Collapse

Deep in the fjords of Southwest Greenland, sheltered from the cold Atlantic in an otherwise bleak and barren land of rock and ice, lie “patches of flatter terrain with luxuriant pastures” (212) that give the island its ironic name. Here, 1,500 miles from Europe, Erik the Red and a community of Icelandic Vikings founded outposts in AD 984—the warmer Eastern Settlement at the southern tip of the island, and the colder Western Settlement 300 miles up the coast to the north. The colonists erected churches and livestock farms, grew to as many as 5,000 people, and remained for more than 400 years before suddenly vanishing.

Many theories attempt to explain why these people disappeared, leaving behind buildings and, famously, the ruins of the church at Hvalsey, whose roofless stone walls stand today as the most famous structure in Greenland. A lengthy cold snap is blamed, or environmental abuse, or abandonment by Europeans, or an overly conservative culture, or perhaps annihilation by native Inuit neighbors.

Greenland’s latitude is roughly level with Norway and Iceland, but those places are warmed by the Gulf Stream, while Greenland is chilled by the Arctic’s West Greenland Current. Fjord summers serve up wind, fog, and heavy rain, while temperatures swing widely around an average of 50 degrees Fahrenheit. The Viking settlements had frost-free growing seasons for only a few months. To this day travel is mainly by boat and often blocked by sea ice.

Past climate conditions can be derived from cores drilled in ice fields and bogs. Ice layers vary in thickness and percentage of oxygen isotopes, and bogs contain varying types of pollen from trees and bushes; these indicate climate changes over the years. Stormy years carry more seawater spray and foreign dust onto the ice fields, leaving telltale traces of salt and calcium. Settlers’ journals also offer clues to weather conditions.

Vikings arrived in Greenland during the Medieval Warm Period, as did native North Americans, who, long absent from the island, reappeared there around AD 1200. After 1300, the Little Ice Age ushered in a cooler period that lasted until about 1800. The Inuit adjusted their hunting tactics, but the Norse refused their neighbors’ techniques, over-relied on their poorly suited cattle and sheep, and suffered for it.

The best farmland was flat and low-elevation, with good southern sun exposure, irrigated by streams, far from cold glacier winds, and near a harbor. Settlers kept farm animals for dairy, wool, and hair; most protein came from hunting seals, caribou, and birds. Late summer was hay-gathering time for livestock winter feed. Cows stayed in barns up to nine months of the year, while sheep and goats were let out to forage somewhat earlier. Colonists grew flax for linen; gardens were few; bread and beer were nonexistent.

Fish teemed in the rivers, lakes, and surrounding ocean, yet Greenland colonists ate very few, despite descending from a fish-eating culture. Fish carry pathogens that can cause serious stomach ailments; it’s possible the settlers suffered a bad case of it and thereafter banished fish from the table. Meanwhile, prey-animal populations and hay production fluctuated wildly with climate; a colder year might cause several food sources to fail.

To survive, Greenland’s 250 farms and 14 parish churches were tightly knit, controlled by clan chiefs from the richest farms. Settlers often got into violent disputes; many burial plots contain skulls with battle wounds. The society grew more hierarchical over the centuries as the poorer farms fell into debt during bad years and became tenants of the wealthier landowners.

Living in a region where success was hard won after many failures, the colonists—like their Icelandic cousins—became conservative, reluctant to tinker with processes that worked well enough for survival.

Ships arrived at Greenland twice a year at most; they brought lumber, iron, tar, small luxuries, and items for church use. In exchange Greenlanders sent wool, animal hides, ivory from walrus and narwhal tusks, polar bears (alive or just the pelt), and gyrfalcons (the largest of the falcons and highly prized).

Greenlanders respected their European cultural heritage and spent lavishly on tithes and church construction. The cathedral at Gardar in Eastern Settlement, over 100 feet long, was as large as Iceland’s, and the church ended up owning about a third of the entire Eastern Settlement. Colonial devotion to European ways may have limited their ability to adapt when conditions worsened in the 1400s.

All five of the main causes of collapse changed for the worse during the Norse colony’s centuries on Greenland. The environment deteriorated under human occupation; the climate grew colder; Arctic natives moved in and fought with the settlers; trade with Europe declined; and Greenlanders held onto useless traditions instead of adapting to the new conditions.

On arriving, the Vikings cut down forests for pastureland; erosion set in, trees didn’t grow back, and lumber and firewood became scarce. Settlers often used turf for building walls and burned it for heat, which “was tantamount to destroying pasture” (250). Without charcoal, iron from bogs was hard to refine and work, and iron items quickly became precious, so that many jobs were performed with inferior tools made of lesser materials.

(Sheep were reintroduced in Greenland in 1924 and quickly caused the same environmental problems. Shepherds there have since learned how to better manage pastures, though soil erosion remains a concern, and sheep farming families rely on government financial support.)

More trouble appeared in the form of new neighbors. The Inuit used dogsleds, superior boats—including their fast kayaks—and better hunting weapons to expand from Alaska to Greenland by AD 1200, in the expansion displacing the earlier Dorset people. By the time they met the Norse settlers, those colonists had lost their iron weapons and used inferior boats. The Inuit’s adaptive ability to shift from hunting one prey animal to another during lean years gave them an added advantage over the Norse.

