Learning from the Low Lands #2: A Council in the Sea Kingdom
(Old) Zeeland and the Oosterscheldekering: the Netherlands as a humanist, hopepunk Númenor
This is the second article in the “Learning from the Low Lands” series, chronicling my travel and research in the Netherlands. Here’s an embed link to the first.
After leaving Amsterdam on a fine evening in mid-January, I was welcomed to the fascinating Dutch province of Zeeland (aka Old Zealand, the one New Zealand is named after!) by local historian Dr. Johan Sturm, at the Middelburg train station. Dr. Sturm was a fascinating guide to Zeeland’s history and culture. He lived in a Middelburg home so rich in history that he was writing a book about the building, with a wall-mounted picture of his 1500s ancestor Ioannes Sturmius, a Renaissance education reformer.
The next morning, we joined a group bus tour of Zeeland historical sites, on the way to the Stichting Blauwe Lijn (Blue Line Foundation) conference on the history and future of Dutch water management. Zeeland has a lot of water management-related historical sites, and visiting them in sequence tells the story of an extraordinary arc of progress. As the bus rolled forward, we soon heard that the placid, sugar beet-filled fields we were crossing were once seabed, part of the great centuries-long Dutch land reclamation efforts. One study has found that a staggering 65% of the current land area of the Netherlands would be underwater at high tide were it not for the intricate networks of dikes, polders, pumps, and dunes, tended for generations, that protect the land from the sea. (Dikes are earthen barriers used to prevent low-lying land from being flooded, while polders are the dike-enclosed pieces of low-lying land). As one old saying goes, the real “largest human-made structure visible from space” is the Netherlands itself.
One of our first stops was the Great Flood (or Watersnoodramp) Museum. My host had been born in 1953, the year of the North Sea flood that caused over 1,800 deaths, around 70,000 emergency evacuations, and widespread damage in the Netherlands, with the affected areas mostly in Zeeland. Keep in mind, this was just eight years after the end of World War II, during which the Dutch people were occupied by Nazi Germany and endured a brutal famine known as the Hunger Winter until liberated by the Allies. At the time of the flood, the Netherlands had only just stopped receiving America’s Marshall Plan aid to rebuild. This was a major disaster arriving right on the heels of one of the most horrific parts of human history. However, instead of being a “straw that broke the camel’s back,” the Great Flood of 1953 catalyzed an incredible wave of innovation and socio-technological progress in the Netherlands.
The traumatic experience shaped the low-lying nation’s modern flood prevention efforts, launching an epic decades-long building project that culminated in an unprecedentedly large and complex network of water management infrastructure known as the Delta Works. This system of massive dams, locks, dikes levees, and storm surge barriers is widely considered in engineering circles to be a modern wonder of the world. Its largest component is the Oosterscheldekering, a kilometers-long storm surge barrier buttressed by artificial islands and interspersed with sluice-gates.
The flood museum was housed in a number of “caissons,” giant concrete blocks of the type deployed to plug the holes in the dikes, dozens of which had opened during the Great Flood. After a quick breakfast stop for coffee and excellent pastries, we went to the only such Great Flood dike breach that had remained unclosed; the Schelphoek, which has been left as a nature reserve. More and more, the Netherlands is integrating nature into their coastal flood management plans. For example, a fascinating project called the Sandmotor placed a large amount of sand in shallow waters and let the currents carry it to where it could do the most good in shoring up the coast.
We had also driven by the Temple of Nehalennia, although we didn’t have time to stop to visit1. This fascinating cultural monument was one of the reasons I’d come to the Netherlands in the first place, after writing about it in my newsletter a year ago. The twentieth century saw the rediscovery of Nehalennia, a Celto-Roman goddess of the sea and trade worshipped in what’s now Zeeland around 200 CE. My host Dr. Sturm, with a colleague, had led a fascinating project to build a reconstructed temple to Nehalennia in the Zeeland village of Colijnsplaat, where fishermen had discovered remnants of a Roman-era temple. I was to visit that temple in full the next day, but it’s an experience that really deserves an article of its own.
Growing up in Colijnsplaat had also shaped Dr. Sturm’s interest in water management history; the village was once home to Johannis de Rijke, a civil engineer who arrived in Meiji Japan in 1873 and became instrumental in developing the Japanese government’s water management infrastructure, from flood prevention to the development of the ports of Yokohama and Kobe. Apparently the field of Japanese water engineering still uses several terms adapted from the Dutch language thanks to his influence. I’d never even heard of de Rijke before, but Dr. Sturm was a devoted admirer; part of the reason he was going to the Blue Line Foundation conference in the first place was as part of broader efforts to raise awareness of his legacy, with 2024 as a “Year of de Rijke.”
