Islandness and Change By Stephanie Arnold

Islands and islanders are slow to change – as I have often heard and readily believed. However, my first few days in the Faroe Islands made me question the sentiment and took me down memory lane.
I was born in Hong Kong, an island on the other side of the world. An impending change in the political regime prompted my family to move to Toronto, Canada when I was a child. As time passed, any “islandless” I experienced living in Hong Kong faded away.

As an adult, life brought me to Australia (another island!), where we saw a rotating house. My husband and I constructed one of our own in a small town on the north shore of Prince Edward Island, an island paradise on the east coast of Canada.


As luck would have it, the HLN’s International Community Energy Challenge brought me to the Faroe Islands. It wasn’t until I arrived in Torshavn that I noticed how effortlessly “new” can co-exist with “old”. From the thatch roof on a sushi restaurant to the modern Bakkafrost facilities within a quaint community, the blend of the two is hard to miss. After hearing about Bakkafrost’s innovative approach to business and sustainability, I realized islandness did not prevent islands or islanders from changing, In fact, islandness made innovation and resourcefulness necessities.



Source: (Top left) Sushi restaurant with a thatch roof; (top right) boats from different eras; (bottom) Bakkafrost facilities and a nearby church and cemetery.

Reflecting on my own experiences, I think islanders do embrace change, as long as the changes are congruent to their core values. Islanders value community, culture, and resourcefulness. From Hong Kong adapting to 99 years under British Rule then trying to forge their own identity upon reversion to Chinese sovereignty to a rural town in Prince Edward Island embracing a rotating house as their own, islands and islanders are perfectly capable of change. They are changing with the times; but they won’t change for the sake of changing.

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