The hills around Reykjavik were apparently once full of birch woods. But the woods disappeared less than a century after the Settlement began, having been turned into wood and charcoal for the growing number of Icelanders. Now the area, as is much of coastal Iceland, is largely a denuded, barren wasteland.
The southwest apparently used to be a centre of intensive agriculture--intensive by the standards of then anyway, before motorised farm vehicles and chemical fertilisers and all that jazz. Then Katla and Hekla covered the plains in lava and ash, and now there's only the odd farm here and there.
Is this what the world would look like after an environmental apocalypse [of the sort alarmists like to trumpet about]? A world of ice and of vast emptiness and of harsh, unpredictable weather. At least it's not without its beauty, and by no means unsurvivable. So, y'know, maybe everything will be alright after all, in the end. In its own way.