Eventually, we finally got to our conference location, the Topshuis. And the Topshuis was impressive as heck. When I’d accepted the invitation to the Blue Line conference in the Netherlands, I hadn’t given much thought to where it would take place. I was imagining, like, an office block. But it’s closer in spirit to the bridge of the starship Enterprise. The Topshuis is the command center for the Oosterscheldekering, or the “Eastern Scheldt storm surge barrier” in English, the crown jewel of the Delta Works.
And the Oosterscheldekering is amazing. The whole thing is a giant machine, one of the largest human-made movable structures on Earth. It’s the largest component of the great generational Delta Works project built after the 1953 floods to safeguard the Dutch coastline. It’s nine kilometers long and made of 65 giant pillars, interspersed with a few wind turbine-bearing artificial islands. (Being driven along this and seeing the wind turbines, giant pillars, and ocean was a really impressive visual!) Between these stationary points hang sixty-two giant slidable gates, each gate about 42 meters high by 6-12 meters long and weighing between 260 and 480 tons. It’s so unique that many of its parts were specially built for this project alone.
All 62 of these sliding gates are normally left open, but can be closed at the push of a button when storm surge starts raising the ocean’s water level. (Heartwarmingly, they’re left open by default not for flood defense reasons, but for ecological reasons, so that the Eastern Schelde delta can remain a semi-marine ecosystem). And that control center is located in the Topshuis. (We didn’t get to see the actual control center, but the conference was in the same building!). When we entered, we saw that the vast open space of the central Topshuis was adorned with bright yellow banners bearing black text extolling the Netherlands’ water management engineering: WATER YOU THINKING?, BRING IN THE DUTCH!, SAFE TO DO THE WAVE, and GO WITH THE FLOW, BUT STOP AT THE DELTA WORKS.
There was a delightful “muscular humanism” quality about these slogans that I really liked: unabashed pride in an extraordinary engineering accomplishment, nationalist-inflected slogans celebrating human excellence and creativity deployed for a cooperative greater good instead of competition, or exclusion. That’s a spirit that the world could use more of, especially as the clean energy transition and climate change adaptation demand more infrastructure projects. The Dutch societal pride in these great works of peace and prosperity is perhaps best exemplifed by the two incredibly badass quotes associated with the Oosterscheldekering. When formally opened by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands in 1986, she famously said “De stormvloedkering is gesloten. De Deltawerken zijn voltooid. Zeeland is veilig.” (The flood barrier is closed. The Delta Works are completed. Zeeland is safe.) And at one end of the great movable barrier, a plaque is incribed “Hier gaan over het tij, de maan, de wind en wij” (“Here the tide is ruled by the moon, the wind and us”).
That’s pretty freaking impressive!
With a few refreshing breaks for some excellent cheese sandwiches and impressively fresh and delicious apples (the Netherlands is big on cheese2, and we’d passed apple trees in the bus on the way to the Topshuis), the rest of the day was spent in conference mode, with all the featured speakers, breakout rooms, and Brownian motion of discussion groups that that implies. Most of the speeches, conversations and workshops were in Dutch, which I didn’t speak beyond a few basic words like “Alstublieft” (a lovely all-purpose pleasantry). However, almost everyone spoke and understood English and would switch to it upon request (really quite extraordinarily courteous!), so I got to have some excellent learning experiences throughout the day.
A representative of the Dutch government, Coastal Flood Risk Management Advisor Quirijn Lodder, discussed the Netherlands’ advance planning for upgrading flood defenses to deal with sea level rise. Advisor Lodder emphasized the extraordinary return on investment provided by the Dutch coastal defense systems: roughly speaking, it costs about 1-2 billion euros per year, just 0.5% of GDP, to protect approximately 3,000 billion worth of assets (i.e. most of the Netherlands). Mr. Lodder also noted that the Dutch Parliament had discussed and funded coastal protection plans and preemptive climate defense upgrades through 2050.
It’s worth emphasizing how impressive this is: the Netherlands maintains a highly developed, high standard of living economy with most of its territory completely below sea level (65%, remember!), for less than 1% of its GDP per year! Of course, that’s so low now in large part because they’ve made smart investments in the past, so they’re now maintaining and upgrading existing infrastructure (actually building the Delta Works cost about 20% of national GDP), but it’s no less of a very impressive result.
A Dr. Renata van der Weiden of Middelburg’s University College Roosevelt (yes, named after the American presidents, who were of Zeelander descent!) told me about DrinkableRivers.org. I’d never heard of the group before, but it sounds right up this newsletter’s street. It’s an NGO lobbying for clean water on the simple premise that rivers ought to be drinkable (brilliant clear goal identification and communication there!), led and founded by Dutch ecologist Li An Phoa, who rose to fame for her exploratory journeys tracing the entire length of rivers on foot.
