Kinderdijk

 Blog 06-26-22 Sunday

There aren’t many ‘man defeats nature’ memes around these days. Mostly nature seems to be crushing human ambitions and dreams.

If you go to Holland, however, they have built a tourist site to refute the pessimists. It’s called Kinderdijk (the dyke of the children) in the land ‘reclaimed’ from the sea, and called, of course, Zeeland. It’s a delta of three rivers that once produced a vast marsh of peat bogs and human-less territory. It took the dutch over 500 years (1200 - 1740) to build a system that drained most of the land, spilling the excess water back into the more narrow environs of the rivers. Further west the North Sea was walled out, preventing the drainage work from being undone. The dry land was then converted to agriculture. Nature vanquished.

The main mechanism, built in the 18th century, was a series of windmills that pump the lowland water up into higher drainage canals that then spill into the rivers. They are still there, the icons of dutch culture. You can visit them and peek in on the lifestyle of a dutch windmill keeper, lots of tight spaces. These aren’t modern, sleek windmills. King Kong could support himself on one of these giants for a 360 degree ride. Living inside one of these things must have required great tolerance of noise and vibration. Reminds me of my bunk on the John F Kennedy, rocked to sleep while behemoth jets thrust themselves out into the Atlantic, except that the arms of those windmills spun any time there was wind, which means, almost incessantly.  I wonder what the guys said to women who might consider marrying them. 

“Sweetheart, my job involves 24 hour a day servicing of a thunderous machine that you would live inside with our children.” How do you romanticize that? The cubbyhole beds that the parents slept in looked cozy, and gave evidence of why the tourist literature they gave us told of families with a dozen kids or more. Lots of makeup sex, I imagine. 

In the 1920’s the dutch gave in to efficiency and turned over most of the water-carrying labor to a diesel generator. It’s not clear to me how much they still depend on those 300-year-old windmills to keep the land dry. I’m guessing it would spoil the tourist experience to be told the quaint structures are vestigial. 

A chunk of the land is now a UNESCO World Heritage site, $20 to enter. But outside the fairly narrow boundaries of the site is farmland, carefully cultivated with cows, goats, and horses pasturing. That suggested questions to me. 

Fertilizer; cow manure; diesel fuel spillage, etc. Where do all those salts and fossil fuel pollutants go? There is no buffer between the farms and the drainage canals and thence into the river. This land is, I’m sure, a sacred cow (pun intended) in Holland. I tried to read up on environmentalist criticism of dutch agriculture. There are apparently many EU environmentalists who aren’t happy with the dutch system. There have been calls to greatly reduce the numbers of cows, chickens, horses, and goats hereabouts. You can guess the reaction of Holland’s ag sector. 

AMSTERDAM, June 10 (Reuters) - The Dutch government on Friday laid out targets for reducing nitrogen pollution in some areas by up to 70% by 2030 - the latest attempt to solve a problem that has plagued the country for years.

Farm and agriculture organizations said the targets were not realistic and called for a protest in The Hague on June 22.

"This is not going to work," said Sjaak van der Tak of agricultural organization LTO in a reaction.

What happens when a whole country is founded on the defeat of nature, only to find out that nature has ways of fighting back? What damage has all those salts done to North Sea fisheries? How many dutch children have been poisoned by industrial pollution?

I sat on the banks of Rotterdam’s river, the Neue Maas. It’s not an easy thing to do. There is a shockingly small amount of public land adjoining the water. Instead there are vast petroleum holding tanks and monstrous industrial complexes hogging the coastline. I can’t believe the water isn’t full of cancer-causing compounds. From a cursory search online it seems like the dutch are trying. They’ve banned phosphates in detergents; water treatment centers have been improved; industry can’t pour waste into the water as recklessly as 30+ years ago. 

Mother Nature is watching.