The American artist Roni Horn knows Iceland well and cares for the future of the land that so much inspired her and her works. She came here many years ago on a motorcycle and visited every corner of the island, staying in a tent and in light-houses etc. She then, two year ago, rented an old library in tje sea-town Stykkisholmur (on the Snaefellsnes peninsula) and transformed it into “The Library of Water”; a community center inside a permanent installation of water columns, containing water from melting Icelandic glaciers, and inside an archive of oral stories of locals about the weather. Ten years ago, Roni Horn decided to write an article about Icelandic nature and the choice Icelanders have to make. She spoke directly to the Icelandic reader in saying: Today you have the knowledge in looking out over the ocean that so fortunately surrounds you that other cultures early on may not have had and later did not care to respect. You have the choice to implement the use of renewable resources to sustain your economy. You have the choice to utilize less invasive methods of production and the choice to produce things that do not result in irreversible damage to your environment.
The article was written on the Sept. 7, 1998, in Reykjavík, for publication in Morgunbladid, September 13, 1998. The article is now re-published on Nattura.info with kind permission of the author.
I grew up with trees. I count them among the most important things in my life. But oddly, when I come to Iceland with its treeless landscape I never miss them. Over the years of travel here the open, unobstructed views of the island have also become very important to me. These views are the trees of Iceland. Because one of the great qualities of the tree is its way of relating things: the earth to the sky, the light to the dark, the wind among its leaves to the stillness that surrounds it, the small spaces within the tree to the vast spaces it inhabits. But here in Iceland the view takes on this role and in doing so expresses a wholly unique sense of place. The weather is a big part of this sense of place and a view here is never without it. It allows a glance at the rolling past and sometimes what’s to come. The view contains the distant and the near often with equal clarity. It lays out the shape of the planet with an expansiveness and transparence that exists in few other places. It holds you in a solitude that enlarges you. The view relates you to the world that in Iceland is mostly a world of natural things, rocks and vegetation and water: complex, multifarious things that are also remarkably young.
I grew up in New York City and it’s early suburbs. My first trip abroad when I was 19 brought me to Iceland in 1975. Since this trip I have come here once, sometimes twice a year, every year. On one occasion back in 1979 I was able to stay for five months. During this period I spent a fair part of my trip out in the landscape with tent, traveling by motorcycle. By the end of my stay, my travels had taken in the whole of Iceland, most notably the interior. The scale of the island made an enormous impression on me; It is big enough to get lost on, but small enough to find oneself.
Since then the roads, especially rough (but having a way of keeping a traveler in close contact with the land both physically and psychologically) have been primed for faster more convenient travel. However with the paved road and accelerated rate of passage I noticed my relationship to the land becoming more distant, even abstracted. To maintain contact with it required greater responsibility on the part of the traveler. This seemed a small price to pay for extensive quality of life enhancements such development brought.
Among the many advantages that Iceland enjoys (though I do not believe recognizes) is its unique position in history relative to those of other modern cultures. That is, because Iceland has experienced delayed economic development the country is fortuitously out of sync with other modern cultures. You are out of sync because your environment, unlike those of other modern societies, is still intact. This places the country now, at the end of the second millennium, in a critical position to observe the destruction that other societies have brought upon their environment through flawed and unchecked development and exploitation of natural resources.
Iceland is in a position to bear witness to these dubious fruits. And with this knowledge it must question the extent and nature of development it wishes to pursue. Unlike other cultures whose major development is yet to come Iceland does not suffer from rampant illiteracy or ignorance brought about by a censored press. You do not suffer pervasive poverty, overpopulation, or recurring natural disasters in the form of drought or floods or unchecked disease.
Up until very recently it seems that exploitation of natural resources has been limited by the size of your economy. But now as the economy grows society is more willing to consider ever more invasive methods of expansion in the service of ever increasing levels of affluence. And with this new potential a greater willingness and most definitely a greater technological capacity to alter nature is pressed forward as necessity.
As a foreigner I have watched with admiration Icelands’ persistent refusal to allow foreign influences to compromise your language. I have admired the extraordinary literature that you have invented and which is such a profound part of your identity. And admired also your early architecture and indigenous building much of which was unique to your culture. And then there are the many enlightened aspects of your social culture: among the most notable- the pragmatic tolerance of intimate union and the responsibility taken for its outcome.
But now when I come to the island I wonder whether you see the fast rate of change that your society has undergone, especially in the last fifteen years and how it now begins to effect the fragile ecologies that surround you. The nature that surrounds you is especially fragile and especially glorious because it is unusually young. And now, because your capacity to alter and destroy nature is greater then ever before.
Modern society has experienced a seemingly uncontrollable appetite for consumption- often well in excess of individual need. The resultant over-exploitation of natural resources has destroyed many underlying organic equilibria now experienced in part with ever more frequent catastrophic events of weather as well as pollution, both in the form of toxins and invasive manipulations of the environment. Iceland is in a unique position to make choices that will bear profound influence on your identity as a people. It is a choice that must reflect your knowledge of other cultures and how they have at first through ignorance and then through wantonness destroyed their environment. In the United States for a large portion of the population ones health is no longer ones own. It is degraded by toxins that though unseen are so pervasive they cannot be kept out of the body. These are choices that must assess the real value of development not just in physical and quantitative terms but in spiritual and psychological terms as well. Many post-industrial, and/or over-populated countries have polluted their waters, their land, and their air. In some places to an extent that makes them uninhabitable. It is a pollution that is toxic and most often irreversible; a pollution that has deeply undermined quality of life. It is also a pollution that destroys humanity even as humanity fights for the right to pollute.
