Bundles for Iceland

The U.S. is sending not only marines but trees to Iceland. In the July Journal of Forestry, a young, husky, German-born Colorado forester, Jacob Jauch, tells how he has unofficially exported enough seed from Colorado's cork-bark firs and spruces to produce some 125,000 trees for Iceland's chief forester, Hakon Bjarnason.

Iceland is now nearly treeless. This is not entirely the climate's fault: its coasts, washed by the Gulf Stream, are warmer than the high country of Colorado, and its capital, Reykjavik, has about the same mean annual temperature as New York City. But while the island was a subject of various European nations during the last 1,100 years, its timber was exploited until its hills lay rock-naked as its lava wastes. New forests never grew because, in winter, shepherds would turn out their hungry flocks, which gnawed groves of saplings, preventing the regrowth of natural forests.

Today, under nightless July skies, the Colorado trees are growing in Iceland's valleys, fenced off from sheep and guarded by rangers on ponies. The seeds were sent unofficially, as from one forester (Jauch) to another (Bjarnason). They are irrelevant to U.S. defense: the marines will have to stay in Iceland 50 years before the fir or spruce look like respectable forests.

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