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The Dutch say that “God created the world and the Dutch created Holland.” For centuries the inhabitants of the marshy lowlands have fought off the encroaching waters and struggled to control the elements. They built dykes and flood barriers to keep the waters at bay, drained the low-lying polder lands and marshes to transform them into fertile farmland and reined in the wide rivers that spilled over the flat delta plains. Holland is the ultimate example of human control over nature, an artificial, man-made country reclaimed from the sea, moulded to the needs of its inhabitants.
Look at an 11th century map of Holland and it is a quite different country, a series of islands and peninsulas, unsafe sandbanks and shallow estuaries. Since then more than 4.5 million hectares of new land have been created and hundreds of kilometers of dykes bisect and encircle the land to protect it from the high waters. In this artificial land there was once, however, a great diversity of landscapes: dunes, oak forests, polders (low-lying land reclaimed from the sea or a river), rivers and farmland, each with its own specific fauna and flora.
This changed in the 20th century: the development of industry, the sprawling growth of cities, and, most of all, the modernization of agriculture, all took their toll off Holland’s natural wealth, nibbling away at the areas of wildlife and placing factories and concrete in their place. Pollution also formed a growing threat to the survival of plant and animal species: since 1950, 70 plant species have become extinct and a further 500 are threatened. Nature reserves had become fragmented and scattered; they were also comparatively small so that species living there were threatened by pollution from outside.
In the 1980s there came a call for a return to nature: now that they had gained complete control over the elements, the Dutch wanted to loosen their grip. And instead of artificial landscapes and manmade countryside, they yearned for a return to “real” nature, unkempt and untouched by the human hand. Enterprising and intrepid as always, they decided to build a “new nature” that would answer all these needs. From making the polders in the 16th century, they were now going to “unmake” them: surely this could only happen in Holland, the paradigm of manipulability. Writer Herman Vuisje comments: “The creation of new nature is the ultimate expression of the Dutch belief in their control over the land. God created the world and saw that it was good. The Dutch created Holland, saw it was not quite right, and started again.”
The problem, of course, was space: Holland is the most densely populated country in Europe, with towns, highways, airports, industries and farmers all vying for the precious land. Finding space for new nature would not be easy. But the government was determined: in 1990 the policy was adopted and they announced that 50,000 hectares of “new nature” would be created by 2015. Farmland is being bought up, areas around the urban perimeters are being developed and wetlands are being created along riverbanks. Contrary to all Dutch instincts and traditions, dunes and dykes, traditionally the guardians of the land, are being breached, marshes are being restored to their original muddy state and polders are being flooded.
Some of the “new nature” needs to be “built”: agricultural land is often polluted so that topsoil needs to be removed and the earth needs to be renewed. A considerable part of the new nature areas are also left to develop on their own. This is rooted in a new environmental philosophy that advocates working with nature instead of trying to contain it; allowing things to “run wild” instead of trying to regulate them. Thus “water should be given the space to flow”: instead of reinforcing and elevating the dykes, rivers should be given the space to overflow onto lands that are specially designated for this purpose. And the sand of dunes should be allowed to blow away and allow for a diversification of vegetation along the coastline.
Returning the Land to the Waters
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| Tiengemeten |
Unsurprisingly, the creation of new nature has caused quite an uproar throughout the country. Farmers are the first to protest the new measures as they are set to lose most. They question the wisdom of the radical new policies: can’t nature and manmade landscapes exist side by side and enrich one another? Does the one necessarily exclude the other? In the case of Tiengemeten, a small island in the estuary south of Rotterdam, authorities have decided that it does. The six farmer tenants who live on the small island are to be “relocated”, while the island will be returned to the waters. Harm Piek of Natuurmonumenten, the Dutch National Trust, explains that the area is perfectly suited to be a nature reserve. “And agriculture simply does not fit into that picture,” he says.
From a mere sandbank in the 17th century, Tiengemeten has grown to an island of five hectares with polders and farmland. It has always been privately owned, but since 1996 the island has become property of Natuurmonumenten and things are set to change. The sea defences will be lowered, drainage will be stopped and the dykes will be breached in two places: water will once again become the “formative force” of the landscape. For many of the inhabitants who know the history of the island and the efforts previous generations put into pulling the small sand bank out of the water and exploiting the newly won land, it is hard to accept plans. Natuurmonumenten has dedicated the island to nature and recreation, and seeks to reconfigure the space to create a “rough nature experience with an island feel” to townsfolk.