Excessive development and the over-use of natural resources is a choice. It is not based in necessity. Development that results in the introduction of pollution to the Icelandic environment cannot be regarded as a viable option because it will ultimately, though not immediately degrade it. Today you have the knowledge in looking out over the ocean that so fortunately surrounds you that other cultures early on may not have had and later did not care to respect. You have the choice to implement the use of renewable resources to sustain your economy. You have the choice to utilize less invasive methods of production and the choice to produce things that do not result in irreversible damage to your environment.
This essay is motivated in particular by my fear of the loss of the Highlands. But as I write I see that it applies to the island ecology as a whole. With each visit to Iceland I become ever more anxious concerning these issues. Yesterday as I was driving out of Reykjavík I was shocked to find myself comparing the view out my window to that of New Jersey in the early sixties. As an artist Iceland has born a deep influence in my professional development which in the case of the artist is a deeply personal matter as well. Over the years I have felt the necessity for my returns here growing greater still.
Which brings me to the crux of the matter -facing the potential loss of the Highlands. It won’t happen right away -first you will build a dam in some remote corner. (In the belief that you can power X, Y, and Z industries, in the belief that you can expand your economy and affluence. You won’t concern yourself now with the fact that these industries will most likely pollute the water and the air. You won’t discuss the fact that this is really the first of many dams.) Then you will flood a valley. (Never mind that it is the only valley like it in the world. Perhaps you will convince yourself that the resulting lake has it’s own beauty, perhaps even accept it as more nature -even though you know it is really artifice.) Along with the dam will come the roads and various other civil infrastructure. (And you will drive these roads and imagine a truly wild place -perhaps one that no one has ever been to before -but in reality these roads will turn the whole of the interior into a parody of itself. Now it is merely more domesticated space.) Along with the roads greater access for everyone. And along with this access a level of use that will quickly dominate and subdue the wild and its unknown.
The Highlands, while often referred to as a vast, empty space is neither vast nor empty. The American poet Wallace Stevens names precisely what the Highlands is so profoundly full of. In the poem “The Snow Man” he says:
For the listener who listens in the snow
And nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
In my experience the Highlands is one definition of the nothing that is. And the nothing that is- is synonymous with the real. The real cannot be mitigated without destroying it. The Highlands are not for everyone. To enhance its accessibility is to deny what it is. An individual who wishes to travel the Highlands must be equipped in oneself both psychologically and physically -and not the other way around. The Highlands is a desert, it will take your measure. It cannot be made into a place for the casual visitor.
Your Highlands, while lauded as the single largest unexploited block of land in Europe is relatively speaking, tiny. (Not even the size of Ireland.) Once you have compromised it, in a matter of one generation or two at the most your identity as a people will be altered. Iceland will become a place dominated by human presence. The balance of identity will tip- away from the majestic solitude of the interior -away from a place largely unoccupied, uninhabited, unaltered -away from the possibility of a place more clear and clean and pure then not -away from a place that expresses vastness and absoluteness, and all that exceeds us -away from a place that is exquisitely distinguished simply in being what it is -away from the many many things I come to this island to experience. These are the things Icelanders have been nurtured on, perhaps unknowingly, that give this culture its remarkable difference, and its utterly unique sense of place.
With this change Iceland will simply become more like the rest of this mostly tragic worlddominated by a humanity that can only value nature as something to be exploited.
Iceland has a choice. The destruction of the Highlands is not necessary to your cultural and economic development. You do not need its resources to live comfortably. Encroaching upon its fragile ecologies even to what is erroneously perceived as a small degree will destroy it. It wont necessarily be an obvious change, but it will be radical and it will be irreversible. It will weaken your identity as a people by taking away from future generations unaltered and unoccupied land that exists today in a scale that expresses and sustains the power and presence of non-human things.
POSTSCRIPT TO “THE NOTHING THAT IS”
Morgunbladid, September 6, 1998, Sunday: 26-27
Here is a simple but compelling economic reason against invasive exploitation of the Highlands. This argument is founded in the time-proven understanding that desirable things become more valuable as they become more rare. Over the next decade or two as modern societies around the world literally consume their environments and those of others, the Highlands as unexploited land will become significantly more rare. As such it will be sought out the world over as a place of growing uniqueness. To ensure this appreciation in value it must be protected against any form of civil based encroachment. And because Iceland’s identity as a people and a land is inextricably bound up with this state of wilderness Iceland as a whole will become more desirable to those living in increasingly over-occupied, over-populated, polluted and generally degraded environments.
Icelanders -each and every one of you -do not have the option to ignore growing pressures from commercial and political sources seeking to act aggressively and irreversibly on the landscape. Now is the time, before damage is done, to develop national policies that will direct Iceland to a humane, clean, vital, and economically viable future.
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