Iceland is the world’s most environmentally friendly country – according to the Environmental Performance Index presented yesterday at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Iceland is often lauded for its renewable energy production, which supplies nearly every home and business with abundant green electricity and hot water. However some point out that renewable energy is logical for Iceland and makes good economic sense and is not an environmental gesture at all—a fact apparently illustrated by the country’s high level of car ownership. However, the EPI looks further than just electricity production.
According to Visir.is, the EPI looks at ten different environmental factors for each country, including: the health of the natural environment, air quality, water quality, biological diversity, fisheries management and agriculture. Iceland picked up the most points for reducing carbon emissions and the planting of new forests. Switzerland, Sweden and Norway tied in second on the list and Costa Rica was the only non-European nation to make the top five.
The world’s developing nations fared worst, with the bottom five on the index being Togo, Angola, Mauritania, the Central African Republic and Sierra Leone.
The USA took 61st place on the list and has therefore fallen 22 places since the last EPI two years ago. Other industrialised nations fared badly with Canada dropping 44 places and China 16.
That’s funny, cause I saw many empty cans of beer in the ditches, and I could even witness once how a guy near Selfoss didn’t care throwing some rubbish out of the window of his car. I used to live with an Icelandic family who didn’t really take recycling seriously until 2008, and they always told me that until then people didn’t really care whether the used cooking oil could pollute once disposed off down the drainpipes. Somehow (many) Icelanders looked like very little environment-conscious to me, but of course I’m a foreigner who used to live there and my comment might end up becoming a target for the hurt national Icelandic pride. Didn’t mean to offend, just point out a very personal opinion.
Yes, I also find this label of “green” somewhat baffling. If Brits acted with the same environmental carelessness that Icelanders demonstrate the island of Britain would be uninhabitable. I’ve witnessed this habit of throwing trash everywhere with no attempt to clean up. You can visit remote spots in the interior and witness the locals throwing rubbish around, vandalising rock structures and generally making a huge mess. (If you don’t believe these stories here are some pictures from an American who worked in Iceland:
http://www.the-saga.net/comments.php?id=P174_0_1_0_C)
If you go anywhere near an Icelandic school or university the pavement is covered in millions of white blobs – chewing gum thrown away.
I was once taken to see the tip above Akureyri – you have never seen such an almighty rubbish tip and awful smell. Stuff is just dumped – untreated. It blows around the nearby hillside (onto a mountain called Sulur).
Nothing is recycled directly from domestic households – that is beneath the dignity of ordinary Icelanders.
Then I’ve seen the most amazing oil pollution spewing from an Icelandic fishing vessel. The captain couldn’t care less.
We visited a dairy farm to get an idea of production facilities, health and safety etc. The farmer was using raw chemicals spread onto his land – chemicals banned in Europe and the US. He wasn’t worried. I asked about run-off pollution into a nearby river – “not my problem” was his attitude.
On another occasion I visited a “light industrial unit” just off the Keflavik-Reykjavik road. Liquid waste (of unknown origin) was being poured directly down the drain. “Does that go to a treatment plant?” I asked. “No, it goes straight into Hafnafjordur harbour”.
The environmental damage caused by the hydo-electric power plants are well known, but places like Krafla are total eyesores. So too many of the abandonned fishing villages with their rotting concrete processing plants. There is no attempt to make environmental impact studies, and no organised decommissioning. They build thoughtlessly and abandon thoughtlessly.
The air quality in Reykjavik leaves a lot to be desired as well.
As for planting new forests, a US environmental scientist once told me that the deforestation of Iceland in the time of settlement is perhaps the largest man-made ecological disaster to hit Europe. Soil loss was massive and wrecked the majority of the farm land. The empty waste land you see in the interior isn’t a natural phenomenon at all. People who wax lyrical about the mysterious empty interior should reflect that what they are looking at is a sight of environmetal destruction many times that of any atomic bomb. So it really is a mystery how Iceland gets this “green” label.
i’m from london and live in reykjavik. I ‘ve travelled all over and can say iceland and its citizens deserve to be first. London is a disgrace, as the world will see at the 2012 olympics!
“So it really is a mystery how Iceland gets this “green” label.”