It didn’t help relations between the two groups that the Norse, with their Viking belligerence and Christian scorn for outsiders, regarded all natives as “skraelings,” or wretches, and tended to introduce themselves by fighting. Little evidence exists of trade between the two peoples: The Norse acquired almost no Inuit objects, regarded the Inuit as interlopers in their walrus hunting grounds, had no spare iron—much coveted by Inuit—to trade, and never adopted Inuit survival skills. Such innovations may have threatened the power of the wealthiest farmer-chiefs.

Several factors caused trade with Europe to decline. Plague in 1349 killed half of Norway’s residents; the Little Ice Age, from 1400 to 1800, clogged shipping lanes with icebergs; Scandinavia joined together under one king in 1397, who neglected Greenland; the Crusades re-opened access to African elephant tusks and then ivory fell out of fashion, so that demand for Arctic walrus tusks plummeted.

In 1362 an ombudsman and tax collector from Norway visited the colder and smaller Western Settlement to investigate reports of Inuit attacks, and found no one alive. Archaeologists later explored the ruins and found precious wooden materials untouched, indicating no orderly evacuation; bones at the top of trash heaps were from lambs, dogs, small birds and rabbits, and only the toe bones of mature cows, suggesting the settlers starved to death.

Only four ships visited Greenland between 1381 and 1410; thereafter, all shipping ceased. The last news from Eastern Settlement reported an execution, a death by insanity, and the wedding of the visiting ship’s captain to a woman from the colony. Diamond notes, “Eastern Settlement was […] larger than Western Settlement, but the outcome was the same; it merely took longer” (273).

In small, local areas, community members can work together to solve resource problems, a “bottom-up” approach. In large regions, a central authority with an overall perspective makes decisions that can account for environmental impacts in all the local areas, a “top-down” approach. Sometimes, especially in Western democracies, both approaches come into play.

Once believed by outsiders to be uninhabited, the rainy interior highlands of New Guinea, a large island north of Australia, have in fact sustained agriculture for 7,000 years, including independently domesticated taro, yams, bananas, and sugarcane, using crop rotation and heavy mulching on terraces and gardens. Millions of highlanders plant fast-growing “ironwood” Casuarina trees that contain useful wood along with roots and leaves that replenish the soil.

To this day New Guinea highlanders take a bottom-up approach, solving problems at the village level, “sitting down together and talking, and talking, and talking” (284). Though known in the past for continuous intertribal warfare, highlanders also display great curiosity and readily adopt plants and farming practices from other villages. Casuarina silviculture evolved at least twice in local areas and spread from there, examples of bottom-up resource management.

Well to the east of New Guinea lies the tiny Polynesian island of Tikopia, population 1,100, which has been occupied for 3,000 years. Warm and rainy, prone to cyclone strikes but also wafted by soil-enhancing volcanic ash and Asian dust, Tikopia’s 1.8 square miles are a carefully cultivated orchard of trees that produce nuts, fruits, and useful materials, while beneath the trees lie gardens of taro, yams, and manioc. Tikopians eat fish for protein, and they store a starchy paste against lean times. The island “is unique in the Pacific in its structural mimicry of a rainforest, except that its plants are all edible” (288).

For centuries the population remained stable due to strong social taboos against having too many children; abortion and infanticide, occasional warfare, and suicide by sea voyage also helped cap the islanders’ numbers. Today, chiefs limit the population to 1,115, and some people simply move to other islands.

During the first thousand years of occupation, the islanders wiped out most of the birds and seafood, then shifted to orchards and pigs. In AD 1200 a second immigration of Polynesians brought new agricultural techniques, and in 1600 the Tikopians ceased pig farming as inefficient.

Four clans controlled by hereditary chiefs manage the island, but everyone knows everyone else, unused gardens can be farmed by anyone, all fishing reefs are for common use, and “each house owns pieces of land in different parts of the island” (293). Thus, governance is a communal, bottom-up process.

Another densely populated island, though much larger, is Japan, with 100,000 times as many people who, before 1868, were isolated from the outside world and under the top-down control of the central government.

Following centuries of civil war, in 1603 Tokugawa Ieyasu emerged victorious and became the overall chieftain, or shogun, who controlled all the other warlords. The shogunate introduced agricultural improvements, freed up local trade, tightly restricted foreign trade, and locked out religious missionaries and European military adventurers.

The population boomed, and the need for construction material and fuel increased, causing timber demand to climb. By the late 1600s deforestation and the accompanying erosion, flooding, and river silting were causing crop failures and famines. The shoguns introduced conservation efficiencies, comprehensive tree inventories, logging restrictions, and tight rules on how timber could be used. They then fostered the art and science of plantation forestry, encouraged the careful nurturing of seedlings, and established government and private forests. Japanese rulers thus independently developed successful forest management at about the same time that Germany introduced its forestry program to Europe.

To this day, most of the land is carefully managed as mountain forests, a legacy of successful top-down environmental policies begun during the Tokugawa era.

Part of the success of Japanese plantation forestry comes from good growing conditions like those on many Pacific islands, including lots of rain, volcanic ash, and Asian dust to replenish the soils; lack of sheep and goats; and plentiful fish as food and fertilizer. What’s more, the strong military stability of the Tokugawa government enabled it to plan for the nation’s future, including long-term management leases for the burgeoning forests.

Success stories from the past, such as New Guinea, Tikopia, and feudal Japan, aren’t rare; many other successes can be listed, including the top-down Incan empire and the bottom-up Australian aboriginal hunter-gatherers, along with modern villages in Spain, Switzerland, the Philippines, and India, whose organized control of resources has provided centuries-long environmental stability.