The wilderness Blog
Wild Ice
By Hillary Rosner, 7-10-05
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Yesterday I drove east—counterclockwise—on Iceland’s Ringroad, from Reykjavik to a small harbor town called Hofn about seven hours away if you’re not stopping every few minutes to gape at the scenery. The drive winds through horse country and across plains of lava covered in thick moss, arriving at the southern edge of Vatnajokull, Europe’s largest glacier. The road goes for several hours on a striking stretch of land between the sea and the glacier.
Mountains jump out of the plains, which in places are huge expanses of black sand—10,000 years of glacial sediment accumulation. Peeking through the jagged rocks are edges of the glacier, which covers 1900 square miles. Ice falls up to 15 miles wide coat the slopes all the way down to where the vegetation begins on the flat plain below. Between wide avenues of sharply scored ice the mountains end in steep grassy hills. Further east, arctic terns raise their chicks next to a lagoon teeming with little icebergs, some of which are as large as a small boat.
It’s an awe-inspiring landscape, and appears as wild as anything I’ve seen. But is it wilderness? It fits many of the qualifications that we expect from wilderness, including the all-important idea that man is a visitor who does not remain. And yet the area at the base of the glacier is thinly sprinkled with sheep, who often graze with their lambs on the incredibly steep hillsides beneath the rock, though there are no farmhouses for hours. Much of Iceland’s natural ecology, according to conventional wisdom, was screwed up by Vikings who cut down the forests and caused severe soil erosion. What’s more, the glacier is melting, thanks to a warming climate.
Iceland, as far as I can tell, does not have a “wilderness� designation. From maps and what I’ve seen so far, it seems that there are a few national parks—three at present, and one more in the making—and then quite a lot of the country that is simply public, where you can hike and camp and drive on jeep tracks but cannot own land or build on it. I’m meeting with a biologist later in the week who can hopefully explain the various land designations. But I can say with some certainty that there is no specific “wilderness� designation in the way it exists in the U.S.--as distinguishable from other natural areas of publicly owned land, like national and state parks, national and state forests, national monuments, and so on.
But of course it can’t just be a legal designation that matters—though those in southern Utah who have been fighting over wilderness designation for years now might want to interject here. What matters, if not the land’s legal status? Is it the way we feel about an area? In Utah, there is broad disagreement over whether certain vast swathes of land should bear the wilderness stamp. Is the final word on the matter the legal outcome? Or may I still call something wilderness if I know it in my heart to be, despite the fact that it bears no official seal from the government?
In Iceland, the glacier is a wild place, both up on the ice cap and down at the base where land and ice merge. Wild birds nest there. Arctic foxes—Iceland’s only native mammal—live and hunt there. The vast mountain of ice creates its own weather—though it’s still trapped in the human-influenced climate. No humans live there. No one is fighting for the right to build or mine or drill for oil there—though on the north side of the glacier a controversial dam is under construction in a highland wilderness. The glacier serves as a reminder that there was a whole wide world before we came along. I’m willing to go out on a limb and call it wilderness.
Wilderness exists regardless of legal status, but in the U.S. that status is the only thing that can protect it from disappearing. Wilderness is subjective. But it can’t be entirely subjective. Does the presence of sheep sent out to graze for the summer tame the edge of Vatnajokull? I’ll say no—though maybe only because the sheep were so thinly distributed. (But sheep can severely damage the land; if it is eroded but still wild, is it wilderness?) Which is a bit like Iceland, a country the size of Kentucky with 280,000 residents—about half of whom live in Reykjavik. Icelanders like to complain about this or that area getting paved over, and reminisce about the past when there were more bubbling brooks, more waterfalls. But compared to the strip-mallified U.S., Iceland is pretty darn unpaved. And though development is spreading out from Reykjavik into the surrounding countryside with their meadows of cracked lava flows, the scale and pace are nothing compared to more-populated countries.
If Iceland’s population were to explode (highly unlikely since there’s barely any daylight for six months a year), would the country suddenly need to declare wilderness areas in order to preserve them? What if tourism to these areas increases? Icelanders care deeply about their country’s natural resources—the tourist radio station implores travelers to leave the land as you found it and tread lightly on the fragile ecosystems. But they’re also building a dam in the middle of a large wild region of the highlands. I’d be interested to see what the country looks like 50 years from now, how much of the wilderness I’m visiting now will remain. And whether they’ve found it necessary to create a specific system for preserving carved-out sections of wild land from encroaching human influence. For now, I’ll be heading to a remote lake in the northeast, one degree south of the Arctic circle.