No mystery to the EPI, you really are a chronic xenophobic :)
“Nothing is recycled directly from domestic households – that is beneath the dignity of ordinary Icelanders”
What a ridiculous statement,
only surpassed by this one.
“The air quality in Reykjavik leaves a lot to be desired as well.”
Iceland is a massive country with a tiny population, not surprising they have a small effect on the environment.
This just one of those meaningless reports, such as Iceland being a country without corruption, its easy when the Mafia controlling the country control *everything*.
Knowless,
I am neither a xenophobe nor a xenophile (is there such a word?) – I accept people as individuals and I treat everyone on their merits and characteristics.
But when an organisation decides to group people together for whatever purpose then it’s acceptable to analyse that grouping – there is such a thing as society.
So, as far as household recycling is concerned when I was visiting from 2000-2008 they could only do this by driving to a council-run site where they could deposit bottles and drink cans. I believe they got paid for that. There was no house-to-house organisation of recycling.
And clearly you’ve not tried to cross Miklabraut while the clak-clak of thousands of studs rip up the tarmac and create a lung-clogging dust cloud of truly asthmatic proportions, or watched the gas guzzling statement-cars crawl down Laugavegur spewing fumes so that the occupants can be “seen” (the infamous runtur – which I never got), or stood amazed at the sight of fifty cars outside a school all with their engines running as the parents waited for their precious darlings – on one occasion driving a full 50 metres from Menntaskolin vid Sund to their house.
I have no remit one way or the other: I watch, I observe and I remember. I was, and I still am, relatively disinterested in what happens to the country so I can congratulate Icelanders on what they do well (preserving fish stocks, organising leikskoli, even the Sedlabanki has done a reasonably creditable job – although that’s not a fashionable thing to say) and comment negatively on things they could do better – and their attitude to the environment, as explained to me once, is: “Yeah, we love our nature until we can make a profit from it!”
Hey, I thought some Icelanders were pretty good at being very xenophobic!!! ;)
Mike, do you drink Faxe beer ;)
i looked at the pictures in the link you provided and counted 14 cans of Faxe, 3 soda bottles, 1 Viking beer bottle and a cocke
looks to me like all of this is from 1 small group of people,
probably tourists, this area is exreamly popular for tourists,
the guys in the pictures are in a lava field, thats why the cracks are there, and they are not on any road.
Your post Mike is mostly nonsense, you should recycle your mind, pull it out of the trash and try to see the world as it is,
when you do you will change your mind about iceland.
the most toxic waste polluting Britain is the banking sector and politics, if you clean up your **** ill pick up the beer cans ;)
It is true that Icelanders do not view nature as some thing that is warm and fuzzy. Thats becasue Icelandic winter and climate is so hostile.
But they are sensible about things. As to trash being thrown around — that does only happen where there is not the teen agers cleanup squads on public service.
In most towns the kids learn that if they throw stuff away in a month it will just as likely that is them going around town picking it up.
Littering problem solved.
As to your talking on environmental impact studies that is not true as we do have the Act on Environmental Impact Studies (1993) and since 1990 Ministry for the Environment.
But it is true that Icelanders are not tree huggers. So called ” nature ” is not wanting to live in harmony with us here on this rock.
It is not like the green and pleasant land of England. At least not until our summer months when suddenly because of 24 hours sunlight our fields and mountains do burst into green and pleasant ness.
( The plants that do live here are tough and winter doesn’t kill them. It makes them come back stronger in summer. )
Mike did write :
>Nothing is recycled directly from domestic households – that is beneath the dignity of ordinary Icelanders.
That may have been true prior to 2008 but now its common.
But for good reason of economic efficency — it’s more cost effective for house holds to split up trash — not for some feel good tree hugger attitude.
>As for planting new forests, a US environmental scientist once told me that the deforestation of Iceland in the time of settlement is perhaps the largest man-made ecological disaster to hit Europe.
Mike, should really talk to historian that know something about this.
This talk of the trees all the way down to near beaches was reported in years after settlement. Then after that the trees slowly did disappear.
Man cutting trees had some thing to do with it but it was not the main reason.
History show that it was actually because of the ” Little Ice Age+ “; as the temperature did drop so the trees did disappear beause of that.
