Some times new Unitarian Universalists are curious about why so many of our congregations consider saving the whales a social justice issue. Whaling! Didn't that go out with Melville's generation. Now days it is just those Japanese who take a few whales as a cultural delicacy, right?
Wrong! Many thousands of whales are being killed every year, and several species are on the verge of extinction.
The Independent reports that "We cannot be excused our culpability. Almost anyone born before 1960 ate whale - in margarine or ice cream - wore it as a cosmetic or fed it to their pets. The peak of whaling was not the brutal days of Melville's Moby-Dick, but the 1960s when, in one season alone, floating factories "processed" 6,158 blue whales, 17,989 finback whales, 2,108 humpback whales and 2,566 sperm whales - not including the thousands killed by the Russians, unreported to the International Whaling Commission (IWC). The whale, too, was a victim of the Cold War. "
Read the Independent report
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