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Before being colonised by the Vikings, Iceland was lush with forests but the fearsome warriors razed everything to the ground and the nation is now struggling to reforest the island.
The country is considered the least forested in Europe; indeed, forests in Iceland are so rare, or their trees so young, that people often joke that those lost in the woods only need to stand up to find their way.
However, it wasn't always that way.
When seafaring Vikings set off from Norway and conquered the uninhabited North Atlantic island at the end of the ninth century, forests, made up mostly of birch trees, covered more than a quarter of the island.
Within a century, the settlers had cut down 97 percent of the original forests to serve as building material for houses and to make way for grazing pastures.
The forests' recovery has been made all the more difficult by the active volcanoes, which periodically cover the soil with lava and ashes.
According to a report published in 2015 by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), forests now only cover 0.5 percent of the island's surface.
The lack of trees means there isn't any vegetation to protect the soil from eroding and to store water, leading to extensive desertification despite the country's far northern location.
[...]Reforestation efforts since the 1950s and especially the 1990s have helped the rocky landscape regain some of the greenery and efforts are ongoing.
In Hafnarsandur, a 6,000-hectare (14,800-acre) area of basalt and black sand in Iceland's southwest, authorities have tasked the Icelandic Forest Service with turning the lunar landscape into a forest.
"This is one of the worst examples of soil erosion in Iceland on low land," said Hreinn Oskarsson, the service's head of strategy.
Armed with a red "potti-putki", a Finnish designed tube-shaped tool, Oskarsson is planting lodgepole pines and Sitka spruces, two species of North American conifer trees, in an attempt to protect the nearby town of Thorlakshofn from recurring dust storms.
"We are planning an afforestation project to stabilise the soil," Oskarsson added.
[...]At the foot of Mount Esja, which overlooks the capital Reykjavik, is Mogilsa, where the Icelandic Forest Service's research division is located.
Next to the station is a 50 year-old planted forest where imported trees grow together with Iceland's only domestic tree, the birch.
Despite the birch being native to the soil, afforestation efforts often focus on other species of trees. The problem with birches, according to Adalsteinn Sigurgeirsson, deputy director of the forest service, is that they aren't a "productive species".
"So if you are going to meet other objectives, like fast sequestering of carbon or producing timber... we need more variety than just monocultures of one native species," he said.
[...]Dozens of nursery gardens have been set up throughout the country to facilitate the afforestation efforts.
[...]Since 2015, between three and four million trees have been planted in Iceland, the equivalent of about 1,000 hectares. That, however, is only a drop in the ocean compared to the six to seven million hectares planted in China over the same period.
See also: Forest Succession
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Arik on Saturday July 20 2019, @10:55PM (5 children)
When there's only a few tens of thousands of people in a region the size of Europe, a large forest is an effectively infinite resource. When the first farmers moved into Europe, that's exactly how they used it.
On the continent this worked out just fine for a long time. The massive failures occurred on islands. Malta for sure, simply cut all the forests, destroyed the soil, and became uninhabitable, over a stretch of many generations of course. There's some evidence of the same thing happening on much larger islands in the Mediterranean iirc.
The isle of Britain has what many think of as wild forests today, but in fact it hasn't. They're only feral. At the height of the bronze age in Britain, more land was under cultivation than at any time since. The forests that remain have all been 'farmed' forests for much of the intervening centuries. Meaning the only reason they weren't cut down to make room for cropland was because they WERE the crop. They were planted, they were thinned, a great many of them were systematically coppiced and so on. Forestry is a much older discipline than many realize.
The Iceland colonists were no dummies, and they were probably aware of the need to do this and probably tried to create tree farms and expand them, once lumber became unreasonably difficult to obtain if not before, but the climactic conditions in Iceland likely made the project much more difficult there.
Easter island is another stark example of this. Covered in trees perfect for making outrigger canoes from when the colonists arrived. They made lots of canoes and caught lots of fish and made lots of babies. After some generations, not a tree was left on the island, and thus no way to make a boat in which to leave it. In that case the culprit doesn't appear to have been climate, but rats. The rats stowed away with the colonists, and ate (among a great many things) the nuts before they could become saplings. At least that was the current theory the last I looked.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 20 2019, @11:07PM
The author doesn't seem to understand that Iceland used to have lush forests before it was discovered by the Vikings.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 21 2019, @02:11AM
> Forestry is a much older discipline than many realize.
A friend in southern England lived on an old estate which had some large redwood trees--that were planted by his great grandfather, brought seeds (or seedlings) back from the California Gold Rush (c.1849).
(Score: 1) by clive_p on Sunday July 21 2019, @09:04AM
My first thought was also that Iceland had similarities with Easter Island (both of which I've visited in the last couple of years). On Easter Island one of the problems was that there were competing villages/tribes/communities, which tried to outdo each other in various ways, especially in creating the Moai - these enormous stone faces. Our knowledge of the early history of Easter Island is obviously sketchy but it doesn't seem that there was for most of the time a ruler in charge of the whole island: my guess is that the separate villages competed and inadvertently destroyed all the trees, each perhaps thinking that there were plenty of trees elsewhere on the island, or perhaps not caring. It is possible that Iceland also broke up into competing Viking communities, each of which used all the timber in their local area, with nobody aware that the entire island was being denuded. The phrase "tragedy of the commons" comes to mind.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday July 21 2019, @09:50PM (1 child)
If the Easter Island colonists were anything like the Maori, and they probably were, the rats were food. The Maori bought Kiori [wikipedia.org] with them to New Zealand, along with the Kurī [wikipedia.org] or Polynesian dog as a food source.
Of course, just like Easter Island, as the first mammals to arrive, they ate all the birds which is a shame.
The Easter Islanders also cut down a lot of trees to build their massive stone heads, or Moai which seems to have been a central part of their culture.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 22 2019, @11:23PM
Wait what? They could make stone heads out of wood?!