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Comments
EXCELLENT post. And, coming as it does from Iceland, timely: This morning’s New York Times has a funny little article about Icelanders who believe in elves. (Here’s the address: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/13/international/europe/13elves.html?ex=1121918400&en=354d75f3ba01b4ea&ei=5070&emc=eta1)
Don’t laugh: It seems that almost all Icelanders think elves exist (at least according to the Times). While a few of the interviewees believe quite literally in them – “My next-door neighbor is an elf woman," says one. "She lives in a cliff in a rock in my garden.� – most qualify their beliefs by saying that it’s not so much an actual, physical elf they believe in (with the pointy ears and the little beards), but rather some greater force of nature. "It's not like they think there are little people living in there who come and dance outside," said a professor of Icelandic folklore. "It's more a sense that there are other powers, other forces around them."
The comical point of the article is that oftentimes Icelanders will not build near anything that is suspected to house elves (the elves live in rocks, apparently). Roadways are diverted to make room for suspected elf lairs. Which, of course, would never happen here in America. (I mean the part about altering or ditching altogether any expansion that might interfere with nature or its “other powers�, not about believing in elves, which I’m sure plenty of Americans do.)
All of which led me to consider why it is that we as Americans lack this national “connection� to the wilderness. To us, it seems, everything is compartmentalized – this part of the country is urban (for businesses and strip malls), that part is prairie (for farming and strip malls), and this part is officially designated wilderness (big chunks of land, usually on fire, with gift shops at the entrances). But within those carefully constructed categories there exists a lot of space for paradox.
Specifically, *why* is it only wilderness if humans aren’t around? Why can we only be “visitors,� as you say? Here in the States, I’m thinking of the more protected parts of our nation’s open spaces, where (despite their “wildness�) there are really strict rules one has to follow. I don’t just mean no mountain biking, but also no dogs and no shitting wherever you please (which, fyi, is what the wild things do), etc.
You write that “there are a few national parks [in Iceland]—three at present, and one more in the making—and then quite a lot of the country that is simply public, where you can hike and camp and drive on jeep tracks but cannot own land or build on it.� Here in the States, we can’t drive our jeeps (or mountain bikes) on much of “our� protected land – yet we have plenty of dipshit yokels that poach trails on their freeride bikes and their ultra-extreme 4x4 jeeps, etc., and ruin it for everyone else. (Because if you can’t go four-wheeling wherever you goddamn please, then the terrorists have won.) I wonder if Iceland has the same problem; somehow I doubt it. I suspect they have a different sense of "public" than we do.
We as Americans – and I’m talking, as much as it’s possible to in these allegedly over-polarized times, about us as a whole – seem to want to separate the wildness from ourselves. What I want to know is, why? I imagine it’s a confluence of innumerable factors, but ones that can be broken down into some pretty clear categories:
- our history as pioneers, in which our efforts were directed at “taming the land,� and making the physical country (and its indigenous peoples) bend to our will;
- probably tied up in that is the personal history/background of the early settlers, many of whom at least ostensibly believed they were operating with God’s encouragement;
- “external� factors like the invention of the automobile and the subsequent planning of roads and national highways, railway-based goods-distribution models, and other things along those lines that encouraged separation not just from the land but from each other. You don’t have to know anything about the wilderness (or about surviving in it) if you can just cruise through it in your Dodge Sebring with the AC on; likewise, there’s no need to inhibit expansion into all these formerly wild places if you’ve got a nice Sebring that can carry you thousands of miles in comfort. (Obviously, these are simple-minded examples, but I imagine people will get my basic point.)
Why do we, as a country, simultaneously love and loathe the so-called wilderness? And when did we divide ourselves from it? Seriously – was it when Man Invented Fire? Twas it ever thus? Or is this a more modern viewpoint? (On that note, anyone know any good books exploring this idea?)
Does this divide only exist in America? I kind of think it might. Take a look at that elf article, but also consider other cultures. I’ve only really traveled extensively in Europe, but to me it looks like there’s less of a divide, less of a rabid desire to “tame� nature. For instance, your latest post points out that Iceland has no official designation for “wilderness�. Roam into the high expanses of the Alps, and you’ll find people living wherever they can – just not hordes and hordes of them with six-bedroom “mountain homes� and Hummers. But they probably have plenty of sheep, which, it’s true, aren’t really “wild.� (Do the sheep know they’re not part of the wilderness? How about the dogs – do they know they’re officially excluded?)
I mean, all of these things seem inextricably linked, and the whole of them seems to have brought us to where we are -- which is needing to officially designate what is wild and what is not. What I would like to see in your blog (and especially in the back-and-forth with readers) is more discussion of this.
I could be wrong on any of this. I’d love to be informed with more data and context, if anyone out there would care to educate me. What in the philosophical history of the U.S. guided us to this point?
Amazing.