How Green Is My Polder (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine June 2003

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How Green Is My Polder (Cont.)


	Solar panels above the bike lane in Nieuwland (Martin Parr)

THE TYPICAL DUTCH STREET SCENE scene looks like this: A young woman is pedaling past a potato field or a city canal, a happy infant strapped into a handlebar seat, a happy toddler in the rear rack, and bread and Heineken in the saddlebags. Nobody is wearing a helmet, because the cars are generally polite and bikes have separate paths anyway. At the precisely zoned urban/rural interface, Mom pedals past houses fueled by natural gas made from recycled agricultural waste, with sod rooftops and tidy permaculture gardens. It's like Berkeley on a collective dose of Ecstasy, except that it's compulsively neat and everything works. To the Dutch, doing things cleaner and smarter is just common sense.

It's also the law. When Parliament passed its sweeping National Environmental Policy Plan, a.k.a. the Green Plan, in 1989, its stated task was to create, in one generation, a society of "negligible risk" for humans and ecosystems. And the crazy thing is, they're actually succeeding. Holland is buzzing right along, meeting most of its toxin-reducing, energy-saving, and land-use goals on schedule. More impressive, it's doing so without harming a gross domestic product that totaled $419 billion in 2002.

In 1988, the normally placid Queen Beatrix shocked the nation, delivering an environmental diatribe in place of her usual bland Christmas address. The people listened. Fifteen years later, Holland is one of the greenest societies on earth.

The Little Country That Could has been churning out amazing statistics. Since 1989, industry has reduced its waste output by 60 percent, sulfur-dioxide emissions have declined by 70 percent, and pollution from volatile organic compounds like dioxin has been halved. Holland has almost completely phased out ozone-depleting chemicals, and 20 percent of its households use green power, largely solar, wind, and biomass. That's more than anywhere in Europe, and far more than the U.S., where 1 percent of households use renewable energy, excluding large-scale hydropower.

The Dutch are easily on target to meet, by 2012, their Kyoto Protocol obligation of a 6 percent reduction in greenhouse gases, relative to 1990. By comparison, under the Bush Climate Change Initiative, the U.S. will increase emissions by 32 percent over the same period. While most of the world ratified the Kyoto accord last spring, the U.S. said no, courting infamy as a surly greenhouse delinquent. The Bush administration says we opted out to protect the economy, because compliance costs money and tramples competitive enterprise.



	Turbines outside Harlingen (Martin Parr)

But there go the Dutch again, proving to be an embarrassing example of economic robustness. The country's environmental gains in the 1990s were achieved while Holland's economy grew 3.5 percent a year, the highest rate in Europe. Holland has had the lowest unemployment on the continent, and personal incomes continue to rise despite hefty eco-taxes on transportation, conventional energy, and waste disposal, which make up a quarter of the total tax burden. Meanwhile, Dutch industries now lead the world in clean technologies and super-efficient manufacturing.

Not surprisingly, other countries are paying attention. Last winter, Denmark and the United Kingdom announced similar climate-saving plans. The European Union is basing much of its emissions-reduction policy on the Dutch model. New Zealand, China, and even our own pollution-challenged state of New Jersey are mimicking parts of the blueprint.

"Holland's was the first truly successful environmental recovery plan in history," says Huey Johnson, 70, president of the Resource Renewal Institute, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that educates states and nations about green strategies. Pointing to the Green Plan's unprecedented scope, he calls it "the best in the world, bar none. It's a doorway to the future."

"The Dutch play way above their weight class," agrees Paulo Almeida, 47, an international-relations specialist for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Almeida visited the Netherlands last year to learn, among other things, how the country disposes of manure, an increasing problem in the U.S., where livestock generates about a billion tons a year. The Dutch carefully regulate the stuff, dry it, and burn it as biofuel.

As Johnson and Almeida know, it's not easy getting U.S. officials to take cues from Holland, which they're apt to write off as a land where tulip-clutching hobbits run a pint-sized society that's nowhere near as complicated as ours. But that stereotype needs a rethink. Holland may be only one-eleventh the size of Montana, but it has 16 million people and is the most densely populated country in Europe. It's the world's third-largest exporter of agricultural goods, and the fifth-ranked supplier of chemicals. Rotterdam, its North Sea port, is the globe's busiest.

The bottom line is one that any U.S. administration ought to find compelling. The Dutch have figured out a way to make money while being green. More important, they make money from being green, exporting their innovative environmental technologies around the globe. America may scoff at a country that spends a significant amount of government manpower turning manure into biofuel, but it won't be us getting the last laugh.

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