Iceland Is Growing New Forests for the First Time in 1,000 Years | Short Film Showcase
What I love about working in forestry is the chance, every once in a while, to get out of the office and walk in the woods. To see the forest growing, to see that we're actually doing some good, is a very rewarding thing—a very satisfying.
But Iceland is certainly among the worst examples in the world of deforestation. It doesn't take very many people or very many sheep to deforest the whole country. Over a thousand years, Iceland used to be much more wooded. The people coming brought sheep, cattle, and swine; land needed to be cleared, and their grazing prevented the forest from coming back. After a long time, the thin vegetation cover that's left is susceptible to disturbances like frost, heaps, and storms. In the wintertime, it basically rips open; the soil is exposed, and part of it starts washing away or blowing away. That's what we see in very, very large parts of Iceland.
My mission is to support growing more forests and better forests—to make land more productive and more able to tolerate the pressures that we put on there. There are other needs of forest biomass, lumber, and lots of different things. We started using exotic species because the native birch simply isn't productive. Knowing which trees to plant is actually harder than you'd think. We plant about three million seedlings per year in Iceland. Most people have, simply until now, used what they have here in Iceland—the native birch. They plant them, and you'd expect that they grow, and then the climate changes.
The winters have become milder. Many of the trees that we planted in the 1950s, especially Siberian larch, are literally dying after several decades of being reasonably good. They are just sitting there dead in the landscape, and it's difficult to find the money to do something else with the land. It becomes a problem.
Our aim is to produce the seed that we need here in Iceland, so that it will eventually all be of genetically well-adapted material. The genetics of forest trees are important—how much heat they need in the summer to grow, how tolerant they are to droughts, and when they know to stop growing in the autumn. These are all things that are genetically determined in the trees. Through the years, we found the species that we can use, and now we're selecting individuals that are best adapted, bringing them together in a seed orchard, and using their offspring in afforestation.
The seedlings are produced in modern tree nurseries with greenhouses. They're all containerized seedlings, which are very easy to plant, and we produce all of them here in Iceland. Right now, I am optimistic for forestry in Iceland. The trees are growing.
People call us at the Forest Service and say, "I've got a shelter, a wall that I want to build. I need some planning for my summer cabin, or I want to build a pagan church. Can you help us?" And we say, "Well, yes, we can!" We're producing wood now for vision boards and planks. We have the trees in the woods, and we can cut them down. The forests are growing better than anybody ever thought. People will more and more look at them and say, "Hey, this is something that's worth having!" This is not something that was obvious to Iceland—you see only a few decades ago. That's a great cause for optimism.