Weekend video: Iceland lost its forests. Can it get them back?

What do you do if you get lost in an Icelandic forest? Stand up.

The joke lands because everyone knows the punchline. Iceland is famously, almost defiantly, treeless. But what surprises a lot of people, including plenty of Icelanders, is that the bare landscape is not a quirk of the climate. It is a wound.

When Norse settlers arrived in the ninth century, birch woodland covered as much as a quarter of the country. Within a few centuries it was almost gone, felled for timber and fuel, cleared for grazing, then kept down by sheep and finished off by erosion. Forest cover eventually collapsed to around half a percent, leaving Iceland with one of the most degraded ecosystems in Europe.

That distinction matters, because it turns the bare hillsides from something fixed into something that can be undone. This week’s video heads to the south of country to follow the slow, stubborn work of growing a forest in what is effectively one of Europe’s largest deserts. The treeless Iceland we take for granted was made and what was made can be remade.