ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a seeming contradiction around the impossibility of nonhuman sentience that has arisen in the two major environmental debates to occur in Iceland in the last 25 years: over whale hunting and over hydroelectric development in support of heavy industry. During the 1980s and early 1990s when the international protests against Icelandic whale hunting were at their height, many Icelanders perceived foreign activists as holding irrational and sentimental beliefs about the intelligence and feelings of whales. Yet a few years later, an Icelandic environmental movement with widespread public credibility arose to protest against state plans to push forward hydroelectric and heavy industry development. In public debate, the highland rivers and moors and their nonhuman inhabitants under threat from hydroelectric reservoirs were talked about in terms suggestive of agency and, in some cases, consciousness. It argues for human cognitive capacities to apprehend it.
