized hunks of glistening raw meat were hauled up the beach. Empty truck beds waited to carry the loads home, bound for several weeks of hook-hung drying and fermenting. Later, vacuum-packed slices would be distributed to freezers around the archipelago and even far-flung friends would receive nutrient-dense treats to help last through a long cold winter.
As the butchering was underway, Sonja spoke to one grindamann. Some meat is always set aside for the community, he told her, but if you contribute to any part of the drive, you get a bigger share. Those who participate are promised a whopping 50 kilograms of meat and 25 kilograms of blubber.
Flashing a winning smile, he offered to share his portion. Sonja declined as politely as she could.
* * *
Over subsequent days at the conference, attendees were buzzing with discussion. In a coffee break, one biodiversity expert expressed deep concern about the scale of the slaughter. But her colleague, who had previously helped develop guidelines for humane subsistence whale killing, said it was “fascinating” to see the spinal lance tool in action. As images of the hundreds of carcasses circulated, some participants had to be given frank instructions about sharing disturbing content with no warning.
The grindadráp is internationally controversial. The European Union and the United Kingdom have both urged the Faroese to end the practice. (Because the Faroe Islands are not part of the European Union, they aren’t subject to its hunting regulations.) For decades, the nonprofit Sea Shepherd conservation group has led awareness and opposition campaigns, planting volunteers on the ground to follow and film the drive, its YouTube videos garnering tens of thousands of views. The videos, which always start with content warnings, are hard to watch, documenting masses of intelligent creatures in clear distress, including pregnant mothers and calves.
Backlash reached a peak in 2021 after a miscalculation resulted in a particularly brutal drive. Whale and dolphin pods are built on intense bonds and maintain complex social dynamics, something researchers are increasingly calling a culture. Survivors of attacks often show signs of trauma and don’t survive well, so it’s considered cruel to kill partial pods. The Faroese authorities that greenlight the grindadráp target groups within a reasonable size. But five years ago, a too-hasty approval ended the lives of 1,400 white-sided dolphins. The following year, the Faroese Parliament imposed an official 500-animal quota, instituted a formal licensing process and new rules designating humane killing tools. Because this year’s Tórshavn drive approached the quota, there won’t be another on any island until next year.
The International Whaling Commission (IWC), which issued a unilateral moratorium on whale hunts in 1986, made exceptions for Indigenous cultures to continue the practice within quotas. The Faroese continued their tradition under that exception. But whether they actually qualify for the cultural and subsistence category is still under question.
I heard the debate play out at the conference. The non-Indigenous distinction, one marine biologist argued over lunch, creates problems not just in principle but also practice. Most traditional Indigenous whale hunts are grounded in relational worldviews that encourage never taking more than you need. Many also tend to avoid killing mother and infant creatures. The grindadráp, by contrast, is a rare indiscriminate mass slaughter sanctioned under cultural heritage laws. The practice inevitably creates needless killing, many argue, particularly as younger generations lose interest in the meat and because whales contain elevated levels of mercury and PCBs, which shows up in the blood samples of those who eat them.
The day after the drive, the conference held a panel discussion about Indigenous food systems. The mood was excited as Inuit researchers from Greenland and Canada celebrated the grindadráp as a firsthand example of a living subsistence tradition. They talked about how anti-whaling campaigns had threatened their own cultures. It’s true, they noted, that centuries of commercial whaling had reduced world whale populations by 70 to 90 percent. But those have nothing to do with traditional whale hunts, which are built on respect for the ocean and its creatures, they argued. At the same time, even the IWC’s quotas for subsistence whale hunting often vastly underestimated whale populations, and for decades the organization has refused to incorporate Indigenous observations. For high north Inuit peoples who live seasonally surrounded by ship-blocking sea ice, it wasn’t just a crisis of cultural continuity—it was about food security.
Around the same time that whaling was becoming regulated, the world was learning that high north species and peoples were being disproportionately poisoned by pollution and heavy metals from industry much further south. In the 1990s, the Arctic Council’s Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program established that the world’s marine pollutants were flowing to the region and concentrating in the blood of its species. In one landmark study, it linked toxic levels of mercury in marine mammals to the blood and breastmilk of Indigenous peoples who ate them. The findings led to historic international regulation of marine pollution, including the 2001 Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants and the 2013 Minamata Protocol on Mercury.
