Wilfried ten Brinke

This is a comprehensive history of the relationship between land and water in the development of the Netherlands, from the last Ice Age to our present concerns about global warming and rising sea levels. And there turns out to be a lot more to it than windmills and fingers-in-the-dyke.

Ten Brinke, who writes from the point of view of a professional engineer with a realistic sense of the practical problems his predecessors had to deal with, takes us in quite some detail (we're spared the maths, but for the rest there's not much obvious concession to the lay reader) through the physical processes that led to the development of the wet, sandy, peaty delta, and the way these processes were increasingly influenced by the activity of humans, from Roman times on. The interesting thing, when you've been fed the "God made the world but the Dutch made Holland" myth, is that so many of the things humans did turned out to have unintended consequences that led to problems (not infrequently: disasters) for which new, imaginative engineering solutions had to be found, and these in turn created other problems. The story, as ten Brinke tells it, is one of incrementally optimised blundering, often hindered by conflicts of interest. It is - almost - reassuring to know that even the supremely competent Dutch engineers have often had almost as much difficulty as their colleagues in other parts of the world getting landowners and politicians to invest in big flood defence projects without the stimulus of a recent disaster. Or at least it would be reassuring if I didn't happen to live in a polder myself.

Another interesting thing that came out of the book is to realise how many different, often conflicting, goals are involved. Making land available for agriculture and housing, facilitating water transport, providing clean drinking-water, keeping feet dry along the coasts and rivers and in the big cities, making space for nature conservation, and even providing for deliberate flooding to stop invading armies (the Dutch military were still devoted to this system as late as the early stages of the Cold War, even though both Hitler and Napoleon had demonstrated key flaws in it...). And it's sometimes astonishing how values change: Johan van Veen, the heroic figure who steered through the implementation of the Delta Project after the disaster of 1953, turns out also to have had a serious plan in his pocket to turn the Waddenzee and its islands (now seen as a tremendously important piece of natural heritage) into a giant polder. Unimaginable a few decades later...

Yet another thing that ten Brinke comes back to frequently is how important the development of administrative bodies to look after water and drainage was, from the medieval Waterschappen (dyke councils) to the establishment in Napoleonic times of the central authority that became Rijkswaterstaat. Even here, though, there was some trial and error involved - part of the reason the 1953 storm did so much damage was that the Waterschappen were too small and localised to maintain their dykes effectively under modern conditions (there are now about 27 such authorities in the Netherlands; in 1953 it was more like 2700).

This is a very nicely presented book, with the text backed up by dozens of maps (both historic and modern) and illustrations. But you need to be pretty familiar with Dutch geography to follow some of the explanations - I found I was spending a lot of time studying 1:25000 topo maps (which I have in an app on my iPad) to keep track of all the current and former rivers, islands, canals and dykes that come up in the discussion. And I also have the impression that I now have a much better idea of how the Dutch river system fits together and why that matters.… (altro)