One part of Jared Diamond's recent book COLLAPSE holds:

When the Norse were living in Greenland, they denuded the ground and put resources into non-essentials (like stained glass windows for the local cathedral). They tried to live in Greenland the way people lived in Europe, by changing the land to suit their wishes, when their wishes were that they could sustain cattle and sheep (not to mention a massive top-down social structure), rather than relying on animals who were adapted to live in that climate. As a result, the Norse caused massive erosion in an already soil-thin land, and ended up having to abandon their living sites within a scant few hundred years.

Other people who lived up there . . . lived on the land the way it was, and seem to have fared rather better.

The naming of "Greenland," by the way, is held by many to have been a bit of a propaganda campaign.

Herring405