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reindeer had moved further north; the lowland forests, now with noticeably
more deciduous trees, had been increasingly logged and were patched with
new farms where slopes permitted it. The loss of agricultural potential in the
much hotter world far to the south had meant that almost any farmable land in
the northern latitudes had been cleared, even if the crops were poor. The
season was still very short for although warming favoured growth, daylengths
were unaffected and growth could still not begin until the early summer. Prices,
however, had risen enough to make even a meagre harvest worth having. And
many more people had moved northwards from Southern and Central Europe,
resulting in a polyglot community that was struggling to reconcile its many
different aspirations and customs. The area, indeed much of the north, had
become a new frontier.
It rained much more and the winter snowpack was thin and lasted only a month
or two in December and January. River flows were more even throughout the
year, and water levels higher in spring, though the summer was dry. The Arctic
charr had disappeared and the salmon were very scarce. Most fish were lowland
species and attempts to replace species that had gone had misfired as a handful of
these now predominated, all of them coarse fish (cyprinids). They were edible if
not delectable. The sport fishing industry had declined and the increased
population had struggled to feed itself, supplementing its diet with poached deer
and moose, both of them now nearly extinct locally as a result. When ecological
surveys had been carried out, it was found that the river communities had changed
with loss of specialist cold-water species, such as stoneflies and the native crayfish,
though a now rampant introduced species of crayfish had replaced it. There was
much more algal growth on the rocks and bigger patches of sediment, for the
intensified farming released more nutrients and the more even water flows no
longer scoured out the bed as the spring freshets had done previously, when a
billion tonnes of snow had melted over just a few weeks. Submerged plants
colonized the sediments in summer and blackfly were scarcer, though still, like the
lake mosquitoes, a nuisance. The local people had taken the law into their own
hands on the latter, however, and insecticide was used rather liberally. One of the
consequences had been the loss of cladoceran grazers from the lakes in the
lowlands and an increase in algal growth. Some of the fish were now health
hazards too because of the pesticide residues they contained.
This was a pity, for fish were generally more abundant in the lakes; the
winterkills that had been frequent in shallow waters under the previous long
winter ice no longer occurred. The period of ice cover was now quite short, but
the fish were of small species, feeding on the bottom, rather than the tasty large
salmonids that had previously been prized. Not that people cared very much
now; food was food. And things were still changing, more rapidly year by year,
it seemed. All over the northern latitudes, permafrost had been lost and methane
in the peaty soils was being released whilst even more carbon dioxide was respired
away from the peat itself. Each year, almost, was the warmest year yet. But life
was tolerable. News from the tropics, that millions had died for lack of food,
water and dry season temperatures that could barely be contemplated, and from
the far north, where traditional hunting peoples had been unable to adjust and
had died out, made even this now tattered landscape something of a haven.
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