Our population did peak 70,000 or so in year 1100 but after that was the Little Ice Age and things got much for the worse :
” Until the onset of the Little Ice Age [ around 1250 ], the Icelanders also grew a hardy strain of barley in the north, south, and southeast of their homeland. However, the farmers had abandoned barley cultivation in the north by the end of the twelfth century. By the fifteenth century, no one grew cereal crops. Despite occasional experiments, barley did not return for eight centuries.
The Little Ice Age caused great suffering in Iceland from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, a period during which mountain glaciers advanced, hay crops fell sharply, and thousands of cattle died of hunger and cold. ”
( That comes from Brian Fagan’s book on Little Ice Age. )
+http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png
( I was trying to link to thread where I post before of this Aug 6, 2009 but now because the template does not allow my response to be seen I can’t find it and link there :
http://www.icenews.is/index.php/2009/07/29/more-members-of-parliament-against-the-icesave-deal/ )
>The environmental damage caused by the hydo-electric power plants are well known
The reality is that this was not unique nature spots at all.
As to sustainibility — Ómar Ragnarsson did make his ideas that some of this water is not from sustainable source. But really he did not present good data.
If any one can show the facts on that it would be help ful becasue there is just far too much complete nonsenses going on about this issue.
>And clearly you’ve not tried to cross Miklabraut while the clak-clak of thousands of studs rip up the tarmac and create a lung-clogging dust cloud of truly asthmatic proportions
This is true enough. But that is because of snow tyres.
When you have lived in the weather here for a while you too will not walk much either.
An Icelander said:
the most toxic waste polluting Britain is the banking sector and politics
Classic!
Without getting into a ****ing match over whose country is worse, confirmation of the smog issue:
http://icelandweatherreport.com/2009/12/iceland-to-join-eus-carbon-reduction-program.html
http://icelandweatherreport.com/2009/10/reykjaviks-dirty-little-secret.html
And confirmation of the lack of water treatment:
Northern Europe: Most of the waste water (80%) in Finland, Sweden and Norway receives tertiary treatment (Fig. 2), while in Iceland the waste water from half of the population is not treated at all and the other half only receive primary treatment.
http://themes.eea.europa.eu/IMS/ISpecs/ISpecification20041007132045/IAssessment1196343193294/view_content
My mother’s asthma always disappears whenever she has a short stay in Iceland, usually in Reykjavík. She lives in Winchester in Southern England, which isn’t known for its atmospheric pollution. So I think the air quality in Iceland is generally better than in England.
It’s impossible to say who dumped those beer cans in the hot pool.
What I would say is that Icelanders have become somewhat more conscious of their environment in the last 20 years than they used to be. I recall being taken out for a drive into the country by some Icelandic friends 20-odd years ago, and we had a picnic in a pleasant area with low trees and bushes. The only blight was the profusion of empty plastic fertiliser sacks which clearly had been dumped somewhere by someone who couldn’t be bothered to dispose of them properly, and blown about by the wind.
However, you can see plenty of litter by many roadsides in England. So I think Icelanders are no better or worse than we are in England when it comes to littering the countryside with refuse.
As for the beer cans in the hot pot – with almost 100% certainty this is locals. The hot pot is “secret”. I would guess that most Icelanders from Reykjavik don’t know where it is.
So certainly no tourists know where it is or how to get there. No tourist buses stop near it and the path to it is plain dangerous. Even if you know where it is – and I too have been shown and sworn to secrecy – it is nearly impossible to find it again.
Secondly, the way down into that particular hot pot is pretty dangerous – maybe 15 metres to climb down. There is sometimes a ladder, sometimes not. Your average tourist would think twice about going close to the edge, never mind clambering down. You see, it is really a crack in the earth more than anything else and it overhangs so you can’t see any water when you are on the surface.
Finally, those pictures were taken in winter, and you simply don’t get tourists up in that region in the winter. On a couple of occasions I have flown into Akureyri and taken a 4×4 over the pass along the Ringroad, past Godafoss, gone to Husavik and then returned down to the Ringroad to get to Egilstadir. On that run, in those conditions you see very few cars on the Ringroad – maybe three or four pass you. And on each occasion you stop and check that each other is OK. At Myvatn the side road to Grojta (spelling??) is usually blocked by snow until early spring – so no tourist would ever take that track.
