Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (38 page)

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 emi
grated. Viking settlers had no way of knowing that Iceland's soils and vege
tation 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 them
selves in an apparently lush but actually fragile environment for which their
Norwegian and British experience had failed to prepare them.

When the settlers finally realized what was happening, they did take cor
rective 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 sup
port, 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 Ice
land'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 peo
ple and burnings of farms in the first half of the 13th century. In 1262 Ice
landers 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 especially Norwegians, English, and Germans, joined by French and Dutch. In the early 1900s Iceland at last began to develop a fleet of its own and underwent an explosion of industrial-scale fishing. By 1950, more than 90% of Iceland's total exports were marine products, dwarfing the importance of the formerly dominant agricultural sector. Already in 1923, Iceland's urban population overtook its rural population in numbers. Iceland is now the most urbanized Scandinavian country, with half its population in the capital of Reykjavik alone. The flow of population from rural to urban areas continues today, as Iceland's farmers abandon their farms or convert them to summer houses and move to the towns to find jobs, Coca-Cola, and global culture.

Today, thanks to its abundance of fish, geothermal power, and hydroelectric power from all its rivers, and relieved of the necessity to scrape up timber for making ships (now constructed of metal), Europe's former poorest country has become one of the world's richest countries on a per-capita basis, a great success story to balance the stories of societal collapse in Chapters 2-5. Iceland's Nobel Prize-winning novelist Halldor Laxness put into the mouth of the heroine of his novel
Salka Valka
the immortal sentence that only an Icelander could utter: "When all is said and done, life is first and foremost salt fish." But fish stocks pose difficult management problems, just as do forests and soil. Icelanders are working hard now to repair past damage to their forests and soils, and to prevent similar damage to their fisheries.

With this tour of Iceland history in mind, let's see where Iceland stands with respect to the other five Norse North Atlantic colonies. I had mentioned

that the differing fates of those colonies depended especially on differences
in four factors: sailing distance from Europe, resistance offered by pre-
Viking inhabitants, suitability for agriculture, and environmental fragility.
In Iceland's case two of those factors were favorable, and the other two
caused trouble. Good news for Iceland's settlers was that the island had no (or virtually no) prior inhabitants, and that its distance from Europe (much
less than that of Greenland or Vinland, though greater than that of the Orkneys, Shetlands, and Faeroes) was close enough to permit bulk trade
even in medieval ships. Unlike the Greenlanders, the Icelanders remained in ship contact with Norway and/or Britain every year, could receive bulk im
ports of essentials (especially timber, iron, and eventually pottery), and
could send out bulk exports. In particular, the export of dried fish proved
decisive in saving Iceland economically after 1300 but was impractical for
the more remote Greenland colony, whose shipping lanes to Europe were
often blocked by sea ice.

On the negative side, Iceland's northerly location gave it the second
most unfavorable potential for food production, after Greenland. Barley
agriculture, marginal even in the mild early years of settlement, was aban
doned when the climate became cooler in the late Middle Ages. Even pas-toralism based on sheep and cows was marginal on poorer farms in poorer
years. Nevertheless, in most years sheep thrived sufficiently well in Iceland
that wool export dominated the economy for several centuries after settle
ment. Iceland's biggest problem was environmental fragility: by far the most fragile soils among the Norse colonies, and the second most fragile vegeta
tion after Greenland.

What about Icelandic history from the perpective of the five factors that
provide the framework for this book: self-inflicted environmental damage,
climate change, hostilities with other societies, friendly trading relations
with other societies, and cultural attitudes? Four of these factors play a role
in Icelandic history; only the factor of hostile outsiders was minor, except
for a period of pirate raids. Iceland illustrates clearly the interaction among the other four factors. Icelanders had the misfortune to inherit an especially difficult set of environmental problems, which became exacerbated by cli
matic cooling in the Little Ice Age. Trade with Europe was important in en
abling Iceland to survive despite those environmental problems. Icelanders'
response to their environment was framed by their cultural attitudes. Some
of those attitudes were ones that they imported with them from Norway:
especially, their pastoral economy, their initial overfondness for cows and
pigs, and their initial environmental practices appropriate to Norwegian

and British soils but inappropriate in Iceland. Attitudes that they then de
veloped in Iceland included learning to eliminate pigs and goats and to
downplay cows, learning how to take better care of the fragile Iceland envi
ronment, and adopting a conservative outlook. That outlook frustrated
their Danish governors and in some cases may have harmed the Icelanders themselves, but ultimately helped them survive by not taking risks.

Iceland's government today is very concerned about Iceland's historical
curses of soil erosion and sheep overgrazing, which played such a large role
in their country's long impoverishment. An entire government department
has as its charge to attempt to retain soil, regrow the woodlands, revegetate the interior, and regulate sheep stocking rates. In Iceland's highlands I saw lines of grass planted by this department on otherwise bare moonscapes, in
an effort to establish some protective plant cover and to halt the spread
of erosion. Often these replanting efforts
—thin green lines on a brown
panorama—struck me as a pathetic attempt to cope with an overwhelming
problem. But Icelanders are making some progress.

Almost everywhere else in the world, my archaeologist friends have an
uphill struggle to convince governments that what archaeologists do has
any conceivable practical value. They try to get funding agencies to understand that studies of the fates of past societies may help us understand what
could happen to societies living in that same area today. In particular, they
reason, environmental damage that developed in the past could develop
again in the present, so one might use knowledge of the past to avoid re
peating the same mistakes.

Most governments ignore these pleas of archaeologists. That is not the
case in Iceland, where the effects of erosion that began 1,130 years ago are obvious, where most of the vegetation and half of the soil have already been
lost, and where the past is so stark and omnipresent. Many studies of me
dieval Icelandic settlements and erosion patterns are now under way. When
one of my archaeologist friends approached the Icelandic government and
began to deliver the usual lengthy justification required in other countries,
the government's response was: "Yes, of course we realize that understand
ing medieval soil erosion will help us understand our present problem. We already know that, you don't have to spend time convincing us. Here is the
money, go do your study."

The brief existence of the most remote Viking North Atlantic colony, Vin
land, is a separate story fascinating in its own right. As the first European ef-