https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Choose-Succeed-Rev... by Jared Diamond goes into substantially more detail about why Iceland was so environmentally sensitive and what the damage was. It is well worth reading.
Iceland's attempts to replant its forests
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Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, out west many states have "free grazing" laws. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_range
See: Cliven Bundy
Came to post exactly this. Once upon a time there were vast western lands open for grazing. There were even "wars" fought between cattle and sheep ranchers over grazing rights. Today the feds have closed off many areas -- for example, if I understand correctly, in the Hells Canyon area there were once 300,000+ sheep left to graze, where today there are effectively none. Certainly there were areas that were significantly damaged by overgrazing and a better balance for the public good was needed. That stated, one of the counter arguments is that it started with the ranchers, then the feds come along and close the roads, soon the public forests become inaccessible and unused altogether. There are a lot more public lands in the west apart from the major national parks. Certainly the Bundy's approach missed the mark in terms of articulating their arguments on this issue.
Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find quite interesting how we plan on terraform and colonize Mars when we can't even grow trees on Iceland.
The farm lobby isn't standing in the way of terraforming Mars.
Well maybe by the time we get there it will.
The thing about mars is that we can't just export the parts of society we like and leave out the rest.
When humans colonize a new 'utopia', we tend to bring all the normal human problems with us too.
Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests
#74Maybe there should be some sort of global chaga tax to fund birch reforestation. If a few bucks was added to every Amazon order or whatever then that would at least help out a bit.
That rewards those who can creatively find a way to shop at Amazon despite taxes more so than it rewards those who can creatively plant trees despite every other hurdle to do so.
I was proposing a chaga tax, not an Amazon tax. I was just using Amazon as an example of a retailer since they sell it.
Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests
#75Just wanted to say, props to NYT for the beautifully designed article.
Except, as I indicate in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15515968 , the images are extraordinarily low-res with JavaScript turned off. 'Well, turn it on!' is certainly one solution, but of course enabling JavaScript doesn't just let me view images (something HTTP & HTML do just fine anyway), but also enables execution of potential malware, tracking & other nastiness.
There are upsides and downsides to enabling Javascript. If you want to enjoy the NYT rich web content, you need to have it on. Just the way it is.
Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests
#76For 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 nativ…
There is actually a similar problem in the Northeastern United States. Deer are overpopulated (in my area 6x traditional level) because they have no predators and hunting is restricted. The deer eat all of the hardwood saplings. In many mid-Atlantic forests there are very few 10-20 year old hard wood trees, they don't survive the deer.
There's a really interesting article about how Yellowstone (a national park in the US) reintroduced wolves into the ecosystem, reducing the dear population, altering the ecosystem for the better:
https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wolf-reintroduc...
Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed the little ice age of the middle ages is what made Greenland uninhabitable. Birch is a pioneer species, they produce millions of seeds a year, they chased the retreating ice cap as melted northwards in Europe. It would appear they need to be planted out, perhaps they need soil to take. Otherwhise it should be a fairly simple case of just broadcasting billions of birch seeds over Iceland.
Greenland didn't become uninhabitable during the little ice age, there's people living now in Greenland descended from people who survived that supposedly uninhabitable country. The Norse colony got wiped out, but it's unknown whether that was because of war, famine or some other reason. We just know life would have been hardier in those years. What little we do know suggests that they were unwilling to learn the tra…
There was an article in Scientific America:
Summary :
After prospering for hundreds of years, the Viking colonies in Greenland were mysteriously abandoned.
Scholars have long viewed their decline as the result of a stubborn refusal to adapt their European customs to the conditions of this Arctic land.
Yet recent findings show that the Greenland Vikings did change their ways. The latest evidence suggests that a complex interplay of cultural and political forces abroad brought about their demise.
Full article (requires subscription)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whatever-happened...
Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests
#78For 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 nativ…
If they legalized sheep hunting, farmers would build fences.
Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests
#79Possibly worth remembering: Iceland (and Greenland, where the vikings hung on until the fourteen hundreds) had significantly warmer climate a milennium ago.
Got any more reading for this? Just back from Iceland so I am interested in this stuff right now. This is the only one I found, which doesn't seem to indicate a significant change. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2851789/
Search for "Medieval Warm Period" in this article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceland
Happened to be reading about Iceland (and its cuisine :) recently.
Re: Iceland's attempts to replant its forests
#80> As a result, Iceland is a case study in desertification, with little or no vegetation, though the problem is not heat or drought. About 40 percent of the country is desert, Dr. Halldorsson said. “But there’s plenty of rainfall — we call it ‘wet desert.’” At first I thought it was an error to call an area that gets plenty of rain a desert. I thought desert was strictly defined by the amount of rainfall. But maybe th…
There is a very famous race series for runners called the 4 Deserts. One race, called the Last Desert, takes place in Antarctica. It may surprise you, like it did me - in fact blew my mind - to learn Antarctica is the largest desert in the World.
Antarctica also has the McMurdo dry valleys with no snow or ice.