The Netherlands can handle the
It’s all gloom. Everything goes bad and leads to an outright lypse: climate, nitrogen, judiciary, traffic, manufacturing industry, tax authorities, nature, housing market, geopolitics. But don’t we spend too much time gloating over solutions? Yes, there are radical solutions, even voluminous ones like doom and gloom. Away with economic growth, even hurts, but then everything will be beautiful! Well.
Why are we so led by melancholy? No doubt gloom was an evolutionary aid. But in the 21st century, doom-mongering undermines the courage to do things systematically.
The Netherlands faces an enormous task. This is partly the task facing every country: reducing greenhouse gas emissions within a few decades. There are definitive and temporary solutions for this, such as electric driving (one day on green electricity) and energy saving. Definitely don’t share a win-win situation. But do it, deadline.
Due to the nitrogen crisis, the Dutch task seems larger and more complex than the elders: it concerns agriculture, biodiversity, housing, work and mobility. The Netherlands: a transit country full of above- and underground infrastructure in the mouths of major rivers, where two-thirds of the economic value is below sea level, where the population density is one of the highest in the world, where great value is attached to cultural landscape, living in low-rise buildings, schools and shops within cycling distance. But also a country that has been protecting itself collectively against the sea for a thousand years. Where the total tension between agriculture, urbanization and nature has existed for more than a century.
Know your history: volatile spatial changes are not something of this century
In the beautiful book The landscape, the people Auke van der Woud shows which way of thinking has led to that full, spatially multifunctional Netherlands. Land, water, vegetation and sea must be paid for for the sake of economic benefit. Van der Woud stopped in 1940, but this trend continued after the Second World War. Land consolidation, further drainage, Vinex locations and, in recent decades, windmills and parks for solar panels. But certainly and the counter-movement strengthened: more land was protected for its own sake, biodiversity became an established concept, just like Natura 2000 areas The Netherlands is unique because of its enormous ecological variation and intensive land use.
There is no reason for apocalyptic thinking. The Netherlands, with all its low-lying areas, can handle these new challenges because we have been shaping this country for so long. The latest estimate of the sea level rise may be higher than expected, it is not a tidal wave that engulfs us in one fell swoop. We have time to widen and raise dikes, create flood basins. It is possible that not everything can be protected and must be started in due course. Just like before in history. losses can be offset by the construction of new land.
Doom-mongering is for those who see nothing but the here and now. Who knows on spatial spatial scales, who knows the history, knows that future changeable, in landscape, distant spatial future and not. Instead of it being (almost) too late, we should put our shoulders to the wheel and embark on a fantastic transformation. Let’s think about what the Netherlands could look like in 2100. A master plan, not only for engineers and ecologists, but also for artists, social scientists and humanities scientists. Now a minister of Spatial Planning is in charge.
A version of this article also in NRC in the morning of November 1, 2021