This is not about tulips. Nor wooden shoes or windmills. Not even about bicycles.
Well, maybe a bit about bicycles.
I’m in the Netherlands, at the invitation of the Dutch government, and I’m curious about three things: What is one of the most successful trading cultures on the planet up to these days? What can we learn from them about the issues related to building infrastructure (port-related facilities, in particular)? And how are they dealing with one of the great moral dilemmas of our time?
Well, that’s a bit heavy, given that there are so many moral dilemmas to choose from, but the question is nonetheless real, especially since the Low Countries are even more susceptible to the consequences of climate change than we are.
The Dutch are a very prosperous, tolerant, educated (and I should say attractive) people, who live more sustainably in practice more than we even aspire to be (all those bicycles!). And yet they are among the more aggressive carbon producers, traders and investors on the planet. (They are, for instance, the second largest foreign investor in Canada, after our American friends, due to a big chunk of their change in the tar sands.)
I’ll have a chance to see the scale of their petro-port in Rotterdam, too – the largest in Europe. And I’m told this country, underneath those bucolic tulip fields, is a web of pipelines full of oil and natural gas. A lot of their way is life is absolutely dependent on the giant natural-gas fields and coal plants that heat their homes, factories and greenhouses, which help make them the world’s second-largest agricultural exporter. (They are very, very good at importing a lot of other place’s products, adding value, and shipping them to people like us.)
So how do they reconcile being so efficient at funneling more and more carbon to and through their country and economy, while sitting just below sea level with all the ominous implications that has for their future. Or are they, being an extraordinarily pragmatic people, expecting to make a fortune providing consulting and construction services on dikes and sea gates as the waters rise?
In so many respects, they’re just like us, we who sit on so much tradable carbon while being stewards of the Arctic, likely having to trade off one for the other.
Got no answer, just the question – but wondering if the Dutch are any closer to figuring out some solutions even as they, and ideally us, reap some benefits.
Well, Gord I’m sure you wont mind an interested octogenarian digressing for a moment: still about the Dutch but not quite in the vein of your conversation.
Back in 1947, the war had barely cooled, (broken bridges and debris, all over the place), just out of school, I must have been about 18, my Mum bought me a nice new pack, I headed to Folkston, the SS Auto ferry and Boulogne.
From there I just put out my thumb and headed south.
I had a bit of schoolhouse French but what I did not expect was the hordes of Dutchmen on the move. I did not speak Dutch, but that was no problem, they spoke almost perfect English. Every Auberge de Jeurness was swarming with perfect-English-speaking Dutch teenagers, guitars over shoulder, on the move.
I was headed for Rome and eventually got there but stopped on Île Sainte-Marguerite: the Isle Alexander Dumas made famous with is Man-in-the-Iron-mask novel (Actually there really was a man-in-an-iron mask probably close to were I slept for a few days but he wasn’t the Dumas character).
Anyway, at le Auberge, we always met for congenial meals, the Dutch and I, until wow, I nearly got into a brawl, over a pretty Dutch girl, with a large Dutchman. Fortunately an aged (well, he was probably late 20’s) Yank intervened.
Phew, that was close: I would have been mauled.
Anyway I passed on the pretty Dutch girl and with emotional farewells (huh, I dunno, we’d only known each other for a few days) I headed back to the Cote d’Azur with my thumb out: ciao l’italia.
Interesting though those few years after the war continental Europe was swarming with guitars-on-shoulder Dutch looking I suppose for more spice islands.
Maybe they were looking for their lost paradise Batavia!
hmmm… i wonder if the Dutch could use their impressive powers of engineering to help raise Venice… ?
I hope you enjoy your trip. My visits to the Netherlands as a kid strongly influenced my views of city building. A relative lived in Middelburg in Zeeland on Spanjaardstraat, an extremely narrow medieval urban street. (It is blocked to cars so Google hasn’t driven all the way down it, but it still work a look.) The things that impressed me were the amount of space that could be fit into the narrow townhouses. The houses are narrow, but at three or four stories, they easily accommodate four or five bedrooms. The back yards are small too, but they end up feeling like outdoor rooms and therefore large. (Small for a yard but large for a room.) There is almost a secondary network of paths that cross parts of the town too, only a arm’s-width wide. The run between row houses and cross the streets through ground-floor openings in the houses. They connect to alley’s behind the houses and some of those alleys also have very small houses facing on to them. Like laneway houses. Another thing that impressed me was the hard urban rural edges. Towns just end and become farmland.
The country is so compact the train system runs almost like the bus. You can get around the whole thing extremely easily. (Not that it’s very big.)
But the intensively used land also has drawbacks. One relative has a house in a farming area and every farmer had a great pile of cow dung under tarps. It was everywhere and there was literally no place to put it. I have also read that the country has very high fertilizer and pesticide use and the resultant pollution problems because of the intensive agriculture. It can also be hard to get things done. To someone from North America the density of infrastructure is amazing – the separated bike highways through the countryside with their own traffic signals – but these things can take a long time to actually be built. I can remember people talking about the Betuwe line when I was a kid, but it was only recently completed. It took over 20 years to build. The Amsterdam tram system and the national railway also endured long delays in rejuvenating the system. I think Amsterdam was one of the last places that still ran PCC streetcars.
The import export statistics might also be a bit misleading. As a trading nation, the country will be a large exporter of agricultural products, especially high value products, but it is probably also a large importer. Some of the exports might just be transshipments. The same goes for foreign investment. For what I assume are tax reasons, many corporations are based there without actually being Dutch. Ikea is technically a Dutch company, and thus Ikea Canada etc will show up as Dutch foreign investment, but actually the company is really owned by a Swedish foundation (or whatever tax efficient regime they have set up).
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/022213-645488-arctic-ice-antarctic-ice-contradict-global-warming.htm. Maybe the alarming sea rise theory is not supported by the facts. For sure some dutch remain sceptical about warming theories that are not supported by the data
The Netherlands, of all places, should be acutely aware of sea level upheavals. When I visited, at the height of the AGW scare mongering, they appeared to me to be pretty blasé: apparently for good reason!
Historical ice core evidence suggests earth’s climate is never static, rising and falling precipitously over the eons: why would we expect our era to be any different.
Unfortunately AGW hysteria has been, is being, fostered by our own very unprofessional cohort of academics, misleading their students, hopefully not to the latter’s future detriment.
Those academics should be summarily dismissed but they will not be.
Our universities are rife with entrenched, prejudicial theories and ingrown administrations, like proverbial the toe nail, brimming with aging faculty members propagating yesterday’s cold spaghetti!