Iceland

Back from ten days driving around Iceland. Thoughts on Iceland

(1) I recommend anyone who goes read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy first - much of the country's outlandish beauty comes from looking like the early stages of a terraforming project and I found it entertaining to compare the various landscapes to variously the Red, Green or Blue stages of KSR's imagined Mars. (A lot of places had elements of more than one, of course.) I'm not sure where the oft-repeated "surface of the moon" idea comes from, very little of it seemed to look like the moon to me.

(2) most of the big problems of the rest of the developed world seem to be passing Iceland by. It has abundant free energy from geothermal sources; little of the country is low-lying (and the sandur, while beautiful, is essentially uninhabitable); global warming is probably a net gain in a climate that treated me to freezing rain more often than not in July; there is sign neither of the fundamental demographic collapse that faces the aging populations of eg Japan, Italy or Spain nor the problems of integrating foreign populations that arise elsewhere from the only probable solution to that phenomenon. All that said, Iceland seems to have its own unique problems - highly active volcanoes and a need to import many essentials being only the most obvious.

(3) I ate more new animals in my first 48 hours in Reykjavik than I think I have in the past two years - two species of char (one Arctic, one an Icelandic word I regret not recording at the time); guillemot; puffin; and whale. On top of that variations on old themes - smoked lamb was new to me, as was the way they do salted cod.

Extraordinarily beautiful country. Also a good hedge proposition for serious survivalists or - with a population of only 300,000 and half of them in the capital - the determinedly misanthropic. If no solution is found to oil running out Iceland is probably an even better bet than Canada.