Iceland's attempts to replant its forests

Just wanted to say, props to NYT for the beautifully designed article.

It's funny how so many Liberal minded types are overrunning Iceland gushing about how beautiful and stark the landscape is, when in reality they don't realize they are admiring just another devastated landscape of Europe. It's a general bias Europeans heavily have as they laud the beauty and natural state of Europe, while there is really not a single natural old growth forest anywhere on the whole continent and most "natural" forests are planted as is usually, easily indicated by the trees that are evenly spaced and generally lined up even in "old" forests.

In reality Europe is a landscaped stripped of snakes, barren of bears and wolves and deer and other fauna, while the forests and meadows are all artificial and man made.

The reason I point this out is that when you can start suspending prior conditioning, you can start realizing this bias that has led to the self-righteousness of Europeans, environmentalists, and the social justice warriors that are ravaging the civilized world.

Humans are a cluster of biases, ignorance, and blind spots; yes especially in the tech community that has a supremacist and self-righteous mentality about just about everything as it decimates the very society and culture that allowed it to emerge.

For reasons I won't go into the farming lobby is really strong in Iceland.

Sheep run free-range around the entire island, if you'd like to grow something that sheep like to eat you need to fence it in. It's not like pretty much anywhere else in the western world where people who own grazing animals need to fence them in.

Thus the sheep range far and wide and destroy Iceland's native low-lying forests. Iceland's native crooked birch hasn't developed resistance to grazing animals as mainland trees had to do, the sheep love to nibble at them and eat the seedlings.

The native trees and other native vegetation are generally much hardier than the foreign plants. But since the forestry service has lost the battle with the farming lobby they're desperately trying to introduce some trees that the sheep won't eat.

Reforesting the country is largely being done through subsidies to farmers, who aren't concerned with topsoil preservation beyond maintaining the desolate landscape they inherited, but they are interested in the eventual promise of a commercial forest on their land.

Which is something to keep in mind when reading articles like these and wondering "why don't they...", usually the answer is that they're planting in a field that's going to be full of grazing animals, and there's no way the forestry service is going to win that battle anytime soon, or that they're not really aiming to restore the topsoil per-se, but to do that as a side-effect of commercial logging.

This page has some more details: http://www.skogur.is/english/forestry-in-a-treeless-land/

What's your point?

By the way, there are some very old forests still in Europe, I don't know if it makes them any better than ones that are only a hundred years old.

It's not just another devastated landscape of Europe, it's the single most naturally devastated landscape on the entire continent.

The National Museum of Iceland in Reykjavík has a permanent exhibition on the subject that I highly recommend. Since colonization a little over a millennium ago most of the topsoil has been washed out to sea, wast swaths of the country that used to be fields or forests are now just bare rock.

Which isn't to say that a devastated landscape can't be pretty.