In the Netherlands, water has always been both a threat and a triumph. A quarter of the country lies below sea level, and for centuries the Dutch have engineered their way to safety. It’s a place not unlike New Orleans: a delta shaped by risk, resilience, and the belief that with enough ingenuity, water can be controlled. But as sea levels rise, that centuries-old confidence is beginning to crack.
In this episode of Sea Change, reporter Jonathan Groubert takes us to the Netherlands to explore a relationship in turmoil. From floating farms to visions of entire cities on water, the Dutch are beginning to rethink everything they thought they knew. The question is no longer how to win the war against water—but whether it’s time to learn how to live with it.
CREDITS
This episode was hosted by Executive Producer Carlyle Calhoun and Amsterdam-based journalist Jonathan Groubert. Jonathan reported this story. Fact-checking by Philip Kiefer. Our theme music is by Jon Batiste and sound design by Dennis Funk.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX. Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
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TRANSCRIPT
I’m Carlyle Calhoun, and you’re listening to Sea Change. The story we’re bringing you today is a dispatch from a place that in a lot of ways is kind of parallel to New Orleans. The Netherlands.
Living in a delta like the Netherlands means that the Dutch are constantly reinventing their relationship to water - a quarter of the country is below sea level. The Dutch have become masters of the water, bending it to their will with dikes and windmills and levies, pumping the water out to create land for fields and buildings on what was once open water. Dominion over the water is a Dutch tradition, of necessity.
Jonathan: You know, there's this expression, God made the world and the Dutch made the Netherlands
That’s Jonathan Groubert… An American journalist who has lived in Amsterdam for decades. He recently got in touch with me about an idea for a story and I was intrigued. He said the Dutch relationship with water is basically the country’s identity. And that the relationship is currently in turmoil.
As people on the Gulf Coast, and on coastlines around the world, wrestle with our own watery future, what can we learn from the Dutch?
Carlyle: So, Jonathan, I vaguely know that the Netherlands is famously below sea level, but I wonder, can you gimme a sense of scale.
Jonathan: So, the Netherlands itself, and I mean the whole country is only the size of Maryland, but it has tripled the population of Maryland, 18 million people, and that makes it Europe's most densely populated country. Now, the next thing you need to know is that almost all of the Netherlands is a river delta. The country is basically a giant floodplain...almost all of it is at risk of flooding. And a quarter of the country, and that's the part where the majority of people live, is below sea level.
Carlyle: And that’s something we can definitely relate to in New Orleans. I mean half the city is below sea level.
Jonathan: Right, and like New Orleans, the Dutch have only been able to build and sustain this incredible civilization of theirs because they got so good at controlling water and floods. all of these picturesque canals … they weren't built to be pretty, they were built to move the water around. And controlling the water is central to everything about this country.
Carlyle: Wow. Okay. So I asked you to go out somewhere in Amsterdam to any place that you thought represented something big and important about the Dutch relationship with water.
SFX: STATION SOUNDS
Jonathan Groubert: So I am standing here at the back of the monumental and gorgeous Amsterdam Central Station and the trains are rolling in and out of the station…Now, this is the spot that used to be the hub that would launch East India Company and West India Company ships that dominated the spice trade, the slave trade, and made the Netherlands the world's colonial superpower in the 17th century. /// It's also true that right here where I'm standing is two meters or nearly seven feet under sea level.
Carlyle: This is really interesting. So the Dutch are masters of controlling water, but how did the Dutch feel about climate change today? I mean, are they scared of sea level rise?
Jonathan: So. I'm gonna put on my untrained psychologist hat because this is fascinating about the Dutch. In my opinion I think that the people here are almost in a kind of denial. Now, let me play you some tape from some people waiting for the ferry near me.
Jonathan Groubert: What do you feel is the current Dutch relationship with the sea?
VOX 1: I know that the Dutch are on top of their game, um, with, um, keeping the sea at Bay. But still, we all know that when the sea levels rise, like two third of the whole country is gonna be under the water.
Jonathan: So Carlyle, did you hear that? She projects this confidence about how the Dutch can handle the water and then like literally in the same sentence she's saying, yeah, but climate change is coming in this big way. So like her thinking is like very split.
Carlyle: Mm-hmm.
Jonathan: Here’s another one.
