Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [119]
Lying 300 miles south of the Arctic Circle, at a latitude intermediate between that of the two largest towns on Norway’s west coast (Bergen and Trondheim), the Faeroes enjoy a mild oceanic climate. However, their more northerly location than that of the Orkneys and Shetlands meant a shorter growing season for would-be farmers and herders. Salt spray from the ocean, blown onto all parts of the islands because of their small area, combined with strong winds to prevent the development of forests. The original vegetation consisted of nothing taller than low willows, birches, aspen, and junipers, which were quickly cleared by the first settlers and prevented from regenerating by browsing sheep. In a drier climate that would have been a recipe for soil erosion, but the Faeroes are very wet and foggy and “enjoy” rain on an average of 280 days each year, including several rain showers on most days. The settlers themselves also adopted policies to minimize erosion, such as building walls and terraces to prevent soil loss. Viking settlers in Greenland and especially in Iceland were much less successful in controlling erosion, not because they were more imprudent than Faeroe Islanders but because Iceland soils and Greenland climate made the risk of erosion greater.
Vikings settled the Faeroes during the ninth century. They managed to grow some barley but few or no other crops; even today, only about 6% of the land area of the Faeroes is devoted to growing potatoes and other vegetables. The cows and pigs prized in Norway, and even the low-status goats, were abandoned by the settlers within the first 200 years to prevent overgrazing. Instead, the Faeroe economy became focused on raising sheep to export wool, supplemented later by export of salt fish, and today of dried cod, halibut, and farmed salmon. In return for those wool and fish exports, the islanders imported from Norway and Britain the bulk necessities that were lacking or deficient in the Faeroe environment: especially, huge quantities of wood, because no construction timber was locally available except for driftwood; iron for tools, also completely lacking locally; and other stones and minerals, such as grindstones, whetstones, and soft soapstone out of which to carve kitchenware to replace pottery.
As for the Faeroes’ history after settlement, the islanders converted to Christianity around A.D. 1000, i.e., around the same time as the other Viking North Atlantic colonies, and later they constructed a Gothic cathedral. The islands became tributary to Norway in the 11th century, passed with Norway to Denmark in 1380 when Norway itself came under the Danish crown, and achieved self-government under Denmark in 1948. The 47,000 inhabitants today still speak a Faeroese language, directly derived from Old Norse and very similar to modern Icelandic; Faeroese and Icelanders can understand each other’s speech and Old Norse texts.
In short, the Faeroes were spared the problems that beset Norse Iceland and Greenland: the erosion-prone soils and active volcanoes of Iceland, and the shorter growing season, drier climate, much greater sailing distances, and hostile local population of Greenland. While more isolated than the Orkneys or Shetlands, and poorer in local resources compared especially to the Orkneys, Faeroe islanders survived without difficulty by importing large quantities of necessities—an option not open to the Greenlanders.
The purpose of my first visit to Iceland was to attend a NATO-sponsored conference on restoring ecologically damaged environments. It was especially appropriate that NATO had chosen Iceland as the conference’s site, because Iceland is ecologically the most heavily damaged country in Europe. Since human settlement began, most of the country’s original trees and vegetation have been destroyed, and about half of the original