How Green Is My Polder (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine June 2003

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How Green Is My Polder (Cont.)

UNDER HOLLAND'S constitution, the queen enjoys three important rights: the right to be consulted, the right to warn, and the right to encourage. She also retains the unwritten right to avoid foreign journalists like food poisoning. I imagine Beatrix eating organic vegetables and dancing around in hemp skivvies, but I can't get anywhere near her. After much fruitless begging, my consolation prize is an audience with an important official named Albert Van der Beesen, 59, a senior policy adviser at the Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management. We meet inside his bright, spacious office in The Hague. Van der Beesen's gray mustache is, like Dutch shrubbery, both voluminous and perfectly tidy. He wears a brown tie emblazoned with yellow tulips, and there's a fresh bouquet of the real thing by his window. The author of the Green Plan's water requirements, he offers me a glass of Holland's finest H2O, commenting that it tastes much better than ours.

"We don't use chlorine," he sniffs. "We use technology. Membrane bioreactors."

As royal speechwriter and adviser, Van der Beesen is responsible for the environmental education of Crown Prince Willem-Alexander, the dashing 36-year-old son of Queen Beatrix. Like his mom, the prince has made the environment, specifically water quality, his cause (that is, when he's not flying jets for KLM or hopping to the Antilles with Princess Maxima, his knockout Argentinian bride). Nicknamed the Water Prince, he is a member of the World Bank/UN-sponsored Global Water Partnership. At home he gives speeches on phosphate pollutants to engineers and municipal governors. Not something you'll see Jenna Bush doing anytime soon.

The environment, it turns out, is a family obsession. The queen's father, Prince Bernhard, now 91, founded the World Wildlife Fund in 1961 and is still president of the Netherlands chapter. Her late husband, Prince Claus, was a patron of historic preservation and environmental protection. Trix's younger sister Princess Irene wrote a Gore-esque book in 1995 called Dialogue with Nature, in which she recounts melodramatic conversations with trees and dolphins. "Make yourself humble and feel, breathe," the dolphins tell her. "Overcome your fear and be our ambassador."

It's hard to imagine our own ruling dynasty getting that gauzy. George W. Bush may have a solar-heated pool cabana at the White House, but let's face it, the guy is fond of fossil fuels—as, of course, are many of us gas-guzzling voters. This is unfortunate, not only for the environment but also for America's future GNP. The Dutch now dominate energy technologies like cogeneration and wind turbines—huge and expanding markets. Meanwhile, America's trade gap is big enough to drive an ethanol-powered truck through.

Already, some American industries are trying to play catch-up. Following in Ford's tracks, General Motors announced this winter that it was no longer skeptical about hybrid cars, and would start developing the technology. But is anyone in the U.S. really taking the Dutch model seriously? Well, yes. Good ol' New Jersey. During the 1990s, then-governor Christine Todd Whitman—now head of Bush's EPA— sent several delegations from New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection to study the Dutch system. As a result, the state now has one of the strongest greenhouse gas reduction plans in the country and is working on a serious smart-growth strategy. New Jersey is on target to reduce its emissions by 3.5 percent as of 2005, while maintaining a 3.8 percent growth rate in statewide domestic product and a 4 percent annual increase in population. Like the Netherlands, the state has used voluntary contracts and rewards companies that show the most improvement.

"Our economy didn't shut down," says Mike Winka, director of the state's Office of Clean Energy. "Our industries didn't move out. We have one of the strongest economies in the country, and our businesses and residents are saving one and a half billion a year in energy efficiency. We're telling the feds, 'Learn from us.' "

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