Alive

I just received an email from my friend Arni Finnsson, the President of the Icelandic Nature Conservation Association (INCA). A minimalist email: it contains only the words "The End", and a link to this afternoon's Reuters story announcing that the Icelandic Government has decided to stop commercial whaling, thereby putting an end to what we said here last year was a political whaling experiment.

This morning I had another email from another whale conservation veteran, Kieran Mulvaney, who is presently on board a Greenpeace vessel in the Bering Sea off the Aleutian Islands. From the site of the first Greenpeace expedition against US nuclear weapons testing in 1971, Kieran is telling me in his email the importance for the current generation of Greenpeace activists to connect with the long history of their organization.

I read Kieran's message just before the after-lunch siesta I take everyday in summer (when I can). As Kieran made me think of the past, I realized that next year will mark the 30th anniversary of the first voyage of the Rainbow Warrior in which I took part and which took Greenpeace to Iceland for the first time, and when I fell asleep I was trying to think how many of us from the original Rainbow Warrior crew were still alive.

When I woke up, I found Arni's Icelandic-ends-whaling email message on my Blackberry.

All of us are alive!