How Green Is My Polder (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine June 2003

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How Green Is My Polder (Cont.)

OBVIOUSLY, WE CAN ONLY GO so far with this imitate-the-Dutch stuff. America is not Holland, nor do we want it to be. We're unruly, we like space, we hate taxes, we don't like monarchs, and we do like something that Holland lacks entirely: wilderness. The Netherlands may be neat, but it doesn't have our happy mess of wolves and craggy mountains, and it never will.

When the Dutch hit the great outdoors, their choices are pretty much limited to boating, riding bikes, skating, walking by flat canals, or wadlopen, a national pastime that involves wading through seaside mudflats at low tide. The idea is to encounter an island, a boat, or a helicopter before the tide comes back and sweeps you to Norway. It's a perfect metaphor for being Dutch: Beat the sea or die.

I try it with a group of 70 pale engineers from Amsterdam on a company outing. We enter the sea from a high grassy berm, a parade of tourist Jesuses walking across the shallow water toward hazy nothingness. The plan is to march eight miles out in the Waddenzee, the sound between Holland's coast and its North Sea islands, to a nature preserve called Rottumeroog. And as we slurp farther from land, I'm feeling surprisingly great. It's warm. The sun is out and winds are from the east, so the seawater is only up to our waists.

Granted, the factories of Germany are visible in the distance, and the most charismatic carnivore in sight is a skinny guy eating a cheese-topped wiener. And biodiversity Dutch-style means crabs, sea worms, and birds—lots of birds. When we emerge from the muck and onto the island in a condensed pageant of evolution, I'm excited to see them. Long-migrating terns, three-toed sandpipers, sea hawks, ospreys, spoonbills, oystercatchers, and plovers. There is a pleasant breeze, and Holland is a pleasant country. Yes, indeed.

Then, just as we are congratulating ourselves on our good fortune, we come upon a heart-wrenching sight: a freshly dead baby seal, confirmed later to be a victim of the same distemper that started Holland's green revolution in the first place.

All that effort and another dead seal? The Dutch still have some work to do.

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