The Faroe Islands lie in the North Atlantic between Iceland and Norway: 18 volcanic islands, roughly 1,400 square kilometres in total, home to approximately 54,000 people speaking a language descended from Old West Norse that survives nowhere else in the world.
The islands are autonomous within the Kingdom of Denmark — a status the Faroese themselves periodically test through referenda and parliamentary debate. The most recent independence debate, in the early 2020s, did not produce a vote. The Faroese have a tendency, when the question of independence is raised, to consider it seriously and then to decide that the current arrangement, on balance, serves them.
The economy is built almost entirely on fish. Atlantic salmon, primarily — the Faroes is one of the world's largest exporters of farmed salmon — but also cod, mackerel, capelin, and the species of small fish that pass through Faroese waters in seasonal volumes that have shaped the country's pattern of life for a thousand years. The fishery is, by Atlantic standards, well managed. Quotas are set by Faroese authorities through their own scientific advisory process and through international agreements with Norway, the EU, and Iceland. The species are not collapsing the way Atlantic cod collapsed in Canadian waters in the 1990s. Whether this is durable into the changes coming to the North Atlantic is one of the questions that Faroese fisheries scientists are quietly working on.
The Faroese have an annual practice — the grindadráp — in which pilot whales are driven into shallow bays and slaughtered for meat. The practice is centuries old, the meat is distributed without commercial sale, and the volume taken is small relative to the global pilot whale population. The practice has nonetheless drawn substantial international opposition. The Faroese have, for the most part, declined to abandon it. The cultural argument they make — that the practice is sustainable, indigenous, and that abandoning it would be the kind of cultural concession to outside opinion that small nations should resist — is the argument they have been making throughout the period of the criticism. The argument is not universally accepted, including by some Faroese themselves. It is the argument they have settled on collectively.
The cliffs of the western coasts of the Faroes hold seabird colonies — puffins, fulmars, kittiwakes — that until the 1990s were among the most populous in the eastern Atlantic. The colonies have thinned, in line with the broader pattern of North Atlantic seabird decline, in line with the broader pattern of pelagic ecosystem stress. The Faroese have not caused this. The Faroese have to live with it.
What the islands offer the visitor who travels there is something quieter than the headline picture suggests. The villages are small, the weather is consistently the weather of the North Atlantic, the light in summer is extraordinary, the light in winter is rare. The language is taught in schools, supported by state policy, and used in daily life. The islands have decided, repeatedly, that they will continue to be themselves.
That decision — to be a small place, deliberately, on terms that suit the place — is the kind of decision that this section of the publication exists to notice.