I received a very cool sounding new book from Booklist today, Terry Glavin's The Sixth Extinction. (It's not out until next April.) I've been interested in the idea of extinction for a long time - in how some cultures are more acceptable of the idea or how it seems to be almost fluid from country to country (or culture to culture). Who sets the percentages for endangerd species - when do we decide if an animal is endangered or not and will people on the other side of the world agree? It's probably strange to think about, but when I read articles like this I have to wonder. Can you just dispute an animal's endangered status and that makes it okay? And what is more important, the status of an animal or of a culture? Consider why Iceland has resumed whale hunts:

Iceland's decision to resume commercial whaling is probably based on fear, more than money or even self-image. Polls have repeatedly shown that 70-80% of Icelanders support commercial whaling and the government has long threatened to play the nationalist card. It also claims that the industry is economically essential to the country. This, though, is nonsense. All of Iceland's whaling is done by one company, owned by one powerful family in Reykjavik who are subsidised by the Icelandic government. While the government says it is economically essential to continue whaling, there is little evidence that it supports more than a few seasonal jobs. Indeed, whale watching is far more important to the country.

And there is barely a market for the catch. In 2004, just a quarter of the whale meat taken by the Icelandic whaling fleet was actually sold. The country's industrial freezers are full of unsold whale from previous seasons. A recent poll of Icelanders by anti-whalers found that only 1% of Icelanders eat whale meat once a week or more, while 82.4% of 16- to 24-year-olds never eat whale meat. Meanwhile, the international market is saturated. The Norwegians, who maintain whaling to keep their remote northern coastal communities politically sweet, failed to meet their quota of whales last year, yet still had to turn some of the catch into pet food. Meanwhile, the Japanese are reportedly handing it out to schoolchildren.

Do the people of Iceland need to hunt whales in order to be Icelandic? Is it necessary to who they are - to their national identity? And does that trump the whales' survival? Whose survival is more important - and who gets to decide?

Interestingly, I just learned that extinction itself is actually a relatively new term in Western minds. I assumed we had always known (the global "we") about the concept, but I was reading a very cool book about Mastodons to my son (and yes, I'll be reviewing it in the next picture book round-up at Eclectica in the Spring) and there it was - Charles Willson Peale from his Philadelphia Museum of Natural History set out to a field in Hudson's Valley to find and assemble the first full skeleton of a Mastodon and prove the concept of extinction - in the early 19th century.

Not so long ago when you think about it, is it?

It seems we were resistant to the whole idea of extinction for a very long time, and then even when faced with irrefutable proof that it happens, we still can't accept that extinction will interfere with our lives - our national lives. I remember when Chief Billie of the Seminole tribe in Florida was acquitted of killing the very endangered Florida Panther back in 1982. He said that his actions were based on Seminole tradition.

I'm sure there are some people in Iceland who would understand.