Iceland & the North Atlantic Nature Nonprofits

Iceland sits on the mid-Atlantic ridge, where the continental plates are pulling apart, and the island is being actively built by that process: volcanoes, geysers, lava fields, and geothermal heat that supplies nearly all the country’s heating and much of its power. It is a young landscape, raw and unfinished, and it is also almost entirely treeless.

That treelessness is not natural. Iceland was substantially forested with birch when the Norse arrived, and it was cleared and then grazed by sheep until the soil itself began to blow away. Iceland has suffered one of the most complete cases of soil erosion in Europe, and the effort to replant the birch and stabilise the ground has been running for a century with slow, real progress.

The organizations here restore birch woodland and eroded soil, protect the highlands and their glacier-fed rivers from hydropower schemes, and watch the glaciers retreat. Iceland has already held a public funeral for one of them, Okjökull, with a plaque addressed to the future.