Many northern Indigenous peoples see elements of the conservation movements as colonialism in another form. ‘There’s a risk that so-called rights of nature supersede human rights,’ said Sara Olsvig, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council.
With these compounded legacies, many northern Indigenous peoples see elements of the conservation movements as colonialism in another form. I heard as much earlier this year from Sara Olsvig, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, while interviewing her for an Atlantic magazine story exploring rights for sea ice. She expressed deep skepticism about granting personhood to nature, given that environmental laws and animal-welfare groups already tend to prioritize “nature” above Indigenous livelihoods. “There’s a risk that so-called rights of nature supersede human rights,” she said. Olsvig spoke from personal experience about how the IWC’s whaling quotas, as well as the EU’s seal-product bans, dealt nutritional, economic and cultural blows to her own Inuit community.
My colleague Sonja also doesn’t differentiate between the grindadráp and Indigenous whale hunts. To her, it’s all traditional practice, particularly since it’s all non-commercial. Ironically, she told me, before Sea Shepherd took notice in the 1980s, the practice was fading from Faroese culture. The aggressive media campaigns revitalized local participation in the tradition, opening new generation-crossing conversations about what the grindadráp is and why it matters. There’s a rebellious spirit about it, she said, particular to people who survived for centuries under control of distant but ever-present colonizers.
* * *
The morning after the grindadráp, I woke early to attend a pre-conference coffee meet-up arranged by a network called Women of the Arctic. At a quaint, red-painted café in Tórshavn center, I crowded around a table with half a dozen researchers and nonprofit workers. After about 30 minutes of chatting over steaming mugs, we were surprised by the arrival of three local Faroese women.
They had seen the meet-up advertised on Instagram, the women explained as they removed their coats and settled in. Like many in Tórshavn, they were curious about our unprecedented mass arrival. Not only was the conference inconveniently taking place in a far-flung location during working hours but attendance was also costly. So when social media clued them into a pre-work meet-up in town, their curiosity found its outlet. They introduced themselves: Lív represented the Faroes on the Nordic Committee of Senior Officials for Gender Equality and LGBTQI, while Turið Maria and Ingillín were the only two employees at the Faroes office of Amnesty International. Ingillín was relishing her recent retirement from parliament. Working for change in such a small, male-dominated culture had been “exhausting,” she told us.
We dug into Faroese gender dynamics. The national population is 51 percent male, they said. But among those aged 24 to 45, the gender gap is much wider and growing fast. The women were careful to call this cohort the “education age.” More young women are pursuing higher education abroad than men and many don’t return to the islands. But, as Ingillín remarked with an eye roll, aging male leaders persistently refer to the same cohort as women of “sustainability age,” referring to peak childbearing potential.
That difference plays out meaningfully in politics. Although abortion has been legal in Denmark for more than 50 years, the Faroe Islands approved it only last December. Amnesty International was a driving force. But, the women clarified, the most intense resistance was largely concentrated among older men in an aging population. And they suspected that the legal lag had a lot less to do with women’s bodily autonomy than Faroese national autonomy. They, too, spoke of a quiet rebellion, a deep awareness and resentment of how they’re perceived by the larger kingdom and world. The more their colonizer condescendingly implores them to change, the more they tend to double down on traditional practices.
That stubbornness is evident in debates around the whale drive, too, they said. All three women agreed that at least some elements of tradition should be changed but also that reform needs to happen from within Faroese society. It simply doesn’t help when Copenhagen or Brussels get involved.
Amnesty’s Turið Maria said the two issues aren’t just parallel, they’re linked. For one, the whale chase is exclusively male and, she emphasized, extremely masculine in its prolonged brutality. She has taken part in a shore butchering during a heavy storm, and described the nearly rain-blinded collective effort as one of the most powerful feelings of group connection she’s ever experienced. But, she added, the mass sportive performance on the water needlessly extended the animals’ distress.
