The singer and musician Björk has teamed up with writer-environmentalist Andri Snær Magnason to promote an online petition against plans for a high-voltage power line to be constructed in Iceland.
“Iceland is now the largest untouched nature in Europe,” the singer declares in a video, launched yesterday at a press conference in Reykjavík. “This would end that. Our government has plans to build over 50 dams and power plants in this area – and to start next year. This could end Iceland’s wilderness in a few years. We propose to start a national park in our highlands. Surveys have already proved that the majority of Icelanders are behind us. We ask for the world to support us against our government.”
The Icelandic government plans to pave roads, erect power lines and install power lines through the centre of Iceland, effectively “cleaving the wilderness in two areas”, as Magnason envisaged it.
“Icelanders have a deadline,” Björk said in the video. “For 11 more days, they can go online and protest an overhead high-voltage power line that will be built across the whole island.”
The project has caused grave upset in Iceland, whose highlands are the largest area of wilderness in Europe. They hold the nesting places of pink-footed geese and are also a habitat for the great north Atlantic salmon, with some of the island’s greatest waterfalls also to be found there.
A benefit event last year featured performances from Björk, Patti Smith, Of Monsters and Men and Lykke Li.Magnason is one of the Iceland's best-known writers, popular for his plays, poetry, novels and children’s fiction, as well as Dreamland, a non-fiction book which deals with the threat to Iceland's environment.
