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When the settlers finally realized what was happening, they did take corrective action. They stopped throwing away big pieces of wood, stopped keeping ecologically destructive pigs and goats, and abandoned much of the highlands. Groups of neighboring farms cooperated in jointly making decisions critical for preventing erosion, such as the decision about when in the late spring the grass growth warranted taking the sheep up to communally owned high-altitude mountain pastures for the summer, and when in the fall to bring the sheep back down. Farmers sought to reach agreement on the maximum number of sheep that each communal pasture could support, and how that number was to be divided among sheep quotas for the individual farmers.

That decision-making is flexible and sensitive, but it is also conservative. Even my Icelandic friends describe their society to me as conservative and rigid. The Danish government that ruled Iceland after 1397 was regularly frustrated by that attitude whenever it made genuine efforts to improve the Icelanders’ condition. Among the long list of improvements that Danes tried to introduce were: growing grain; improved fishing nets; fishing from decked rather than open boats; processing fish for export with salt, rather than just drying them; a rope-making industry; a hide-tanning industry; and mining sulfur for export. To these and any other proposals involving change, the Danes (as well as innovative Icelanders themselves) found that Icelanders’ routine response was “no,” regardless of the potential benefits for the Icelanders.

My Icelandic friends explained to me that this conservative outlook is understandable when one reflects on Iceland’s environmental fragility. Icelanders became conditioned by their long history of experience to conclude that, whatever change they tried to make, it was much more likely to make things worse than better. In the first years of experimentation during Iceland’s early history, its settlers managed to devise an economic and social system that worked, more or less. Granted, that system left most people poor, and from time to time many people starved to death, but at least the society persisted. Other experiments that Icelanders had tried during their history had tended to end disastrously. The evidence of those disasters lay everywhere around them, in the form of the moonscape highlands, the abandoned former farms, and the eroded areas of farms that survived. From all that experience, Icelanders took away the conclusion: This is not a country in which we can enjoy the luxury of experimenting. We live in a fragile land; we know that our ways will allow at least some of us to survive; don’t ask us to change.

Iceland’s political history from 870 onwards can be quickly summarized. For several centuries Iceland was self-governing, until fighting between chiefs belonging to the five leading families resulted in many killings of people and burnings of farms in the first half of the 13th century. In 1262 Icelanders invited Norway’s king to govern them, reasoning that a distant king was less of a danger to them, would leave them more freedom, and could not possibly plunge their land into such disorder as their own nearby chiefs. Marriages among Scandinavian royal houses resulted in the thrones of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway becoming unified in the year 1397 under one king, who was most interested in Denmark because it was his richest province, and less interested in Norway and Iceland, which were poorer. In 1874 Iceland achieved some self-government, home rule in 1904, and full independence from Denmark in 1944.

Beginning in the late Middle Ages, Iceland’s economy was stimulated by the rise of trade in stockfish (dried cod) caught in Iceland waters and exported to the European mainland’s growing cities whose urban populations required food. Because Iceland itself lacked big trees for good shipbuilding, those fish were caught and exported by ships belonging to an assortment of foreigners that included