VOX 2: Uh, I'm retired at the moment. Before that I was a fisherman.
Jonathan Groubert: You're the perfect person to speak with about this, aren't you? Are you afraid of sea level rise?
VOX 2: Yes. Yes. Yes. But the Dutch are very good in, uh, control the water.
Jonathan: And there it is again. I'm afraid of climate change, but hey, we're the Dutch. We got this. Here's another one.
VOX 3: It can be a friend on holidays and when it's a lovely weather you go to the beach. And it could be an enemy too. You don't know about the level in the future because of the climate problems.
Jonathan Groubert: Do you ever worry about that?
VOX 3: Quite, yes, quite. But I'm too old to live it all, I think.
Carlyle: I mean, she explains the relationship so clearly there. The water's a friend and it's an enemy. But yeah, I can't really tell if they're nervous or not.
Jonathan: Me neither. And in my opinion, they really should be because this country has built itself around a relationship with water. And the water is going to change the terms of that relationship, whether people like it or not.
Carlyle: Coming up, we dive deeper into the Dutch water psyche. How is climate change fundamentally shifting this country's centuries-long battle with the sea?
BREAK
Carlyle: Okay. Jonathan, I feel like before we talk about how climate change is shifting the Dutch relationship with water, I wanna understand how they came to define that relationship as it is now.
Jonathan: Let's start with Tracy Metz. Now Tracy is a Dutch American journalist and the author of numerous books, articles, and podcasts about the Dutch relationship with water, and she is, in my opinion, the authority on this subject.
Tracy Metz: The relationship of the Dutch to Water has gone through several fascinating fundamental iterations. I think in the beginning when people first established themselves here as fishermen, it was a simple fact of life. That water was the main characteristic of the place they had chosen to live.
Jonathan: You know, the people in this part of Northwest Europe, they first started manipulating the land to live with flooding as early as 500 BC, like making manmade hills that were higher than sea level.
And you just lived with it. You accepted this. Everybody had a boat. If you lived along the river, you knew that the tide could rise and that you would need to take all your furniture upstairs, wait till the tide went down and bring your furniture back. It was just the way it was.
Jonathan: So let's just jump forward in time to the 17th century. And the Dutch turned their watery land into something that works for them. And you need canals to control sea level rise to let the water in, to let it out, but it also means easy access to the sea to sail around the world. And this is the era of a vast colonial empire.
Now, to be sure, being part of the Dutch empire, being subjugated by the Dutch was awful. It led to terrible crimes like repression, the theft of riches and even slavery. This history is something the Dutch are only just getting to grips with.
But back then, controlling the water meant getting rich, and it meant creating this enlightened culture of Rembrandt and Erasmus and eventually Van Gogh, or as we say in Dutch van Houck, and it was their access to the sea that brought them these riches.
But you know, people can get complacent, and when that happens, Mother Nature likes to come along and teach us a lesson.
NEWSREEL
Tracy Metz: I think a major turning point in this was the enormous disaster of 1953.
NEWSCASTER
Jonathan: So this is a newsreel about the flood of 1953, the vatas node hump, as it's called in Dutch. A great storm came in from the North Sea, it broke the dikes and killed more than 2000 people.
Tracy Metz: It was a poor and isolated agricultural part of the country. They were not protected from. A combination of storm and spring tide and it was a national disaster. It was a European disaster. People were sending blankets and food and emergency help from all over Europe.
Carlyle: Oh, that sounds painfully familiar. So what did it look like when the water cleared? What was the aftermath?
Jonathan: You know, it was a disaster zone. Houses were gone, lives were ruined and, and more than anything, it really woke the people up.
Tracy Metz: And it was then, I think that the Dutch started to really see the water as an enemy, as something that they had to fight.
Carlyle: Okay so we're seeing this shift from living with water to fighting against it. So what exactly changed?
Jonathan: Infrastructure. This was the moment the country decided that if they were gonna engineer their way out of the problem, they had to go big. So the old type of dirt and grass dike that was lovely and blended in with the landscape just wasn't good enough anymore. So they created the Delta works. It is the gold standard of flood control. The storm surge barriers need to be seen to be believed. If a storm comes, you just close the gates to the sea and keep out the storm surge. There's a giant barrier at the mouth of the river that leads to Rotterdam's Harbor. The gates of this barrier are as wide as the Eiffel Tower is tall.