As for the lack of trees it wasn’t people cutting them down – it was sheep. The natural tree cover over the interior at the time of settlement was dwarf birch (tall trees can’t survive the high winds). Unfortunately the leaves are within reach of the sheep. Within a few generations the sheep had simply stripped all the leaves and killed off the tree cover. The roots of the trees were holding the soil in place. When the trees died the fragile covering of earth was simply blown away – which is why you now see a combination of rocks, black sand and moss throughout the interior. Only where the soil was deep did it survive: namely in the large valleys and coastal plains. The interior of Iceland isn’t a natural phenomenon – it is a man-made environment (which is one of the reasons I have some sympathy for those who defend the huge dam out east, the eco argument in that case is flawed since the dam wasn’t flooding pristine nature at all).
“This just one of those meaningless reports, such as Iceland being a country without corruption, its easy when the Mafia controlling the country control *everything*.”
That says it all.
Fisy writes:
“When you have lived in the weather here for a while you too will not walk much either.”
The weather in Reykjavik is not too bad, and I nearly always walked – much to the amazement of the car-mad locals. Thus I would walk from BSI to Borgatun when flying in for meetings. That is a distance of about 1 km but it staggered people that I would walk such a “long way”! It rained a good deal, but no worse than the UK, and in the winter the temperature rarely dropped below minus 5. Admittedly that made it a bit fresh when the wind blew but after sitting on a plane for 3 hours and a Flybus for 45 mins the walk was always welcome. The longest walk I ever did was from a hotel close to Laekjatorg to an industrial unit very close to IKEA (the old IKEA I mean) which drew gasps of amazement from the “rough tough” descendants of Viking warriors – a distance of 4 km: less than an hour’s walk!! How did I do it?
For some journeys in Rvik I used the local buses (straeto) – if I recall correctly about 200 krona for any journey (but my memory is hazy on that figure). The buses were not heavily used and on occasion they were empty. I can recall taking the bus to the domestic air terminal and that indeed was empty.
Why walk and why take a bus when I could have bought a car for my own use and just left it in-country?
It’s good financial sense – if you are investing in a place you don’t know then you must get the “feel” of the place. The best investment tool anyone has is their eyes and ears. Look and listen. It doesn’t take long in Iceland to understand that the population’s self-image is somewhat different from the reality. Once you’ve understood that simple fact you can work it to your advantage. Walking everywhere helped promote an image of Brits who were “poor”, “naive”, “stupid”, “mad”, etc. (Image is more important in Iceland than substance – Icelanders demand that things “look right”; so if you create a disjunction between the two the local people assume the image is correct rather than the substance. Hence, a man who walks everywhere clearly can’t afford a car, hence is poor and hence financially illiterate.)
I’ll give an example of how to use your eyes (again related to eco matters). On the Flybus from the airport to BSI I would count the tall building cranes I could see. In 2002 the number was around 10, often single figures. By 2008 this had boomed to over 70. Housing, retail properties, and light industrial units were spreading out like a plague from Gardabaer/Hafnafjordur. Now any economist would muse: “How come there is such a huge increase in the need for housing? For shops? For productive facilities? How is all that being paid for? What will be the return on that investment? What will be built in those productive facilities?” The obvious answer was that (i) there was NO boom in the population, (ii) the proposed shops would add NOTHING to the economic well-being of the country and would merely act as conduits for imports, and (iii) there were NO new productive efforts being developed. Conclusion: the financial structures of the country were skewed and could not continue.
The icing on the cake of these observations were when Reykjavik announced its Opera House and Akureyri started to build its large-scale theatre/concert hall (both massively polluting projects in their own right). Er? Rvik has a population of 160,000 (about) and Akureyri is a mere 15,000 – what the hell is going on? Obvious: like the massive polluting cars these structures are “statements”. The cars are statements by individuals, the buildings by municipalities. Both are total waste as far as the well-being of the nation is concerned. Ultimate conclusion: They are building an Opera House? We’re outta here!
PS The only time I regretted walking was when I was in Dalvik one winter’s day. I had been to see a chicken processing plant (which I believe has closed down). I needed to walk about 200 metres to my car. I had to walk northwards into the teeth of a January sub-arctic blizzard. The pavement was icy. Visibility was almost zero. And by heaven it was cold! But I made it! The drive from Dalvik to Akureyri was amusing – about half a dozen locals had managed to drive off the road at various points along the road. I stopped at each in turn and offered assistance. Only one needed an ambulance. Quite a journey.
