Giving polders back to the sea

The inside of their building made me long for some life and green in our own, and dream of vines climbing the rails on the inside of the Rapson Hall courtyard.


Today we visited Wageningen University Research Centre, a part of ALTERRA, which is a school of everything land related. We had a presentation from Arjan Koomen about the geologic and geographic history of the Netherlands, as well as an introduction to the complex issues that they are currently facing relating to their future. The reclamation of land from the sea has had consequences that people at the time did not predict: to deal with the risks of flooding on three sides from the sea and internally from the major rivers that run through the country, they built a complex system of dikes and water drainage. Cities and agriculture grew on the newly protected peatlands, pumping water out of the land through canals to keep the land arable. Over hundreds of years this has led to soil subsidence and problems with salinization of the soil; in other words, the land is sinking and becoming salty, and thus soon will be uninhabitable. In addition to this, all the rivers have been dammed, and with no natural floodplains to absorb sedimentation their water levels have risen to a point where they are actually higher than the land around them, carried through the landscape by way of concrete channels. This is a disaster waiting to happen, and I couldn't help thinking that their traditional way of life in this part of the country is doomed. Then again, I think we are all in this boat. Though we have done our best to remove ourselves from larger ecological systems, there comes a point where we must face the fact that this is not possible. We cannot continue to live in a way that pretends we can exist within a closed system that disregards natural processes. We all must change. Each of us in our own way must give polders back to the sea and hope it is still possible to reclaim some kind of balance.

In other less dire news from the day, Jamuna and I went for a run through Utrecht this afternoon, dodging bikes and cars as we went. We found a lovely path along the canal through a park, with spring bulbs starting to peek up out of the grass, lots of birds and people out with their dogs, and the general bustling of little neighborhoods. Life goes on. We made a delicious dinner from our street market finds of tortellini, sun dried tomatoes, olives, feta, pesto and garlic and an equally as tantalizing salad with crispy bacon, dates, walnuts and lemon vinagrette. Two of my favorite things, a run and a delicious meal, have made me feel slightly more grounded in this frenetic new lifestyle of mine.