Reykjavík Grapevine - 01.08.2014, Qupperneq 8

Iceland | For Dummies
Reykjavík’s streets have seen a lot
of marching in the last two weeks.
An estimated 11,000
Icelanders participat-
ed in the annual Slut-
Walk which helped to
inspire a parliamentary
proposal that calls for the improvement
of the handling and litigation of sexual
assault cases.
Earlier in the week 3,000 people
attended an anti-war “die in”
in central Reykjavík to protest Israeli air
raids on Gaza. At the protest more than
600 people lay down on the ground to
represent the recent civilian deaths in
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Politicians have been speaking
out about the situation in Gaza,
too. Iceland’s representative at
the United Nations, Gréta Gun-
narsdóttir, condemned both Israel
and Palestine in a speech at an open
meeting of the Security Council.
Minister of Foreign Affairs Gunnar
Bragi Sveinsson issued a state-
ment calling for “the full force” of
the UN Security Council to be used to
stop the violence in Gaza.
Even Prime Minister
Sigmundur Davíð
Gunnlaugsson has
sent a strongly-word-
ed letter to Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netan-
yahu on the subject of the “deeply
disturbing” attacks Israel is launching
against Gaza, urging for “a peaceful
resolution.”
In other news, a Reykjavík resi-
dential street saw a decrease in
the speed of traffic after actress
Vigdís Hrefna Pálsdóttir placed
flower pots in the middle of the
road. Some angry drivers went as far
as to call the police but the flower pots
may not be necessary for much longer
as the street’s residents have applied
for official traffic calming devices with
City Hall.
Another Reykjavík street was
subject to something much less
pleasant when a tourist decided to
poop outside a storefront in the
centre of town. According to wit-
nesses the man then simply walked
away after finishing his bowel move-
ment, stopping only to smell his fin-
gers.
By Nanna Árnadóttir
— Continues —
8
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 11 — 2014
In an interview with Icelan-dic state radio, RÚV, Þóra Ellen Þórhallsdóttir, pro-fessor of botany at the Uni-versity of Iceland, said that the flora of Iceland was go-ing through "much faster
changes than previous generations of
Icelanders have seen, with the excep-
tion of those who first settled here and
were most active in cutting down for-
ests." Previously barren areas have be-
come covered in vegetation, and birch
and willow trees are growing where
once there were barely tufts of grass.
That is great! Unless it's ter-
rible. It's terrible, isn't it?
Not necessarily. The Icelandic flora,
which had been developing in peace,
has never really recovered from the
arrival of humans at the end of the 9th
Century. They chopped down most of
the trees and let their sheep eat the
rest.
Never trust anyone that wool-
ly. Or one who carries an axe
around for no good reason.
Around the year 1900 the human in-
habitants of Iceland stopped punch-
ing nature into submission for long
enough to look at what they had done.
Maybe, they thought to themselves,
we should try to fix the damage. Some
of them did, at least. Others started
putting up hydroelectric dams every-
where they could.
Nature is like a vampire, it's not
enough to kill it; you need to
bury it under running water.
You are mixing things up, vampires
are unable to cross running water but
they should be buried at crossroads.
It took centuries for desertification
to get completely out of control. But
for about four hundred years, roughly
from 1550–1950, Iceland suffered cata-
strophic soil erosion. A quarter of Ice-
land is now desert. Or more, depend-
ing on how you define desert. Another
way of looking at it is that only 11% of
the country has not been affected by
soil erosion.
So killer sheep destroyed pretty
much everything?
The sheep were just being sheep, eating
plants to stay alive. It is not entirely fair
to blame farmers either, because for most
of history humans had a very poor un-
derstanding of ecology. Today Icelandic
sheep farmers direct their sheep to areas
that can sustain grazing and at least a
third of them work with The Soil Con-
servation Service of Iceland to help the
land recover.
If I can't blame sheep or humans,
who do I blame?
Rest assured, you can still blame humans.
We are still causing a mess. One reason
for the changes in Icelandic vegetation is
that the climate is changing, which has
made it easier for the flora to recover.
One startling example, as mentioned by
Professor Þóra Ellen Þórhallsdóttir, is
that some glaciers have been receding at
a speed of 150 metres per year. That has
opened up new areas for plants to grow.
Is there any problem global
warming can't fix?
Well, it could make Earth so inhospitable
to humans that we will all have to leave
the planet or die out as a species, which
would be a solution of sorts. Meanwhile,
some humans are trying to reverse what
previous generations have done. In the
last decade more area has been recov-
ered for vegetation than has eroded. The
increase is slow but, as the professor of
botany pointed out in her radio inter-
view, when plants have gotten a secure
foothold, they can spread rapidly.
Nature's like zombies then. You
get one zombie, then it bites some
people and soon you're overrun
with zombies.
There are other ways to relate to nature
than by comparing it to monster films.
But yes, after turning large parts of Ice-
land into desert, humans have finally
started to reverse the process. The Soil
Conservation Society of Iceland, found-
ed in 1907, has been crucial. Its methods
have been everything from organising
small armies of tree-planting volunteers
to dropping seeds and fertiliser from
planes.
Unlike with zombies, dropping
actual bombs on eroding soil
would only make the problem
worse.
There are differences of opinion on
which methods to use to reverse soil
erosion. The most emotional debate cen-
tres on the plant Lupinus nootkatensis,
or the Nootka lupin. It was introduced
to Iceland because it grows well in erod-
ed soil and fills it with nitrite, which
plants use for energy. In theory, once
the Nootka lupin has enriched the soil,
other kinds of vegetation move in and
make use of this bounty of food.
The "in theory" part of that last
sentence sounds like the sort of
thing a movie scientist says just
before claiming: "Nothing can
possibly go wrong."
In many areas Nootka lupins have been
displaced by native plants, but in other
areas they have smothered all other spe-
cies. It has at least stopped the soil from
eroding. But that is a tiny bit like solving
the problem of human-caused deserti-
fication by having zombies eat all the
humans.
So What's This Changing
Flora I Keep Hearing About?
Words by Kári Tulinius @Kattullus
Illustration by Inga María Brynjarsdóttir
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