Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [157]
Just as in Iceland, the environmental problems that beset the medieval Norse remain concerns in modern Greenland. For five centuries after Greenland’s medieval Norse died out, the island was without livestock under Inuit occupation and then under Danish colonial rule. Finally, in 1915, before the recent studies of medieval environmental impacts had been carried out, the Danes introduced Icelandic sheep on a trial basis, and the first full-time sheep breeder reestablished the farm at Brattahlid in 1924. Cows were also tried but were abandoned because they took too much work.
Today, about 65 Greenland families raise sheep as their main occupation, with the result that overgrazing and soil erosion have reemerged. Greenland lake cores show the same changes after 1924 as occurred after A.D. 984: a decrease in tree pollen, increase in grass and weed pollen, and increase of topsoil carried into lakes. Initially after 1924, sheep were left outdoors in the winter to forage for themselves whenever the winter was sufficiently mild. That caused grazing damage at the time when the vegetation was least capable of regenerating. Juniper trees are especially sensitive, because both sheep and horses browse them in the winter when there is nothing else available to eat. When Christian Keller arrived at Brattahlid in 1976, juniper was still growing there, but during my visit in 2002 I saw only dead juniper.
After more than half of Greenland’s sheep starved to death in the cold winter of 1966-67, the government founded a Greenland Experimental Station to study the environmental effects of sheep by comparing vegetation and soil in heavily grazed pastures, lightly grazed ones, and fields fenced to keep sheep out. A component of that research involved enlisting archaeologists to study pasture changes during Viking times. As a result of the appreciation thereby gained about Greenland’s fragility, Greenlanders have fenced off their most vulnerable pastures and brought sheep indoors for barn feeding throughout the entire winter. Efforts are being made to increase the supplies of winter hay by fertilizing natural pastures, and by cultivating oats, rye, timothy, and other non-native grasses.
Despite these efforts, soil erosion is a big problem in Greenland today. Along Eastern Settlement fjords, I saw areas of bare stone and gravel, largely devoid of vegetation as a result of recent sheep grazing. Within the last 25 years, high-velocity winds have eroded the modern farm at the site of the old Norse farm at the mouth of the Qorlortoq Valley, thereby furnishing us with a model for what happened at that farm seven centuries ago. While both the Greenland government and the sheep farmers themselves understand the long-term damage caused by sheep, they also feel under pressure to generate jobs in a society with high unemployment. Ironically, raising sheep in Greenland doesn’t pay even in the short run: the government has to give each sheep-farming family about $14,000 each year to cover their losses, provide them with an income, and induce them to carry on with the sheep.
The Inuit play a major role in the story of the demise of Viking Greenland. They constituted the biggest difference between the histories of the Greenland and Iceland Norse: while the Icelanders did enjoy the advantages of a less daunting climate and shorter trade routes to Norway compared to their Greenland brethren, the Icelanders’ clearest advantage lay in not being threatened by the Inuit. At minimum, the Inuit represent a missed opportunity: the Greenland Vikings would have had a better chance of surviving if they had learned from or traded with the Inuit, but they didn’t. At maximum, Inuit attacks on or threats to the Vikings may have played a direct role in the Vikings’ extinction. The Inuit are also significant in proving to us that persistence of