The Sagas record that when Ice­land was dis­cov­ered, trees from seas to the moun­tains cov­ered it. If that were indeed true, the early inhab­i­tants did a pretty effi­cient job cut­ting down the trees for fuel and allow­ing their sheep to fin­ish up by devour­ing young shoots. You really don’t see many trees at all around Ice­land. Some birch trees and some fir-type trees here and there, but no forests to speak of.

I have read that sheep are super effi­cient destroy­ers of veg­e­ta­tion if graz­ing is not man­aged, chew­ing plants and young shoots down to the roots and leav­ing the under­ly­ing soil vul­ner­a­ble to ero­sion by water and fierce winds. Once the top-soil is blown away, it is almost impos­si­ble to restart veg­e­ta­tion. The refor­esta­tion pro­gram that is going on in Ice­land has been quite suc­cess­ful and new clumps of trees are begin­ning to dot the country.

In Ice­land, it is easy to be envi­ron­men­tally cor­rect. The coun­try has a small pop­u­la­tion, large tracts of unin­hab­ited land, almost no pol­lut­ing indus­try, and the abil­ity to live off geot­her­mal and hydro­elec­tric power with­out using fos­sil fuels except for auto­mo­biles. The lack of nat­ural resources also means that there is very lit­tle to export except for prod­ucts that come out of the ample sur­round­ing ocean. You can’t export hydro-electricity if you are an island nation. The next best option is to bring in indus­tries that are thirsty for elec­tric­ity. That has set eco­nom­ics and envi­ron­men­tal issues on a col­li­sion course like every­where else in the world. The Kárah­n­júkar hydro­elec­tric project is build­ing a dam across two glacial rivers Jökulsá á Dal and Jökulsá í Fljóts­dal, flood­ing a remote part of the already remote East­ern High­lands. The power from the project will be used exclu­sively by the Amer­i­can alu­minum com­pany Alcoa in nearby Reyðar­fjörður cre­at­ing jobs in an eco­nom­i­cally deprived area depen­dent mostly on fish­ing. There have been angry protests by envi­ron­men­tal­ists in the past year and some peo­ple have chained them­selves to the con­struc­tion equip­ment to protest the dam.

It’s hard to have an opin­ion on it as we were only vis­i­tors here, but we did drive by the dam and the local Eng­lish speak­ing paper, The Grapevine, had a huge arti­cle about the Alcoa smelter underway.