hiya! I am doing a translation (French into English) on an article on the negative effects of tourism in Iceland. It can be found here: [https://journals.openedition.org/vertigo/4568](https://journals.openedition.org/vertigo/4568)
In one sentence it mentions “the destruction associated with sheep and horses who roam the land freely all summer long”, anyone know what they mean by this? Is there a specific type of destruction taking place?
Is it just the destruction of their land?
Can’t seem to find any articles online!
Thanks!
P.S. I visited your country once in 2018 and loved it 🙂
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It refers to sheep/horses eating all the vegetation, turning the land to desert as the dirt dries up and gets blown away.
The sheeps can eat or destroy the trees in iceland becuse the trees are very small and that turned much of iceland into desert
Oooh! I only read a little French but skimming through a few paragraphs this seems to be my topic! The question about what is a “natural landscape”? Is there any part of Iceland that is not partially anthropogenic? In Icelandic there’s the term “ósnortin náttúra” – untouched nature. Such a thing hardly exists. The Icelandic landscapes are continuously changing – by geological factors (earthquakes, volcanoes, changing land elevation etc), by climate (10.000 years since the glacial retreat), etc. But it has also been affected by humans since they arrived here 1200 years ago. Humans have cut down trees and … relevant for your question… they have had free-roaming grazing sheep which have caused desertification in many areas and prevented trees from re-appearing. I don’t know if the horses are that big a factor (not as much as the sheep). Making regulations about sheep grazing (sometime in the 70ies I think) had a visible effect as it allowed plants to come back in certain areas.
Sheep more than horses cause a massive amount of destruction they tend to eat everything down to the dirt causing soil erosion its an ongoing problem that so far has not been dealt with.
Farmers release the sheep in may June and they are gathered up again in September.
personally i feel they should be corralled in and not allowed to wander freely but what do i know as far as i am concerned sheep and farms are something that happens in the vague grey area outside of Reykjavik and look exactly like they do when the reach my plate 😛
The sheep is the reason Iceland has no forests to speak of. They will chew the bark off, and kill the tree. Any area with trees is fenced to keep the free-roaming sheep out!
Horses do not roam freely here they are always inside fences. But sheep can cause some damages to trees and bushes.
Sometimes you’ll see these tiny islands on rivers, and somehow they’re just densely bushed while everything on the riverbank is bare. That’s just because the sheep can’t reach it. Lots of places the sheep can’t reach there are just tons of little birch trees growing. I’m not saying correlation implies causation, but it does wink and lift its eyebrows sometimes.