Two, she pointed out, the risks associated with whale meat consumption can open all kinds of assumption-laced discussions about a woman’s bodily choices. Women roughly between the ages of 20 and 40 are discouraged from eating the whale meat since it contains toxic elevated levels of mercury that can disrupt fetal development. That norm is founded in real health risks. But Turið Maria felt the practice also aligns with many male leaders’ ease with talking about young women in terms of population sustainability.
On the other hand, all three women agreed that the grindadráp seemed to be a positive activity for young men. Like in many other places in the world, they are falling behind their more-educated counterparts and seem to be growing more isolated. Lív told us it’s rare for her sons just to get outside let alone spend time learning from older generations. But when they walk up the beach with their friends and fathers and uncles, soaked and salted and sprayed with some blood, they seem to stand taller.
“It gets them away from their phones and microwave pizzas,” she said. “These days, that feels so special.”
* * *
On our one free day before our flight home, a researcher-colleague and I signed up to take a van tour of the islands. As we piled in with three other conferencers, our driver-guide, Annfinn, introduced himself as Tórshavn’s former deputy mayor. A vivacious, wise-cracking man in his late 60s, Annfinn was abuzz with pride about the previous day’s whale drive. As he steered us through undersea tunnels linking the 18 islands, he regaled us with a few tales of his own youthful days at sea.
Over several hours, we traversed various stunning landscapes caught in all weather: sunwashed seaside towns, dramatic storm-lashed cliffs and—munching on everything from coastal grass to thatched roofs—thousands and thousands of sheep. Toward day’s end, Annfinn took a final detour along a short cliff-hugging road to the village where he grew up. He pointed to his grassy-roofed childhood home, then drove past his current house. Just next door, a middle-aged man in a blood-streaked white t-shirt lifted a garage door, revealing long sections of glistening red whale meat lining the concrete floor.
Annfinn pulled over, greeted his neighbor in Faroese, then parked and beckoned us out. After a slightly bewildered hello, the man gave us a tour of his garage’s contents: not just floor-slabs, but buckets and wheelbarrows stacked and overflowing with variously marbled flesh. The man pointed to each pile, explaining which corresponded to what part of the whale’s body, and which friend or family member would come to pick it up. We walked around the back of the house where a line of hooks would soon hold the freshly carved flanks.
Back in the garage, as he opened a freezer to show us a piece of last year’s catch, a woman and a tall young man joined us, whom he introduced as his wife and son. I asked the son how old he was. He replied with a gruff “20.” I asked how many times he had participated in the drive. “This was my first year,” he said, folding his arms with studied nonchalance.
His dad beamed. “But he was a natural,” he said, and his son’s face briefly softened with the slightest sheepish smile.
Just as we climbed back into the van, another car pulled up and a gaggle of kids began piling out. “Here they come, to check on their share!” the neighbor said with a laugh, waving as we drove off. True to the ancient sharing economy, the meat would make its way around the islands and perhaps be traded for eggs, fish and other products. But it would never be sold.
Only three countries maintain commercial whaling industries. I live in one of them. Along with Iceland and Japan, Norway chose to entirely ignore the International Whaling Commission’s 1986 ban. Norwegians argue that because they exclusively hunt minke whales, which are still abundant, their practice is sustainable. Of the three nations, Norway’s whaling industry is by far the largest.
I still remember my surprise when I first saw whale on a Norwegian restaurant menu, particularly since Tromsø—Europe’s orca-watching capital—is also where humpbacks are protected and revered. Clearly in Norway, your fate as a whale very much depends on your kind. Domestically, whale is sold in a tourist-targeting market that tends to falsely advertise it as a local delicacy. In truth, I don’t know a Norwegian who eats it. The entire industry seems to pass under most Norwegians’ radar, out of sight and far offshore. The vast majority of what’s caught is either exported to Japan or sold as dog food.
Every year, the Norwegian Seafood Authority tracks whale populations and sets quotas. In 2026, whalers are permitted to kill up to 1,641 creatures. The April-to-September whaling season is currently in full swing, taking place not too far from the high north waters I can see from my living room window as I write.
As far as I know, I’ve never met a Norwegian who’s witnessed a whale hunt. I’ve certainly never met a Norwegian who’s taken part in one.
Top photo: Hours after the grindadrap, “pilot whale killing” in Faroese, the waters of Tórshavn Bay remain an uncanny brilliant red.