Tracy Metz: These are major, major manmade interventions in the landscape and in the waterscape to keep the water out. The water was an enemy. It was a war on water.
Carlyle: So if we go back to the interviews that you did at the train station, all that confidence that the Dutch project about how good they are at holding back water, is that because they feel like they've won the war on water?
Jonathan: Well, it's an ongoing war, but it did create tremendous trust on the part of the Dutch people that they can engineer themselves out of any water issue.
But here's the thing, if the UN is to be believed, the sea level could rise by two to three feet or more by 2100. Now that's conservative and it won't stop there. Tracy Metz, she actually thinks this is a war that the Dutch can't win. So maybe it really is time to change our attitude.
Tracy Metz: Maybe we should realize that it's time to live with the water, to accommodate it, to make space for water, to let it back in and be part of our daily surroundings the way it used to be centuries ago. And they're also thinking increasingly about floating technology.
Carlyle: Ah, okay. So not holding the water back, but letting it in and living on top of it? That's the new idea.
Jonathan: That's right. Yeah.
Carlyle: So what does this actually look like?
Jonathan: Well, I met with a gentleman named Peter van Wingerden, who had an idea to build a floating dairy farm. An idea that he says people around him didn't exactly believe in.
Peter van Wingerden: You're completely crazy. You're out of your mind. And not only my family and friends said it, but the authorities. You wanna do what? A farm in our port.
Jonathan Groubert: Well, can I ask you a serious question? Are you crazy?
Peter van Wingerden: A bit.
///
Jonathan Groubert: We're walking on the footbridge. And here we are into the farm and here are the cows. Hi ladies. Oh, the cows are interested in me.
Peter van Wingerden: They're smelling your microphone.
Jonathan Groubert: She just licked the microphone. She licked me.
Jonathan: So, my God, cow tongues are unbelievably enormous and my microphone was covered in mucus after that.
Carlyle: Oh my gosh. Gross. Okay, well I wanna pull up a picture of this floating farm to see what we're talking about, and I'm looking at it now and it's actually, I mean, it's beautiful.
Jonathan: Yeah. It's like hyper modern, but at the same time it's pretty spare. It's this concrete square that's actually floating in the harbor. And on the top, that's where the cows actually are. Right? And it sort of looks like a metal toll booth with all kinds of girders. It's totally open.
Peter van Wingerden: So everything is automated over here. So the feed comes in over here, automated. The milking robot is automated, we have a manure robot who collects the manure. The manure robot dumps it in a hole, and there we turn it into fertilizer again. So also that is completely automated.
Jonathan: And on the top, that's where the cows actually are. Right? And it sort of looks like a metal toll booth with all kinds of girders. It's totally open.
Carlyle: And the cows, you can see their little heads sticking out, eating their hay, and they've got a nice view. And it's not like this is in some remote harbor either. I see cranes in the background. This is an industrial port.
Jonathan: Yeah, this is Rotterdam. It's the busiest, largest port in all of Europe.
Peter van Wingerden: Let's have a look downstairs. How we turn this into dairy.
Carlyle: There's a basement in this floating farm?
Jonathan: Yeah, there, there's like several basements, right? The, the, the bottom floor is below the waterline, so you can't even see it. But from the outside, like in the first level, Peter shows me the cheesemaking space.
Peter van Wingerden: And this is our experimental zone about the tasting, about the ripening time, about the acid, about the salt that we all play with, about the herbs inside our cheeses.
Jonathan Groubert: Mm, very creamy.
Peter van Wingerden: Very creamy cheese.
Jonathan Groubert: Yeah, it's really creamy.
Peter van Wingerden: So I'm gonna show you one more thing that is below the water line.
Jonathan Groubert: Okay, now we're going down again.
Jonathan: And down at the bottom level. This for me was the big surprise because there's another kind of farm down there. It's like a greenhouse. Only it looks like fish tanks with blue and pink lights shining on them.
Peter van Wingerden: So this is where we test the equipment for our second floating farm that will be next door. Where we will produce a thousand square meter of growth area for vegetables and herbs. So we're testing all kind of several herbs and lettuces inside this small containers.
