Now elsewhere in the world, Iceland may bespoken of, somewhat breathlessly, as western Europe’s last pristine wilderness.But the environmental awareness that is sweeping the world had bypassed themajority of Icelanders. Certainly they were connected to their land, the wayone is complicatedly connected to, or encumbered by, family one can’t doanything about. But the truth is, once you’re off the beaten paths of thelow-lying coastal areas where everyone lives, the roads are few, and they’reall bad, so Iceland’s natural wonders have been out of reach and unknown evento its own inhabitants. For them the land has always just been there, somethingthat had to be dealt with and, if possible, exploited—the mind-set being one ofland as commodity rather than land as, well, priceless art on the scale of the“Mona Lisa.”
When the opportunity arose in 2003 for thenational power company to enter into a 40-year contract with the Americanaluminum company Alcoa to supply hydroelectric power for a new smelter(冶炼厂), those who had been dreaming of some-thing like this for decadesjumped at it and never looked back. Iceland may at the moment be one of theworld’s richest countries, with a 99 percent literacy rate and long lifeexpectancy. But the project’s advocates, some of them getting on in years, weremore emotionally attuned to the country’s century upon century of want,hardship, and colonial servitude to Denmark, which officially had ended only in1944 and whose psychological imprint remained relatively fresh. For the longesttime, life here had meant little more than a sod hut, dark all winter, cold, nohope, children dying left and right, earthquakes, plagues, starvation,volcanoes erupting and destroying all vegetation and livestock, all spirit—aworld revolving almost entirely around the welfare of one’s sheep and, later,on how good the cod catch was. In the outlying regions, it still largely does.
Ostensibly, the Alcoa project was intendedto save one of these dying regions—the remote and sparsely populated east—wherethe way of life had steadily declined to a point of desperation and gloom.After fishing quotas were imposed in the early 1980s to protect fish stocks,many individual boat owners sold their allotments or gave them away, fishingrights ended up mostly in the hands of a few companies, and small fishermenwere virtually wiped out. Technological advances drained away even more jobspreviously done by human hands, and the people were seeing every-thing they hadworked for all their lives turn up worthless and their children move away. Withthe old way of life doomed, aluminum projects like this one had come to beperceived, wisely or not, as a last chance. “Smelter or death.”
The contract with Alcoa would infuse the region with foreigncapital, an estimated 400 jobs, and spin-off service industries. It also was away for Iceland to develop expertise that potentially could be sold to the restof the world; diversify an economy historically dependent on fish; and, in anappealing display of Icelandic can-do verve, perhaps even protect all ofIceland, once and for all, from the unpredictability of life itself.
“We have to live,” HalldorAsgrimsson said. Hallor, a former prime minister and longtime member ofparliament from the region, was a driving force behind the project. “We have aright to live.”
