Polders and the Zuider Zee
with a little work, this is a nice spot
Politics & Crazy Commentary
It never ceases to amaze me that otherwise intelligent and educated folks set their sensibility aside when their politics interfere. I am not a climate expert or a weatherman. My point of view on the subject emerges from COMMON SENSE. One of my sons served overseas in Okinawa, Japan. While I have lived in the Southeast US and had some exposure to “hurricanes”, what my son J was exposed to constantly was a vastly different scale of storms called typhoons. Why are typhoons larger challenges than hurricanes? It is pretty simple, not controversial, and certainly beyond the scope for politicians and pundits who just hate things for hate's sake. The water in the Pacific is WARMER. That’s it, end of the story, please move along. When folks tell us the water in the Gulf of Mexico is hotter than it was 100 years ago, accept the results of a mercury bulb thermometer cheerfully and decide how to respond. This SIMPLY means the amount of energy available is INCREASED and the storms will hence be MORE SEVERE. Don’t take it personally and for Pete’s sake don’t argue about it with a “yeah but”. This is not a personal matter nor something to politicize. It is somethiing to rationally absorb and act accordingly. People who politicize it are NITWITS and you should assume it applies to other things they say. By the way, during his service I think my son was exposed to 165 MPH winds at least a couple of times. It’s all the more impressive if you go with 265 KPH. Tonight we won’t argue about the metric system though.
A Bit of Burnout
I have greatly enjoyed my 2nd Tuesday of the month history book club. This year, however, I have found it hard to commit to some of the books. The book we reviewed in September was titled “Three Ordinary Girls: The Remarkable Story of Three Dutch Teenagers Who Became Spies, Saboteurs, Nazi Assassins--and WWII Heroes”. I did not read the book but faithfully attended the monthly meeting hoping for some inspiration from others. Perhaps we have read my fill of WW II retrospectives. Perhaps I am trying to mix in other genres. There is a lot that pulls me into this wonderful group. My hopes were validated as the group spoke highly of the book.
I listened to the attendees and their reviews. This is my FAVORITE aspect of the club. One of the members waxed about the challenging Dutch names and some of the more unusual words unique to the region. One of them was polder. I had long ago started this post for a different reason but her comment made me return to finish this post. Inspiration can arrive by showing up. Because of attending, I went back and read the book after all! It was time well spent I think.
Inspiration
A while back I did a couple of posts about water, climate, and progress. Some of you have written me and said “I like some of your posts but who is your audience as your topics seem to jump around wildly”? I think that when you begin writing (after putting it off for half a lifetime) you are your audience. I don’t know yet what to write about and genuinely look for inspiration in my mind.
Water Worries
So what am I talking about in the “high-minded” inspiration paragraph? Today I am going to write a bit about an interesting and inspiring culture from northwest Europe, the Netherlands.
Today’s story builds on things I’ve posted about before like water, agriculture, and climate. I believe the WHOLE WORLD wants to learn and the best teachers of our lives brought us along on a journey and made the journey a joy. That is my aim and the tangents are the rest stops along the journey. Even when parts of a post seem to be an irritating meander or a tangent, I am trying to share my thinking process along the way.
There are so many ideas we’ve kicked around in my previous posts. Here are some that are important today
Water is fundamental. Our brains are 73% water. Our world is 71% covered by the ocean. Only 3% of the world’s water is fresh. About 90% of the freshwater in the world is stuck in the Antarctic ice sheet (which is melting). Only about 10% of the world’s freshwater is surface-accessible [about 0.3%] including the ice sheets. Without freshwater, this human experiment ends quickly. [ See Post “Just Water for Me” ]
If you are (1) stuck on a raft (2) drink some salt water (3) you will be dead very soon. It takes a lot of energy to get the salt out of the water so the ONLY WAY we “find” more water (hint desalination) is to figure out free energy that doesn’t lead to even more melting (renewables). Free energy just means energy that doesn’t exasperate the problem. Lots of carbon is sequestered in the ground. When we burn it and place it in the atmosphere, we are making the future solution more difficult [ See Post “Here Comes the Sun“ ]
Water levels are rising. This is pretty SIMPLE because the ice sheets are FRESHWATER and they are less dense than seawater. I posted about ice cubes floating in “Just Water for Me“. Humans are notorious for sticking with bad and objectively impossible ideas for centuries long after being objectively taught the truth. The things we are doing to raise the water level will continue just like people, 60 years after the surgeon general report, continue to smoke tobacco.