Mike, you seem to know quite a bit more about Iceland and icelanders than i expected,
i have often wondered what people were supposed to live in all those houses being built 07-9,
agree about the Art center in Akureyri, ugly building that was not needed and its almost 2 bn over budget already and not finished,
same goes for the opera house, way too big and expensive.
The Bjorgolfs were involved in the opera house like many other busynesses in Iceland that have turned out to be damaging for icelanders.
The new Landsbanki plans
http://www.big.dk/projects/bki/
good thing that wasnt built.
when some icelanders are driving in a blizzard where visibility at times drops to zero they just accelerate so they dont get stuck in heavy snow that they cant see, its better to punch trough it if you are going fast, unless there is a turn on the road….
I am not trying to convince any one that Iceland is perfect, and i realize that icelanders have some issues that need to be addressed,
not just banks and politics, some of our flaws like arrogance and stubborness have actually kept us alive for over 1000 years and won many battles for us,
so icelanders are not likely to change much.
The problem with your comments, Mike (UK Nordic Analyst), is you seem to over-simplify and generalize practically everything that you observe.
According to your observation, Icelanders are all environmentally ignorant slobs, lazy bums that all gasp and amaze at the powerhouse Brit who walks INCREDIBLE distances (though not really, they’re just lazy).
Without a doubt, you sir have got us all so well figured out, almost too well for your own good!
Your claim of millions of chewing gum spots surrounding Icelandic schools and universities will have to be ruled blatantly false when it comes to the pavement around the Uni of Iceland, unless there’s a new ninja brand about that I’ve not noticed. Otherwise, as a student there, chewing gum spots are less prevalent and noticeable than goose ****.
Chewing gum spots on sidewalks and walls surely can never be seen in the über clean UK, where the environment is treated with such humble respect that it really aught to be the envy of the universe.
Oh and by the way, the air quality in London and pretty much any British city I’ve ever been to, leaves a WHOLE LOT to be desired. Don’t get me started on the obscene traffic, and -as with pretty much everywhere else- the presence of rubbish in even the most unlikely places.
>Oh and by the way, the air quality in London and pretty much any British city I’ve ever been to, leaves a WHOLE LOT to be desired.
But this just highlights the absurdity of the index. It’s pretty-damn hard to screw up if you have a small population and a large country.
So comparing London to Reykjavik doesn’t make much sense. Bearing in mind that I’ve not verified these figures, the Wiki population density figure for London is 4,761/km2 vs. Reykjavik’s 437/km2. So I suppose the question would be was London 10 times worse? Although that in itself is simplistic.
I must sign off for a few weeks since I will be working in-country amongst you fine folks and silence will be required during these delicate times. I am really looking forward to working my way through documents containing words such as skuldabréf, verðbólga, skuldatryggingaálagi and of course gjaldþrota.
If you see an ancient Brit walking down Laugavegur (counting the chewing gum blobs on the ground and deriving economic conclusions from that) with a young black Brit and a Chinese woman then that is probably me with a couple from my team. And almost certainly I will be in Kaffibarinn enjoying a Thule whenever I can get out in an evening. I tend to sit alone, read and write notes – so I’ll be very obvious! Identify me and I’ll buy you a beer!
Canada is a large country with a small population but it didn’t do much for our rating!
>Canada is a large country with a small population but it didn’t do much for our rating!
I noticed that. It did in the past – last year you were ranked next to Iceland. You must have switched to 100% coal power or something :) .
True and Iceland is only a misnomer.
I could just as well compare the town of Salisbury to Reykjavik and the air around here would still have to be considered better.
Besides, the huge population density difference between Reykjavik and London only serves to make London that more hugely filthy, despite London presumably having a sanitation management system that much larger than the one in Reykjavik.
However I have no comment on the index itself; I put very little faith in these things to begin with. What I did find offensive was Mike the “UK Nordic Analyst” method of analysing, in particular the claim that basically translated to that if Iceland were populated by British people, it would not be as dirty as it is.
Mike (UK Nordic analyst
I am neither a xenophobe nor a xenophile (is there such a word?) – I accept people as individuals and I treat everyone on their merits and characteristics.
