According to the Icelandic Forestry Association, at the time of settlement, over 25% of Iceland was covered with birch woodland. But this resource was over exploited. It was cut for timber, for firewood, or just burned off to clear land for grazing. With no trees, the land quickly eroded. They say Iceland today is “without a doubt the most eroded country in Europe, if not the world.” But starting about 1930, conservation and tree planting efforts have been underway, and are yielding results. But the environmental degradation, which is now so difficult to reverse, began quite early.
According to ResearchPennState, Iceland was settled between 870 and 930 by Viking chieftains trying to escape rule of the king of Norway. They divided the country into 36 chieftaincies which jointly ruled for 300 years. Then civil war broke out and when it was over, Iceland had lost its independence and become a part of Norway. Icelandic society changed from a relatively egalitarian society where each chieftain fed and housed his followers to a state hierarchy where each family was on its own and little concern was shown for the poor.
Penn State anthropologist Paul Durrenberger claims that the societal changes were not the result of the war but the cause, having begun 200 years earlier. He says overpopulation, overgrazing, and erosion had reduced Icelanders’ ability to feed themselves, and chieftains learned that a man ate more than his labor was worth. John Steinberg of UCLA, Durrenberger’s collaborator, says the chieftains “squeezed the followers out of the longhouses,” which is a sign of a developing country trying to get more production out of its people. But in Iceland’s fragile landscape, it didn’t work. And the result was chaos, war, and disaster.
During the “Free Commonwealth Period” (930-1262) authority was in the hands of the chieftains, who represented their constituents for a fee. But constituents could change their allegiance at any time without changing residence. So there was a lively competition among chieftains to attract more followers. And a chieftaincy was property—it could be bought and sold. You could purchase a chieftaincy as an investment, hoping that by being an effective chieftain, you could attract more followers, and earn a profit in fees. It was government by free market capitalism, and it worked fairly well as long as there were 36 chieftains. But the end result of competition is monopoly. By 1230, six families controlled all the original chieftaincies. Having acquired more wealth and power than they could hold onto, their rule collapsed in chaos and civil war. Someone appealed to the king of Norway for help, and when it was all over, Iceland was a province of Norway, which was later conquered by Denmark.
Even if, as Durrenberger argues, the breakdown of a functioning democratic order was the result of the impoverishment of the Icelanders and not the cause, there are still some lessons here. One is that when the environment imposes hard limits to what can be sustainably produced, that imposes limits on the kinds of government that can be used. We often hear the slogan, “Let the winners win and the losers lose.” No polity ever followed that doctrine more assiduously than the Icelandic settlers. And the winners did indeed win and the losers lost. And the biggest loser was the environment. But the Icelanders also lost their prosperity, their democracy, and eventually their sovereignty. Considering the fragile environment, they would have had serious difficulties no matter what their social system. But to most Icelanders, allowing too much wealth and power to be controlled by too few people is what turned a difficulty into a disaster. You may ask, “How could people’s political views today be influenced by events of a thousand years ago?” In most places, they wouldn’t be. But Icelanders actually read their history. As my daughter puts it, by the time they regained their independence in 1944, “They not only knew how they had lost their sovereignty-- they’d had 700 years to brood about it.”
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