Truth comes in three flavors as I explore in my post titled “Truth”. I try most days to stick to the objective type of truth. Problems and challenges are often re-tagged as opportunities to the optimists of the world. I would imagine you will remain young if you spend more time with optimists than pessimists. One way to embrace and visualize success is that there may even be an inspiration from the past. One of the wonderful new words, at least for me today is polder and it is an old and quite regional word.
Water World
When I was in school I wondered whether the study of geography was all about trick questions and memorization. Sometimes it was Holland, and other times, the Netherlands. Regardless of what we called it, the people who lived there were called Dutch. This seems unnecessarily confusing to me. It turns out that the Netherlands just means a low-lying country. The Netherlands is a small country that has had an outsized influence on the world. While the rest of the world has begun to think about and ponder the consequences of the seas rising, this has been the reality for the Netherlands for hundreds of years.
The Netherlands is a little bigger than Maryland and has a population between Pennsylvania and New York. Its population and economy are similar in proportion to both of these northeastern states. Businesses we might associate with the Netherlands are Stellantis (the parent company for Chrysler), Royal Dutch Shell, Unilever, and Heinekin Heiniken with lots of diversified businesses in between.
What do the Dutch have to offer the world today? I think inspiration as no nation has figured out how to cooperate and thrive with nature and the challenges of the sea like the Dutch. Small countries with historically belligerent neighbors that fostered Empires (Britain, France, and Germany) are not a great location. Despite this, we rarely assess the role of the Dutch in wars, conquest, and misery. While they have surely made errors like all nations, it seems to me they have thrived and focused on their surroundings. Nowhere is Dutch know-how more obvious than in the world of water engineering. All of this happens in the shadow of the North Sea.
The video above inspired this post. My favorite tidbit is “the greatest water management program the world has ever seen cost $12B over 50+ years”. LA spent $5B building a football stadium. One of the outcomes of the Dutch project was reclaimed land three times the size of Singapore! For context, flood response in the US after Hurricane Harvey came in closer to $15.3B. We do this every year. Rebuilding flooded communities counts as economic growth. That seems like a dumb way to measure. Good for Home Depot which sells a lot of plywood and generators. [When I did my final proofread of this post we are dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Ian on the Florida gulf coast] — this is sad and predictable — the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and EXPECT different results — welcome to hurricane season. How many 10B$ storms before trying something different might be worth a go?
Think Different
Many years ago I saw a story about the mundane subject of road construction. The cost to build infrastructure always seems ridiculous, especially in the United States. The best context here is that the Dutch built the greatest water management project in the history of the world for $12B.
It seems to be the worst in large cities where red tape makes it almost impossible. This is an old story but positive about how the federal organization in The Netherlands does road construction. This seems inconceivable. It is not clear to me what the catch is or whether we simply embrace the bureaucracy. My favorite takeaway is crazy people who have probably never left their County in the United States just readily group the Dutch as “those crazy Socialists” because they live in Europe. Watching something like this and drawing a conclusion probably makes their head hurt and their mouths just have to blurt out “yeah but”. The crazy part of this time-lapse is that the work was done amidst a rainstorm. The owner of the video has marked it to be only viewable inside YouTube. You can still click on [Watch on YouTube] and ignore the unseemly graphic preview. The subject of this video is how to build a tunnel in a weekend.
The Dutch, like no other country on earth, have figured out (hundreds of years before we seem to face the same intractable challenges) to coexist with the sea. The Dutch call the blocks of land recovered from the sea and protected by dikes a polder. This is a great new word that the rest of the world might ponder as part of the solution to man-made climate change and sea rise.
Thoughtfulness With Technology
The Zuider Zee is a famous area in the Netherlands. It is easy, as I described in a prior post to fall for go big or go home and exotic technology. This is just old-fashioned hard work. This project has been in progress since 1927 and is a modest investment. There is a lot we can learn from this. While this video near the end becomes a bit of a marketing video, the beginning is awesome.
The Poll & Music
Here’s a song about windmills since that is what I think of when I think of the Netherlands. Finally, tonight I can reference one of my favorite artists. This, in my opinion, is the best song ever about flooding.
What’s Next
Next time, we have a Pot Pourri (Jeopardy Fans?) titled “Let’s Make Mirth — Part 1”
"Nitwits." A good word :-)
Hey Mark I enjoyed your post. I'm an American living in the Netherlands. An interesting little fact to add to your post is that the Netherlands offered to help the US with the devastating aftermath of hurricane Katrina. They declined. Imagine where things would be now if the result US learned from them earlier.