How the World Breaks by Stan Cox

Author:Stan Cox
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620970133
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2016-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

COME SAIL AWAY

The homeland of hydrocontrol has paid the price for its accelerated armoring of coast and riverbank, as more people and industries moved into better-defended land, raising higher the consequences of failure. The last years of the Delta Works construction were marred by economically disastrous floods in 1993 and 1995. In 2006, the Netherlands’ water managers decided they couldn’t keep raising their bets, so they folded. The next works, a $2.8 billion project called Room for the River, not only reversed the tactic of the previous sixty years but, in a sense, represented a retreat from centuries of Dutch protective strategy. Along the Rhine, Meuse, Waal, and Ijssel Rivers, dikes have been pushed inland, floodplains restored, built obstacles removed, and sacrificial overflows established. The residents of these zones—whole towns, in some cases—have moved. The shift from armoring to acceptance has dramatically increased the safe carrying capacity of the rivers (although that increase depends on future developments upstream in Germany, France, and even Switzerland) and restored environmental quality through the delta.

Such a quick about-face is impressive and the voluntary movement of entire communities even more so. The ecological turn shows a softer side of the Dutch. The country’s regional Water Boards have existed since the thirteenth century, managing their respective patchworks of polders, dikes, and canals. They were the country’s first democratic institutions, and they represent the deep pilings of Dutch civic spirit. Living within a giant engineering experiment, the medieval Dutch learned, meant that communal concerns always came first, backed by the weight of water. This didn’t make Room for the River an easy task (the town hall arguments were long and vocal); it just made it possible.

From the moment it began, Room for the River was quickly absorbed into the Netherlands’ self-image and sales pitch. It’s a badge of environmental honor and engineering insight, but the ecological turn itself has not sold as well on the foreign market. Customers have reason to be skeptical of how ecological solutions—especially ones involving retreat—will fit with the free market. Is there a way to make room for the river, or the sea, without forcing a retreat?

Yes, there’s a design for that, too. In 2014, the Miami Herald reported on the latest pitch for a city that had tried everything else:

In the land of boom and bust where no real estate proposition seems too outlandish . . . a Dutch team wants to build Amillarah Private Islands, 29 lavish floating homes and an “amenity island” on about 38 acres of lake in the old North Miami Beach quarry connected to the Intracoastal Waterway just north of Haulover Inlet.

The villa flotilla, its creators say, would be sustainable and completely off the grid, tricked out to survive hurricanes, storm surge and any other water hazard mother nature might throw its way. Chic 6,000-square-foot, concrete-and-glass villas would come with pools, boathouses or docks, desalinization systems, solar and hydrogen-powered generators and optional beaches on their own 10,000-square-foot concrete and Styrofoam islands.

Asking price? About $12.5 million each.25

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