Sorry Mike UK, the ever present add on cynical prose which colour your comments, indicate a typical emotionally immature xenophobe.
eg “that is beneath the dignity of ordinary Icelanders”.
“So, as far as household recycling is concerned when I was visiting from 2000-2008 they could only do this by driving to a council-run site where they could deposit bottles and drink cans. I believe they got paid for that. There was no house-to-house organisation of recycling.”
That does not say much for your selective observations.
Large enough containers have been present for recycling at shops for years.
People do not get paid for returning bottles and cans, they get their deposit paid back, a deposit already paid at purchase time.
The recycling of cans bottles at centers is decades old and a proven good workable system. Plus the orderly system for other recycling at the same centers works well.
But when an organisation decides to group people together for whatever purpose then it’s acceptable to analyse that grouping – there is such a thing as society.
Not quite Mike UK, in your case that is an excuse for condescension, flexing the muscles of your superiority complex. Perhaps some inadequacy, a chronic need to feel superior, indicated at times by your boasts of your superiorior intellect and your cynical generalisations of stupid Icelanders.
Quite simply, your selective letterbox cynical observations have little objective value to a general discussion about Icelandic society.
. And clearly you’ve not tried to cross Miklabraut while the clak-clak of thousands of studs rip up the tarmac and create a lung-clogging dust cloud of truly asthmatic proportions, or watched the gas guzzling statement-cars crawl down Laugavegur spewing fumes so that the occupants can be “seen” (the infamous runtur – which I never got), or stood amazed at the sight of fifty cars outside a school all with their engines running as the parents waited for their precious darlings – on one occasion driving a full 50 metres from Menntaskolin vid Sund to their house.
Laugavegur/parliament square, sunny summers days, a lovely fresh walk.
Relaxed peaceful capital city, flowing traffic, fresh clean cool air, a good and happy place to be, feels like home.
Mike UK Nordic Analyst did write :
>” As for the lack of trees it wasn’t people cutting them down – it was sheep. .. Unfortunately the leaves [ of dwarf birtch ] are within reach of the sheep. Within a few generations the sheep had simply stripped all the leaves and killed off the tree cover. ..The interior of Iceland isn’t a natural phenomenon – it is a man-made environment ”
It looks that Lauri Dammert ( Finnish journalist ) did write what you talk about :
“When the Vikings first settled in Iceland 1100 years ago the land was forested, as described in the medieval sagas, “from the feet of the mountains to the seashore”. Forests covered perhaps 30 percent of the island’s total area (102 819 km2). .. Some two centuries after settlement, humans had created the Icelandic landscape as it is known today: barren land, dominated by deserts, tundra and grasslands. A transition to a colder climate in the fourteenth century made conditions for plant life even harder.
The young, volcanic and porous soil (the result of a history of volcanic eruptions), heavy rainfall (2 000 to 4 000 mm yearly in parts of the country), strong winds and sparse vegetation resulted in widespread erosion after the trees had vanished.”
Although it’s on track it does sound a bit much into generalizing and simplying like that idiot Jared Mason Diamond who just does not bother do detail research.
But you need to read moor deeply, example ” Behaviour and plant selection ” by Anna Guðrún Þórhallsdóttir and Ingvi Þorsteinsson from early 90s :
http://www.landbunadur.is/landbunadur/wgsamvef.nsf/0/1af5558159e05a5d00256e15004621f3/$FILE/gr-bu7-agth.PDF
Bacically this does demonstrate that given the change of what to eat where there is burch and grass they only eat the birch in 30% of the time.
Other archeological work indicates that “Domestic faunal remains indicate that in the first centuries of Norse settlement more reliance was placed on cattle than on sheep or goats. This pattern was reversed in alter centuries, ”
on page 334 we see ” This suggests that, in some
areas, destruction of the birch forests preceded the establishment of farmsteads or inten-
sive grazing and must relate lo a different suite of activities.
What could have caused such a dramatic decline in the apparent extent of forest cover
over most of Iceland? Archaeological evidence indicates that many early farms in Ice-
land’s interior were built over charcoal-enriched soil layers (Fig. 2a-b). These burning
levels have generally been interpreted as evidence for the intentional clearance of Icelan-
dic woodlands prior to the establishment of farms ( Jxirarinsson 1943, 1970). The palyno-
logical evidence of settlement in Iceland was sufficiently accepted to serve as a ‘hmdn&aC
profile for interpreting the establishment of swidden cultivation in the European Neoli-
thic (Iversen 1941). Recent work at the site of Hals, in western Iceland, supports sug-
gestions that intentional agricultural clearances may only have been partially responsible
for deforestation in Iceland (cf. pórarinsson 1974).