Jonathan Groubert: Which are all stacked, one on top of the other. Amazing.
Peter van Wingerden: Yeah, it's really cool.
Jonathan: One thing that's really interesting to me is where this concept came from for Peter, because it wasn't anything to do with the Netherlands. He got this idea because of something he saw in America.
Carlyle: Oh really? What is that story?
Jonathan: Well, Peter is an engineer and his work brought him to New York in 2012, and he got there right after Superstorm Sandy, and he was shocked to see that the storm had basically prevented food from being brought into Manhattan.
Peter van Wingerden: So I was talking to people and I asked them, What happened with you when the flooding was in your city? When the water level was under your window? What happened to you? And they all told me it was really terrifying because of there was no food. Everything was empty. Supermarkets were empty. There was no fresh food. Because we're completely depending on transportation. And if transportation cannot enter the city, there is no food.
Jonathan: So that was the birth of the idea of Peter’s floating farm. And it's why it was particularly important to prove he could make and maintain a floating farm in a city close to where the people are.
Peter van Wingerden: Before Sandy, New Orleans happened. It'll happen in Egypt. It'll happen in Vietnam. It'll happen in every delta. So we said when we came back to the Netherlands, let's start over here. Let's make a showcase over here in our own port to the rest of the world.
Jonathan: And he went ahead and did it. Now he's Peter van Wingerden, the floating farm guy, and he travels the world preaching the gospel of floating farms. And some are listening. There are prototypes planned in the Middle East and Asia. It is not a moneymaking venture yet.
Carlyle: And it's also, we're not just talking about some floating houses, like we're talking about re-engineering all of these aspects of society like growing food. And agriculture is huge in the Netherlands right?
Jonathan: Oh, absolutely. In fact, and this is gonna sound bananas, because remember we said the country is only as big as Maryland. It is the second largest exporter of agricultural products in the world, second only to the United States.
Carlyle: Wow, I did not know that. Um, so I'm wondering though, how practical is this? Like what do the numbers look like for Peter?
Jonathan: So this is the only floating farm in the Netherlands, and Peter talks about it as a pilot project, a proof of concept. And he's only got 40 dairy cows and a few dozen employees. And that is minuscule by Dutch standards.
But you know, Carlyle, the idea of a floating farm is great for feeding people in cities, but of course there are a lot of other aspects of daily life. And when the water comes, people will need to be able to get on with their lives. They have to go to work, they have to pick up their kids at school. Right,
Carlyle: Right, right. So what are they thinking?
Jonathan: So some Dutch people are really thinking to the future. If you can float a farm, why can't you float—and I'm not kidding here—a whole city?
Rutger de Graaf: I think it's part of our tradition. started with windmills, with the flood levies, with the storm surge barriers. And actually what I have developed with my team is just the same thing, but with a different technology. It's also making land from water.
Jonathan: So this is Rutger de Graaf and he works for a company called Blue 21, and they are indeed designing floating cities.
Jonathan Groubert: Where are we going?
Rutger de Graaf: So we're going to the floating pavilion. So that was our first project, and it's still a good example of floating structure technology here in Rotterdam.
Jonathan Groubert: The water taxi is coming, let's go.
Jonathan: And we are on a water taxi on the river mass in Rotterdam, heading over to something called the floating pavilion.
Carlyle: Okay, so I'm gonna have to see a photo of this too. Let me pull this up. oh wow. It's like some, clear geodesic domes.
Jonathan: And they're like two big half soccer balls cut in half.
Carlyle: That’s exactly what it looks like.
Jonathan: Yeah. And they're like floating on the water, also on platforms, floating on the water. And they're not small. Right. They're enormous. Rutger and I went out on the pier for a closer look and I wanted to go inside, but we weren't allowed in because there were people using it. There was a university using them for classes.
Rutger de Graaf: We designed it as an exhibition center, a conference center, and it was put at the first location in the city center of Rotterdam. It has been there for 11 years, and then two years ago it was moved to this area.
Jonathan: Rutger's vision is that a city can be built on top of hundreds of interlocking structures just like this. Almost made of Lego that can hold, yeah. Domes, but also houses, regular looking houses, parks, factories, whatever you need, you can just keep adding onto them and adding onto them until eventually you have a whole city.
