I loved my trip to Iceland. It’s a beautiful country with beautiful people. (Really beautiful people.)

And I understand that the country has a long fishing tradition of which it is understandably proud. Iceland isn’t the easiest country in the world in which to make a living, and fishing is brutal.

That said, Iceland has an unfortunate tradition of whaling, and in recent years the country has embraced that tradition with increasing ardor.

On my trip to Iceland, which was work-related, several restaurants served whale meat to the group of foreigners I was reporting on; I declined, but it definitely felt like they were trying to sneak us whale meat in situations where people either wouldn’t know what it was or would feel uncomfortable saying no.

Now the BBC reports that Iceland is planning a massive sale of whale meat to Japan, which is just wrong for all sorts of reasons.

This summer, [Icelandic whaling company] Hvalur hf caught 125 fins [fin whales] - a huge expansion on previous years.

The company’s owner says he will export as much as 1,500 tonnes to Japan. This would substantially increase the amount of whalemeat in the Japanese market.

The bizarre thing about this is that whalewatches are a big business in Reykjavik…so on the one hand, they take people out to see whales, and then, when the tourists aren’t looking, they kill them. It’s a very odd cognitive dissonance.

Whaling has become a hot-button political issue in Iceland, which is in dire economic straits and under economic pressure to join the EU—a move which would mean some loss of sovereignty (goodbye kroner!) for Iceland and is deeply unpopular among Icelanders, who are proud of their independence and talk about Vikings a lot.

The [Icelandic] government has formally applied to join the EU, and it is entirely possible that the EU would demand an end to whaling as a condition of Iceland’s entry.

Here’s the real problem: The more whale meat is traded, the more likely it is that a global marketplace will develop, and that will only lead to the slaughter of more whales…..