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Outside Magazine June 2003

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How Green Is My Polder
With their nifty new windmills, tidy techno-homes, and enviro-crusading queen, the Dutch are busy creating the cutest little ecotopia on earth—while stoking a booming hypercapitalist economy. What does tiny Holland know that America is too big and dumb to figure out?

By Florence Williams


	Cleaner and smarter: The new face of Holland, where it's cmpulsively neat and everything works. (Martin Parr)

IN HOLLAND, the queen travels in a Ford. It's a roomy dark-blue sedan, and the windows are only slightly tinted, not celebrity-style dark. Through them, on a late-May afternoon in the central Dutch city of Haarlem, you can see the queen's Princess Di hat, her toothy smile, and, of course, the regal wave that all queens learn at queen camp. A pair of punked-out motorcycle escorts ride alongside the car—tall, blond men in psychedelic orange jackets and tight leather pants. The convoy pulls up in front of 17th-century Doopsgezinde Church, where a lone, burly policeman with a ponytail and an earring is standing around, occasionally looking both ways.

It's a bit of a letdown, really. David Letterman has tighter security than this. And where's the golden coach, the huge, adoring throng? The crowd numbers a few dozen at best, including a bored pedestrian eating a sandwich and three Indonesian transplants leaning out a window above their restaurant across the street. It seems that nearly everyone in this proudly classless society has seen plenty of their 65-year-old queen—officially called "Beatrix, by the Grace of God Queen of the Netherlands, Princess of Orange-Nassau, etc., etc., etc.," but more informally known as Trix—and counts her as one of them. More or less.

Trix alights wearing a pink checked suit. She looks terribly pleased to be here, standing between the mayor, wearing a heavy ceremonial medallion, and the nervous, sweating teenage winner of an essay contest. The occasion is the 250th anniversary of the Royal Holland Society of Arts and Sciences, a lecture-happy outfit who will present the queen with a new book, Mappae Mundi: Humans and Their Habitats in a Long-Term Socio-Ecological Perspective. It's about mankind's dire influence on nature, one of Trix's favorite topics.

The queen is so close I can practically smell the bouquet of white alchemilla she's holding. Placid and plump, she seems completely benign as she chats maternally with the teenager about his studies. But don't be fooled: Beneath that understated pomp is an ax-wielding warrior-queen with no tolerance for slacking when it comes to healing the earth.

Who knew? The Dutch found out back in 1988, when Trix scooted over to Parliament to deliver her annual Christmas speech. The populace expected the usual bland address; instead she jolted them out of their waffle-induced holiday stupor by calling for an environmental revolution on a scale that no other nation had ever attempted. That fall, nearly 2,000 harbor seals had washed up dead on North Sea beaches, victims of distemper, their immune systems weakened by toxic chemicals. Pollution was rampant, industrial fumes were stinking up seaside resorts, and flooding rivers had everyone worried about climate change.

"At Christmas, the joyous anniversary of Jesus' birth," Beatrix began, "light breaks through in a world darkened by man's egotism and lust for domination over his fellow man and nature." Yowza. "We feel that darkness today," she intoned with Judi Dench-like authority, "in all its frightening gloom, as the future of creation itself is at stake." Scolding the Dutch about the ecological fallout of their standard of living, Trix went on to say it was high time "the position was reviewed and our way of life adjusted accordingly."

Everyone in Holland remembers that speech. And in stark contrast to what would happen if, say, Prince Charles delivered a similar diatribe in England, Parliament obediently set about converting Trix's words into action, enacting a radical 25-year plan that would, a decade and a half later, turn Holland into a world model for environmental and economic sustainability. By 1999, the country had spent more than $66 billion on the effort. Today, North Sea winds spin turbines to make electricity; toilets are flushed with rainwater; and everything from dead cars to manure gets recycled. In one of the biggest national makeovers in history, this boggy, industrialized country has become one of the greenest societies on earth.

Ecotopia exists, and it wears clogs.

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Outside correspondent FLORENCE WILLIAMS wrote about biodiesel in September 2003.

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