The question that arises here is whether Holland’s new nature is being built for the benefit of biodiversity and ecological balance, or for a population of environmentally aware citizens who like to believe that there still is real, unspoilt nature in their small country. Is it ecological concern or the entertainment business that drives these projects?
Journalist Tracy Metz was so intrigued by the phenomenon that she wrote a book about it. She sees the very concept of new nature as a contradiction in terms: indeed, by “creating” nature, man automatically takes control of the process and thus creates an artificial product.
Writer Willem van Toorn is also skeptical. He sees new nature as a product of guilt. “We feel guilty about our lifestyles: our cars are bad, the highways are bad and so to appease our minds we want to create pure nature. We believe that by making new nature, we can redress the balance.”
For Van Toorn, one of the things that makes the Dutch landscape so unique is the fact that mankind has for centuries been so narrowly involved in its creation and maintenance. The Dutch landscape is one that has been manipulated and altered through time, which also means it has a very rich history, as the island of Tiengemeten testifies. “Instead of chasing after an idealized image of nature, we should accept that we live in a manmade landscape; we should try to develop it further and allow as much diversification as possible in the existing realm,” he says.
The Garden of Eden Versus Unkempt Wilderness
Beside the question of who this new nature is for, one can also wonder what this new nature looks like. A return to a pure, primeval nature: does that mean the forests of the interglacial period or the archaic forest of Robin Hood? Which nature is the purest and the most authentic? Landscape philosopher Peter Kuckelkorn sees the new nature movement as a romantic idea. “People who seek to return to ‘real’ nature in search of the roots of life are in fact seeking a lost paradise. They don’t want the wilderness that is full of threats and chaos, they seek the safe, well-tended and orderly Garden of Eden. Our lost paradise is represented as the essence of pure nature in harmony, as a pleasant park,” he says. But he wonders whether this is realistic.
Kuckelkorn sees another, more worrying tendency in the new nature philosophy: ecologists are striving to return to a purely indigenous nature, eradicating any foreign plants. “The scientific basis of this argument might seem justifiable, but the result is a type of vandalism. Imagine that this purist idea of nature was translated into political terms,” Kuckelkorn comments. Pure nature hasn’t existed for many centuries in Holland and yet the ecological theory that is being applied is based entirely on exclusion: authentic-unauthentic, indigenous-exotic, where all that is exotic is seen as unauthentic and therefore to be eliminated. In terms of biodiversity, this policy would then appear to impoverish the Dutch ecology rather than enrich it. “If that is what the nature of the future is to look like, then environmental policy is slipping into very questionable ideological realms,” Kuckelkorn says.
New Nature as Politics
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| Oostervaardersplassen |
New nature is also, in the end, a question of politics. Natuurmonumenten has 870,000 members – more than some political parties and most church communities – and therefore has considerable political clout. The ecologists of Natuurmonumenten have a very particular vision of new nature, a vision that excludes the “old nature”. In a country that thrives on compromises and the harmonious resolution of conflicts, such single-mindedness could lead to the creation of isolated spaces that don’t link up to the adjacent spaces.
Rural sociologist Jan Douwe van der Ploeg says there should be a balance between nature reserves and farmland. The Oostervaardersplassen, a naturally developed bird reserve that is being shown as the model for new nature, only came into being after the Flevopolder was drained; and the birds that settle there largely depend on the surrounding farmland for their sustenance. This again illustrates the need for balance. “There are no longer any ecosystems that are not conditioned or influenced by human interference; nowhere in the world – not even in the Amazon or in the nature parks in Africa. This is not important: if you look at history, it is more than clear that biodiversity has increased hugely through human interference and regulation.”
Van der Ploeg admits that while 20th century agriculture did destroy many plant and animal species, the current environmental policies also don’t enhance biodiversity. On the contrary, they threaten it. “Nature reserves are insufficiently managed; there is an illusion that by leaving things untouched, a “better” nature will develop. Nature itself is the first victim of this fiction,” he says.
Metz – originally a Californian – says that wilderness is only an illusion in this moulded and remoulded country; perhaps the Dutch should not seek this wilderness in their home country, perhaps they should try to be satisfied with an iris instead of a rare orchid, and appreciate a buzzard instead of yearning for a sea eagle. “It is important to protect nature and biodiversity in the various ecosystems, but it is pointless to deny that man plays a role in this protection,” she says.
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