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 and cattle and swine land
needed to be cleared and their grazing
prevented the forest from coming back
and after a long time the thin
vegetation cover that’s left is
susceptible to disturbances like frost
heaps and storms in the wintertime it’s
basically rips open the soil is exposed
in part 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 are other needs of forest biomass
lumber 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 you use what you have here in
Iceland it’s the native birds 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 sitting
there dead in the landscape and it’s
difficult to find the money to do
something else with the land becomes a
problem our aim is to produce the seed
that we need here in Iceland 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 when they
know to stop growing in the autumn these
are all things that are genetically
determined in the trees
and 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 of 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
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