Rutger de Graaf: And what we're working on now is to make this what you're seeing here, 20 times larger. So that's what we're doing every time we're developing the technology to make it much bigger.
Carlyle: I mean, this all sounds very hopeful, but let's say a giant storm comes, will this floating city stay afloat? I mean, even big ships do occasionally sink.
Rutger de Graaf: We did all the calculations, tsunamis, hurricanes, typhoons, everything. Extreme weather, extreme waves, all of that is possible from an engineering point of view. So technically there are no obstacles, but it needs to be included in urban planning, policy making, and a political decision making.
Jonathan: And there is some political decision making. Blue 21 is one of 34 partners in a major research project called, and the name says it all, “Floating Future.” There are universities involved, businesses, nonprofits, even the Dutch government; they've all thrown a little money behind Rutger's vision.
Carlyle: Well, I mean, it's an exciting idea and the technology sounds promising, but I wanna go back to something that Rutger just said there. So he's talking about building a whole new floating society, and then he kind of flippantly at the end there says, yeah, and all we need now is the political will and the policy and the urban planning. I mean, that's a big to-do list.
Jonathan: You're in good company, Carlyle, because Tracy Metz has the same questions.
Tracy Metz: These floating solutions at the moment are still in the, I'd say, in the phase of bright ideas. It's innovative, it's intriguing, but it's not really scalable yet. A couple things will have to happen. It'll have to be easier to get a mortgage for a floating house. That's very difficult right now. It sounds kind of pedestrian. But for a homeowner it's important.
Jonathan: Yeah. It really is important. It's a really practical barrier. I mean, if you can't get a mortgage, can you get regular homeowners insurance? I mean, who's gonna be able to afford to live this way? Is this going to be a dystopia where all the super rich live in floating bubbles? Are regular people gonna be able to afford it? Who knows? But these are valid questions.
Tracy Metz: Are we going to build houses or are we going to build space for water? This is going to be a dilemma that the Dutch will have to confront certainly in the coming 50 years, or we'll be living on the water if we have a choice.
Carlyle: Hmm. It sounds like what Tracy is saying here is that even for the Dutch who have such a unique history with and relationship to water, this is gonna be a huge challenge with maybe some messy outcomes.
Jonathan: Yeah. And not only that, Tracy says it's possible that the only way the Dutch will change their relationship with water is if they have to.
Tracy Metz: What might be the most beneficial to get us thinking about moving to floating places is a disaster. Another flood. I hate to say it, but that does help people think. And there's an expression in Dutch: [speaks Dutch] Give us our daily bread, and a flood. Because that really helps people become aware.
Carlyle: That is an amazing saying. I think that just kind of shows how integral to the Dutch, the history of water and flooding is. But I mean, really Tracy sees floods as this necessary evil to spur change. Do you agree?
Jonathan: I do actually. I mean, this is what happened the first time around. I mean, you heard those people that we spoke with at the beginning of the show. On the one hand, they know that the water is coming. They know that the danger of sea level rises is ever present. They know that they live, you know, below sea level and that the water could always come. But at the, then they always sort of end their sentence with, yeah, but we're the Dutch man. We got this. We can handle it. We will engineer our way out of this problem. But they have never faced a problem like this before. And the fact of the matter is if you want to create the political will in a democracy like the Netherlands where you have so many competing interests, there's nothing that captures people's attention better than a disaster.
Carlyle: Okay. But that is a depressing place to leave this episode. So let's not. I hope that's not true, because honestly, the Dutch have taught the rest of the world so much about managing water. We've all learned from the Dutch, we're hoping that the Dutch are innovating in a way that can help us in the future. Is this an unfounded optimism on my part?
Jonathan: You know what Carlyle, I think you are absolutely right because. Let's be clear about this. If there is one place on earth, one river delta on this planet, one lowlying part of this world, where you have the people who have the wherewithal, who have the knowledge, who have the fortitude to actually do something about this and do it on time before it goes too far, then I am, I say this as somebody who has lived in this country for 35 years, it is the Dutch who will be able to do this.
Thanks Jonathan for bringing us this story, and be on the lookout for part two of this series. We are going to look at how coastal cities here in the US are collaborating with Dutch water experts to redesign our relationship to water.
