Environmental Science

Please feel free to skip ahead to the asterisks (*****) since by now you’ve probably heard of the travel difficulties. Also, I’m sure my travel narrative is a bit boring. I don’t really blog or journal so it might get a bit dry. Here goes…

Monday at 8am we left Dubuque for our adventure to Iceland. We arrived 3 hours or so later at Chicago O’Hare airport. Our initial flight to Toronto was delayed causing a cascade of connection reschedules and etc. When we arrived on the ground in Toronto, we sat on the plane for about an hour and a half or so as the runways and tarmacs were gridlocked. We had a gate to go to, just no way to get to it.

Like an interstate pileup in the sky...

When we finally got to the gate in Toronto, we learned that it was late enough that we had missed our previously rescheduled flight to Iceland. At first that seemed like a nonissue and one we were already aware of that might happen. But Toronto only flies to Iceland every couple of days, so what now? We were put on a place to Copenhagen! We made the Copenhagen flight and just a couple short hours after landing in Toronto we were on the road (or, in the air, actually) flying towards Denmark for a good 7:15. Lovely jet, but I had the middle seat, so my elbows made good friends with our professor Sam on my right side and a random but pretty chill European gentleman on my left.  The Beef Stroganoff they served was pretty 5-star, so my introduction to airline food wasn’t bad. Maybe because  I felt famished and had already been travelling for 18 hours. But this isn’t about a lesson in the patience or humility of international travel. More on that later.

We landed in Copenhagen. Beautiful airport. Nice people. Decent food.

You ever seen an egg, shrimp, lettuce and mayonnaise sandwich? Me neither.
But daaaaaaaaaaaaang is it good!

 It took the airline folks quite a bit of work to get everything figured out, as apparently Air Canada had dropped the ball on something and we were, in my understanding, at the exact moment we arrived, stuck. Just… stuck. No continuing on. But, the traveler assistance folks seemed like they took on the burden and before we knew it we were on a place to Iceland! So we flew for 3 hours or so, landed, departed the plane, learned all of our luggage was lost, had a bit of a laugh about it, and shrugged our shoulders. Why? Because Hey! We made it to Iceland! WOOHOO! Gunnar and Jon came and picked us up, gave us a lovely welcoming, drove us to Gunnar’s home in Kopavogur, and we slept! We had beds to go to! For the first time in… 33’ish hours. I think.

*****Our group, throughout the travel ordeal, was smiling. We were cracking jokes at our misfortune, sarcastically (and hopefully) optimistic. We knew that by the grace of God, hardworking Canadians, helpful Danes and patient Icelanders that we would make it to our Icelandic adventure. We talked as a group about how this was, for some, a lesson in patience. For me, it wasn’t a lesson in patience because we had fun! We have a great group, a fearless leader, and high spirits.

The sun is not an early riser, a bit like
most seminarians...

So, we left on Monday. By this time in our trip it was Wednesday morning, Icelandic time. I don’t remember when exactly as I was still in a bit of a daze, but we loaded into vehicles and took off for our first destination – Skalholt. I rode with a nice Icelander named Benedict. Benedict took the hour long or so drive to point out some things about Iceland. Q. What is that all smoke coming out of the ground? A. It’s steam from geothermal energy works. Q. What kind of fish is caught in that river? A. Salmon. Q. Can we fish in that river? A. Sure, for $1-10,000… a day.

This was a very nice introduction to Iceland, because it showed us some of the basic framework for how Iceland is, well, Iceland. Firstly, a major part (the major part?) is water. The country utilizes water for energy production in a great amount. Enough, actually, to potentially export it, and certainly enough that fresh water is a major piece of their national discussion. Water is used for energy, for heating, for fishing, for drinking, for an infinite amount of things and is in a system that is all connected. That is important.

Secondly, fish! Salmon, Cod, crab (not a fish) is a big industry here! Gunnar, our host, was a fisherman by trade for a long while (I need to remember to ask him for some stories!). If you want to read the numbers, they’re widely available on the internet. But remember that fish as an industry is important to the history of Iceland.

