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By Root 2082 0

into and stored as butter, cheese, and an Icelandic specialty called skyr, which to my taste is like a delicious thick yogurt. To make up the rest of their diet, Icelanders relied on wild game and fish, as revealed again by the patient efforts of zooarchaeologists identifying 47,000 bones in garbage heaps. The breeding walrus colonies were quickly exterminated, and the breeding seabirds became depleted, leaving hunters to shift attention to seals. Eventually, the main source of wild protein became fish—both the abundant trout, salmon, and char in lakes and rivers, and the abundant cod and haddock along the coast. Those cod and haddock were crucial in enabling Icelanders to survive the hard centuries of the Little Ice Age and in driving Iceland’s economy today.

At the time that settlement of Iceland began, one-quarter of the island’s area was forested. The settlers proceeded to clear the trees for pastures, and for using the trees themselves as firewood, timber, and charcoal. About 80% of that original woodland was cleared within the first few decades, and 96% as of modern times, thus leaving only 1% of Iceland’s area still forested (Plate 16). Big chunks of scorched wood found in the earliest archaeological sites show that—incredible as it seems today—much of the wood from that land clearance was wasted or just burned, until Icelanders realized that they would be short of wood for the indefinite future. Once the original trees had been removed, grazing by sheep, and rooting by the pigs initially present, prevented seedlings from regenerating. As one drives across Iceland today, it is striking to notice how the occasional clumps of trees still standing are mostly ones enclosed by fences to protect them from sheep.

Iceland’s highlands above tree line, supporting natural grassland on fertile shallow soil, were particularly attractive to the settlers, who didn’t even have to clear trees there in order to create pastures. But the highlands were more fragile than the lowlands, because they were colder and drier, hence had lower rates of plant regrowth, and were not protected by woodland cover. Once the natural carpet of grassland had been cleared or browsed off, the soil originating as windblown ash was now exposed to wind erosion. In addition, water running downhill, either as rain or as snowmelt runoff, could start to erode gullies into the now-bare soil. But as a gully developed and as the water table dropped from the level of the top of the gully to the bottom, the soil dried out and became even more subject to wind erosion. Within a short time after settlement, Iceland’s soils began to be carried from the highlands down to the lowlands and out to sea. The highlands became stripped of soil as well as of vegetation, the former grasslands of Iceland’s interior became the man-made (or sheep-made) desert that one sees today, and then large eroded areas started to develop in the lowlands as well.

Today we have to ask ourselves: why on Earth did those foolish settlers manage their land in ways that caused such obvious damage? Didn’t they realize what would happen? Yes, they eventually did, but they couldn’t at first, because they were faced with an unfamiliar and difficult problem of land management. Except for its volcanoes and hot springs, Iceland looked rather similar to areas of Norway and Britain whence the settlers had emigrated. Viking settlers had no way of knowing that Iceland’s soils and vegetation were much more fragile than what they were used to. It seemed natural to the settlers to occupy the highlands and to stock many sheep there, just as they had in the Scottish highlands: how would they know that Iceland’s highlands couldn’t support sheep indefinitely, and that even the lowlands were being overstocked? In short, the explanation of why Iceland became the European country with the most serious ecological damage is not that cautious Norwegian and British immigrants suddenly threw caution to the winds when they landed in Iceland, but that they found themselves in an apparently lush but actually fragile environment