When Environmentalists Crossed the Strait: Subsistence Whalers, Hippies, and the Soviets

 
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Ryan Tucker Jones brings us to the rough water of the Bering Strait in the 1980s, when environmental activist organizations Seas Shepherd and Greenpeace crossed the Strait from Alaska to Siberia in order to provoke an international incident surrounding illegal whaling being carried out in the name of the Indigenous Chukchi and Iñupiat peoples. Both landings led to outrage from Indigenous peoples—from both sides of the Strait—and redefined the organizations’ stances on Indigenous whaling, leading to some long-lasting animosity.

DOI: 10.5282/rcc/8966