Thirdly, tourism! We saw a river and wanted to fish in it. Apparently, a lot of people do! And for quite a sum of money! I don’t know when the tourism industry got off the ground here, but it seems like the industry is well established and not on thin ice. Tourism spreads Icelandic culture and brings valuable revenue to the shops and Icelandic business.

Look at me, I am water! Representing
energy, fish, tourism, life, etc.,
important elements to the life of
Iceland. I can't think of any other group
 whose life is so well represented through
the properties and metaphor of water.

Oh wait - Christians!

So what does the flow of water in Iceland have to do with the price of rice in China? Economics, like an environment, is a system that lives alongside and within other systems. Deciding to make even minor adjustments in a complicated system can have large good or negative impacts on things you wouldn’t even have dreamed! This means there are different landmines in the discussion about things such as clean energy. For example, I would love to see more hydroelectric in the United States. About a decade ago, coal accounted for 51% of American energy production. I don’t know the number now. But you know how dirty coal is? It’s nasty. Straight up bad. Can’t deal with it without getting your hands dirty (pun very intentional). I would love to have a larger national discussion in the United States on clean energy production, and in my mind, hydroelectric could be a part of that. I asked about it here in Iceland. To get hydroelectric energy, you dam up a river, drop a turbine in it, water turns the turbine, and energy is converted out into a useable source. Sounds great, right? Could be. Can be. I don’t know enough. But what if you drop the dam in a river, the flow of the river is redirected enough that some smaller tributaries dry up or made much smaller and the fish can’t survive there? Now there might be some damaged industries, including fishing and tourism. Or what if, as we were enlightened about one particularly contentious debate, the dam is thought to inhibit certain silt and sediment flows that then are reduced at the ocean where the rivers outlets, affecting the breeding ground of the large fishing crop of codthat would normally be found there? There could be profound consequences on industry, economics, etc.

What the particular discussion about what clean energy production in Iceland means for Iceland, I don’t know nor do I claim have 10% of the knowledge I’d need to make an informed and valuable opinion. But what I do come away with is a broadened horizon for understanding the inter-connectedness of all systems and ecosystems. In Iceland, the country is a much smaller land mass than the United States, so it’s different for me to imagine the consequences and changes that some environmental changes made in say, Cheyenne, or Oregon, or Vermont, might have on other parts of the United States, like Iowa, Kansas or Utah. By simply talking with one man about geothermal energy and fishing for probably a total of 20 minutes of a 60 minute car ride on our first day in the country, and then talking with another man, Axl, a couple days later for a bit longer about water and hydroelectric energy, so on and so forth, my perspective has been stretched, teaching me to consider more of the effects that even small changes can have on an entire ecosystem. So, before I go on, as I’m already at the end of single-spaced page 2 as I type this in Microsoft Word and up to this point in the story of our 6 days of travelling I’ve only reached the end of the first hour of the first morning of our trip, I should say that this trip has already done two major things for me – 1) I’ve learned a lot about Iceland already. Axl asked me what I expected Iceland to be like before I came and I sat there (and Will can attest to this) for a good 5-10 minutes before I told Axl that I had absolutely no idea.  And 2) this trip is challenging my base foundations for understanding and interpreting the world around me. The specific example I gave you is specifically talking about ecosystems and general systems-theory, but my entire lens is being adjusted and refined, like if I suddenly noticed a big speck that was on my glasses and I began to clean it off.

This is getting long and the day (night) and hour (morning) is getting late, so instead of narrating more tonight, I will save that for a later time.  I leave you with two things a quote that I have absolutely cherished ever since the 12^th grade and that I hope informs you, the reader, partly as to why I needed to come to Iceland. I remember it kind of roughly, so, apologies, but here it is: “A person’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimension.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes

Dear God, thank you for the diversity of your creation, that you teach us and expand our horizons. Grant us humility, that we might learn from our sisters and our brothers across the sea, both about their communities and ways of life and about how we can grow in faithful practice of discipleship back home. 

Góði Guð takk fyrir fjölbreytnina sem þú hefur gert í þessum heimi, að þú kennir okkur og víkkar sjóndeildarhringinn okkar. Veitt okkur hógværð, sem við getum lært af systrum okkar og bræðrum í heiminum, bæði samfélag þeirra og lifnarðarhætti og hvernig trú okkar vex í starfi lærisveinsins heima.