..
Iron production, with atiendan! charcoal burning, represents one of a range of activities
that probably contributed to the initial assault on Iceland’s forests. The iron production
episode represented by a single slag heap at Háls represents the destruction of at least
5-10 ha of woodland (pórarinsson 1974; Tylecote and Clough 1983). This is a conservative
estimate of the local impact of iron production, since at least two slag heaps are présentât
the site and others are known from the immediately surrounding region. If charcoal-
burning or iron production generated unintentional forest fires, as has been suggested,
their impact would have affected a far wider area over a very short span of time.
The destruction of Iceland’s woodlands by iron production, intentional burning, fuel
collection, grazing, building and unintentional fires had long-lasting effects on Icelandic
society and environment.
Evidence that woodlands were burnt prior to the establishment
of farms has been reported for two-thirds of the sites known to have been permanently
settled in the tenth century. Residues from iron production are present at 40 per cent of
those locations. Clearings produced by iron production or other intentional burning would
have been attractive locations for establishing farms, since the back-breaking business of
field clearance would have already been completed. Thus, resource decisions made in the
earliest land-use phases may have directly influenced the development of later settlement
patterns.
Clearances, especially when followed by livestock browsing, would also have dramati-
cally affected the structure and economic utility of Icelandic forests. The dominant tree in
Icelandic woodlands, the hairy whitebirch (Betula pubescens ssp. tortuosa), grows as a
straight-trunked tree to heights of 8-12 m when protected from prédation (Blöndal 1987).
However, fire, felling, livestock browsing and soil acidification cause the tree to regenerate
from basal buds as a low and shrubby, multi-branched form that rarely reaches heights
greater than 3 m (Davy and Gill 1984; Kauppi et al. 1987; Verwijst 1988). At these heights,
most of the trees’ branches, leaves and buds would have been accessible to browsing
sheep, goats and horses, leading to stunted growth and death. Further, progressive
deforestation reduces the extent of sub-canopy snow beds which provide optimum
conditions for the survival of birch saplings through the winter (Kullman 1984). As
pressure from humans and livestock increased, therefore, it would have been harder to
regenerate forests, even in their shrubby form. The low, multi-branched Icelandic birch
woodlands could be managed for rafter and charcoal production, but loss of the higher
canopy forests eliminated the potential for using indigenous wood resources in construc-
tion or ship-building.
By the twelfth century, driftwood beaches and birch coppices were
economically valuable resources, but voyages were made to Norway for house timber and
ships were no longer built in Iceland. Deforestation therefore contributed to the eventual
isolation of Iceland, its increasing reliance on foreign shipping and the development of
economic inequalities based on access to, and control of, fuel and construction materials.
Farms that were partially deforested prior to their settlement may also have experienced
fuel shortages before those that were established in pristine woodlands.”
http://york.academia.edu/documents/0028/5652/Landnam.pdf
read in here p 323 on ( this is from settlement of Iceland in archealogical and historical perspective by Kevin P Smith from World Archaeology book 1995 ) .
So iron production burning of forest was more than sheep in early years. But Little Ice Age had more to do with it later.
Mike UK Nordic Analyst did write :
>I must sign off for a few weeks since I will be working in-country amongst you fine folks and silence will be required during these delicate times.
We will watch for the progress of law suits on behalf of bond holders.
My best wishes to you there Mike ( and you team ).
Apparently the EU doesn’t agree..
“It says Iceland meets EU criteria on democracy and human rights.
But in some areas Iceland will have to make “serious efforts” to conform with EU legislation, it says, including: fisheries; agriculture and rural development; the environment; free movement of capital; financial services and taxation. ”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8533706.stm
Hi Peter,
“Iceland will have to make “serious efforts” to conform with EU legislation, it says, including: fisheries; agriculture and rural development”. This is all true if Iceland wants to conform. However there is one problem:
Iceland’s current policy on these particular issues is actually better than the EU’s. That is a problem.