How Green Is My Polder (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine June 2003

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How Green Is My Polder (Cont.)


	A harried soccer mom in Nieuwland (Martin Parr)

IN MANY WAYS, BAILING OUT THE PLANET is the perfect role for the Dutch. After all, they invented the nation-state, the stock market, and New York City. They also eagerly embraced the good-works teachings of 16th-century theologian John Calvin, creating a society of social tolerance and guilty self-improvement, designing a huge welfare apparatus, and spending 1 percent of GNP in aid to developing nations, a figure rivaled only by Norway and Denmark.

But there's another, less altruistic reason behind the recent environmental fervor: Almost all of Holland is below sea level, saved from the Big Dunk only by centuries of frantic seawall construction, thousands of miles of engineered canals and dikes, and fleets of pumps that keep the flat community farmlands, called polders, dry. So residents tend to worry a bit about global warming.

America is not Holland, nor do we want it to be. We're unruly; we like space; we hate taxes. But even New Jersey has learned from the tulip clutchers, reducing emissions and limiting growth without denting its economy.

"We've been fighting the rivers and the sea since 1300," says Jaap Jelle Feenstra, 48, secretary of public affairs for the Port of Rotterdam and a retired member of Parliament's environment committee. "It's why we're so afraid of climate change. It's why we have strong environmental policies. It's not because we're better people, but because it's necessary."

Still, that doesn't explain how they pulled it off. To get a grasp of that, I pay a visit to one of the main shepherds of the Green Plan. Cees Moons, 52, is a rumpled, somewhat sallow bureaucrat who works in the Ministry of Housing, Physical Planning and the Environment in The Hague, the Netherlands' seat of government. A dozen cigarette stubs languish in the ashtray on his desk, no doubt testing the innovative fresh-air filters in the ministry's gorgeous new modernist building. The director of external safety and a chemical engineer, Moons spends a lot of time on the road explaining the plan to other governments. He apologizes for his jet lag and then echoes Feenstra's point that green thinking works in Holland, and industries go along, because it makes good sense.

"We found out that sustainable solutions are feasible and affordable," he says. "We call it Ôthe silent revolution.' "



	Hey, I can't find my car: bike parking in Amsterdamn. (Martin Parr)

Moons explains that, to turn its swampy wetlands into farms, Holland has long relied on a consensus-based "polder model" of cooperation, and that officials applied this spirit to the enviro-crusade. Under voluntary but binding covenants, each industrial sector came up with its own ways to meet environmental targets. Some groused in the beginning, but in Holland, unlike America, corporate suits are comfortable with central planning.

Besides, industry got a few concessions. Corporations can trade emissions credits, negotiate subsidies for new technologies, and enjoy huge tax breaks for overshooting their environmental targets. Citizen groups like Greenpeace—to which 10 percent of Dutch households belong—watch over the process and report to government and the press. Fines kick in if targets are not met.

Given its proven successes, the major tenets of the Green Plan are highly popular with Dutch citizens and pretty much impregnable, despite recent turbulence in Dutch politics. In the last year alone, Holland has weathered two emergency elections, three different parliaments, and the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, a gay right-wing candidate for prime minister gunned down by an angry vegan who believed Fortuyn would harm Muslim asylum-seekers and scale back environmental gains. Dutch politics can seem crazy to Americans—one left-leaning administration resigned last spring after a report came out condemning the failure of Dutch peacekeeping troops to prevent a 1995 massacre in Bosnia; a right-leaning coalition fell apart last fall simply because its members couldn't stop bickering. The broader pattern of late has been a shift toward relatively conservative politicians whose main issues are lax drug laws and the continuous stream of immigrants from North Africa. Dutch military spending has been holding steady at a little less than 2 percent of the GDP, compared with the United States' 3.5 percent. But despite making other budget cuts, the country's new right has not shown much inclination to take on the Green Plan.

If anything, the plan has grown more ambitious. Updated in the fall of 2001 in a new version—crafted largely by Moons—that extends to 2030, the augmented plan aims to improve upon the piddling requirements of the Kyoto Protocol. Holland now intends to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by an additional 50 percent over what Kyoto requires, and to spend $430 million to buy emission-reduction credits for sustainable projects in developing countries.

"We go post-Kyoto on a global scale," Moons says emphatically. "It's just being smart."

To fulfill that post-Kyoto, post-Calvinist global salvation mission, the Dutch have created the most widely used climate-modeling software in the world, the Integrated Model to Assess the Global Environment (IMAGE). They've also pioneered an interlinked system of computer models to apply economic factors to environmental problems, calculating the costs of pollution in terms of sick days, disability, and adjusted life expectancy.

They are becoming, in short, the Microsoft of green thinking. "We're the biggest of the small countries," Moons declares, stabbing his desktop with a pencil. "We want to influence things."

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