A Dr. Mark Voorendt of the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) discussed his area of expertise: urban flood defenses. When pressed to give advice for any readers that might be connected with such projects, he demurred at first, emphasizing the importance of specific local knowledge. Finally, he commented that as a general principle it was unwise to rely too much on numerical models of potential flooding, or to come to believe that any modelling program could output a definite truth that could be counted on: validation with ground-truthing remains paramount.
For me, the primary takeaway from the whole day’s experience, from the Flood Museum to the Oosterscheldekering to the Topshuis to the fascinating folks within, was one of a profoundly reassuring air of deep-rooted competence, with expert process knowledge on coastal flood risk management deeply integrated into Dutch society and culture. Destabilizing Antarctic ice sheets mean that sea level rise will likely be an ongoing global problem for decades if not centuries, but catastrophic flood predictions don’t take human ingenuity into account. From Manhattan to the Mekong Delta, Earth has lots of high-population density low-lying areas that have an excellent chance at following the Netherlands’ model of holding back the sea, thanks to ongoing global economic growth and technological development. I came away feeling more optimistic than ever before about human civilization’s capacity to hold off, adapt to, strategically manage, and generally deal with sea level rise and build a good Anthropocene despite it.
On a more abstract narrative level, the Netherlands strongly reminded this writer of a more hopepunk and humanist version of Tolkien’s fictional Númenor3. This proud mercantile sea kingdom has engineered4 their way out of the Drowning, and is working on long-term plans to continue that in the face of climate change5.
One of the many things I’m trying to contribute to in a small way by writing The Weekly Anthropocene is developing a more hopeful and inspiring narrative of human civilization and its response to climate change. We are not hopeless eco-sinners doomed to be woefully struck down by the forces we have unleashed, we are a brilliant, unprecedented mega-band of clothes-wearing plains apes who’ve created extraordinary wealth, prosperity, art, culture, and science thanks to incredible technological innovation, and we’re now starting to manage the major negative externalities of our civilization (air pollution, global warming, biodiversity loss) by transitioning to clean energy and working to establish new ways that humans and ecosystems can thrive alongside each other. The story of humanity and its biosphere is awesome, and the Netherlands in general (and the Delta Works specifically) are a great physical incarnation of some of our present accomplishments and an inspiration for future ones. Well done!
I think I’m telling the story of this bus tour a bit out of chronological order, but I trust you’ll get the gist.
As I recall, the fascinating book on the developmental economic history of the Netherlands I was reading during this trip, Pioneers of Capitalism, reports that archaeologists have found Dutch folks of the Middle Ages to be unusually tall for the period, likely due to the low-lying boggy region specializing in dairy products as an export commodity to be traded for cereal crops and thus having relatively abundant protein available.
If the Tolkien references are confusing (this writer is a big fan of the legendarium!), here’s some background. J.R.R. Tolkien, famed author of Lord of the Rings, wrote a highly detailed “backstory” for his created world of Middle-earth, in which a major historical arc was the rise and fall of Númenor, a seafaring kingdom that became a renowned naval and exploratory power before degrading into a cruel empire and eventually seeing their island sunk by a great flood caused by divine wrath. In Tolkien’s mythic world, a flooded kingdom is the result of a fall from virtue being punished by the gods; in this one, a flooded kingdom can just invest in really good hydrological engineering.
Dang, now I really want to read a fan fiction in which Númenor reforms and builds its own version of the Delta Works.
If we extend this metaphor (and wilfully mix up different eras of Middle-earth history), the Blue Line Foundation meeting was a bit like LOTR’s famed Council hosted by Elrond at Rivendell.
Now, I’m not exactly saying that King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands is a descendant of Elros Tar-Minyatur, but I’m not not saying that either. ;)
Thanks so much for this ongoing series on the Netherlands. I was a fan of your newsletter before this series, but even more so now. My grandfather's family goes back many centuries in Zeeland. I plan to visit there this summer, and these marvels are now on my itinerary.
As a recent immigrant to the Netherlands, I've been trying to impress on various Antipodean friends just how astonishing the Deltawerken are, and how thoroughly they embody the Dutch spirit. As you say, the flood of 1953 would have defeated many, particularly after the horrific experiences of WWII. It reminds me of the resilience of my new home, Rotterdam, which so spectacularly and innovatively reinvented itself after being obliterated by German bombs.
I'll be sharing these excellent articles in this series. Thank you!