LANDMAKING

A history of land reclamation

One cannot talk about environmental problems in the Netherlands without talking about the land itself. The Dutch have a long and complicated history with the water that often threatens the country. Therefore, ‘The Fight Against the Water’ is an important part of Dutch history and Dutch identity. The name of the country in and of itself already implies its precarious geological position: Nederland means ‘low land’ and the country is often dubbed as De Lage Landen (The Low Lands). I remember being shown a map of what my country would look like without its current infrastructure of dikes, polders, and seawalls in elementary school and how I was shocked to see that my house would be underwater if it weren’t for these infrastructures.

People started to settle what is now the western part of the Netherlands because of population growth in parts that were already inhabited. People were pushed to areas that were increasingly less appealing to settle. Large parts of the western Netherlands were peat marshes with low forests growing on them, and the risk of flooding in those marshes made them less attractive as places to settle. Therefore, the expansion of settlements went from higher-lying areas to low-lying areas, which started to happen around 800 A.D.

From this period onward, the settlers started manipulating the land for agriculture. They drained peat marshes to be able to cultivate grains, which resulted in the peat starting to decompose after it had been locked from oxygen supply for centuries. This decomposition process caused the collapse of the peat structures, which resulted in the soil sinking, sometimes multiple meters, over a period of 1000 years. Storm surges sometimes caused former peat marshes to be turned into lakes, decreasing the area of available land in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

With the water encroaching on the now low-lying lands, people started building dikes to surround and protect the land. Additionally, it was sometimes decided to pump water out of the lakes to create more land available for agriculture and to create a bigger buffer between residential areas and the sea. This process of polderen happened by using windmills as pumps and happened over a period of more than 400 years, starting in 1533 with the Achtermeer as the first polder, and with the province of Flevoland in 1975 as the most recent project. Even though the transformation of bodies of water into land for agriculture and habitation was often deemed necessary as flood protection, it still had a devastating effect on the existing communities around those areas. The creation of a polder could make towns that used to have access to open seas landlocked, resulting in a drastic change in available work and the lived culture. For instance, the town where I grew up, Jisp, used to be an industrious whaling village with direct access to the Zuiderzee, which was connected to the North Sea. In the seventeenth century its surrounding areas were turned into polders, and it is now a landlocked village that is 20 kilometers away from the ocean it used to be directly connected to.

The most recent and most tremendous change in landscape happened with the implementation of the ‘Zuiderzeewerken’ between 1920 and 1975, with the intention to turn the Zuiderzee, a semi-inland extension of the North Sea, into a lake by building a 32 km dike between the provinces of Noord-Holland and Friesland. Additionally, a 1500 km2 area (twice the area of New York City) of the Zuiderzee would be turned into a new province; Flevoland. This caused many towns whose major source of income depended on sea fishing to lose their access to the sea, or becoming landlocked by the emergence of Flevoland.

This history of landmaking shows that the Dutch have been successful in manipulating land and water with technological advancements to prevent them from being flooded too often. A part of the Dutch identity is built around the notion that “they created their own country”. The aforementioned examples show that the country seems to decide to implement major changes, despite the tremendous effects these changes have on the livelihood of some people, as long as it benefits the many. This tradition of sacrifice has resulted in a contemporary approach towards to issues of sustainability that are highly technocratic without taking societal implications into consideration. It is entirely in line with how this country has operated before.

400 year investment cycle

Wetlands and marshlands are now widely recognized as ecosystems that function as buffers that protect their hinterlands against fluctuations in sea level. The Dutch made money from draining the wetlands back in the day, and today they are making money from building dikes or remaking the wetlands their ancestors destroyed or altered. In this 400-year investment cycle, the Dutch are making money by selling a fix to a problem they helped to create themselves. Moreover, the creation of this problem at the time was seen as fixing another problem: that of transforming ‘unusable’ swamplands and marshes into arable and buildable land. Dutch engineers and merchants were hired to transform these landscapes into more useful land, which was a lucrative business. Today, Dutch engineers are paid again, but this time it is to fix the mistakes their ancestors made. Somehow, the Dutch are hailed internationally as innovators who have the best adaptation strategies for sea level rise, but somewhere in the narrative the fact that the Dutch also played a significant role in making landscapes less adaptable to sea level rise got lost. Thus, the Dutch are receiving all the credit for coming up with solutions, but they barely get any of the blame for significantly contributing to the problem.

Jason W. Moore, and Charles Wilson before him, have observed that the trade routes of the East and West India companies played a big role in implementation of capitalism on a global scale. These companies used capital accumulation and trade imperialism and exploitation of peoples in all corners of the world for the betterment of merchants in the Dutch Republic. One big export product of the two Companies was the selling of the dredging and draining services of Dutch engineers. Part of their contracts was often a partial ownership of the land they reclaimed, or shares in the company they worked for.

“Wherever Dutch capitalists went in the north they were to be found draining swamps, clearing forests, building canals, opening mines, building ships, mills, factories for gunpowder, glass, textiles. Thus Amsterdam capital reached out into Europe’s backward areas, fertilising and fructifying as it went.” (Wilson, p. 78)

It is generally acknowledged that the imperialist trade practices of the Dutch Republic and the East and West India Companies did have widespread global social and economic consequences. However, the previous section shows us that exploited communities and countries also had to deal with environmental and ecological degradation as a result of the land management strategies of the Dutch. This ecological dimension of the practices of the Dutch Republic and East and West India Companies therefore implies that the Dutch capitalism that was practiced and spread at that time was not only based on social and economic alterations of society, but also environmental alterations.