upstream

abstract

What can a journey along a canal in the Netherlands bring you? The Netherlands is the flattest country in Europe. Because of its retrieval from the sea, it created a unique relation and control over nature, but does nature exist in the Netherlands? And how does storytelling and identity enforce the nation as a symbol for water management?

Analyzing both inside and outside of the surface, it’s a consideration of whether we are still safe in the future in the dikes. What can we learn from listening to entities? Further down, it opens the countries fight and paradoxes towards the beaver and its complex relationship in the country. Fieldwork with a forest ranger will offer a new scope on a threat inside our dikes, and a broken 5,000-year-old relic may hold the answer to all uncertain questions.

Balanced out by snippets from an exploration alongside a canal, where a group of fat bikers passes by, a disappointing UFO landing site, and a fish doorbell offer unexpected perspectives on coexistence. What happens upstream? The current is drawing me in to know what happens at the end. If people are determined by their landscape, then what can I learn from a human-made world?

Chapter 1: Life and Catastrophe

Perfect Storm
In 1953, a dark, powerful storm sailed from Scotland over the North Sea toward the Netherlands. It rained intensively, and as the sea level rose, 500 dikes gave in and broke, flooding the land and causing thousands of casualties, both human and farm animal. Being the biggest flood ever recorded in the Netherlands , it left the country in shock and trauma, marking the nation’s fear of the danger of water. We worked together to get the water out of the country and rebuild everything that was broken, but more than that, we had to come up with a plan for radical change. Rebecca Solnit argues that “disasters create liminal spaces where new social possibilities emerge. That in these disrupted landscapes, people briefly experience alterna It is in this disrupted landscape of the flood’s aftermath that such a moment arose, a moment of radical rethinking of Dutch water management.

I start my journey up on the canal next to the park, I hear a hummmmmmm come closer. Followed by an alarm UUUUrrrr. It's 3 kids on a fatbike. It's an electrically powered bike with big wheels that replaced the blue license plate scooter. For sure they are going too fast, but the bike seems to be a heavy topic in the Netherlands. Invading the crucial purple/pink coloured bike lane with its size and speed. The government tried banning them, but the rule was made so specific that the developers narrowed the wheel size down by 5cm to make them usable again. The topic divides the nation and provides something to hate on. Personally, I don't really get it. It's an object.

superstructures
There was a general concern about the possibility of a new disaster happening, and with the most damage being done in the province of Zeeland, this became the location destined for radical change. This change came in the idea of building a structure designated to resist and moderate the water. The revolutionary project is called the Deltawerken—gigantic superstructures designed to control and keep the high water from the North Sea out of the Netherlands, ensuring that there would never be a flooding disaster again. Built over the course of 20 years, it consists of connected cathedral-sized pillars placed along the coastline,functioning as a barrier and mediator between the salt water from the sea and the freshwater from the river estuary. Journalists from foreign countries saw this happening in the Netherlands and dubbed us the “masters of floods.” The Deltawerken is now considered one of the modern wonders of the world. But, as Winfried Bajiens mentions in his program Waterman, “how impressive they may be, they are not a solution to modern-day problems.” This is echoed by Rutger Bregman in his book Het Water Komt, who argues that the old ways of dealing with rising water are unachievable and costly—we have to look for other alternatives. With the Netherlands projected to be drowned in the next 100 years due to rising sea levels , a new solution isnecessary and urgent, and can originate from a different point of view.

Culture > Nature
The Netherlands is known from its history and the ability of retrieving land from the sea , and in doing so, the act of reclamation has coined a famous Dutch saying, “God created the world, but the Dutch created the Netherlands” . The saying symbolizes how we, as inhabitants, perceive ourselves in relation to nature. In contrast to other cultures, nature is considered something that can be taken, twisted, and manipulated into culture, indicating that the people already owned the land before it was taken from the sea—it never had its own life. It is this perspective that Bruno Latour critiques in Politics of Nature, where he argues “that modernity allows science to mobilize nature while simultaneously denying that nature has been mobilized.” In this vision, nature is stripped of agency—it is an object to be engineered, controlled, and made productive.
However, Dutch folklore has once considered the water to be alive, but more through the metaphor of the water wolf. It symbolizes the centuries-long struggle of the Netherlands against floods and water management. Historically, this image was used to describe the unpredictable and devastating power of water, as if it were a living, predatory entity. On the one hand mastering it, but always aware of its unpredictability.

Symbolism
As mentioned before, land reclamation has become a national symbol, emphasized in history books and retold as a heroic narrative that fosters a sense of unity. Resonating to the principle of Memory studies, this memory of a shared past that serve important values for group & individual identity shaping. If we repeat the stories, the narrative stays alive. These kinds of stories are supported in a fairy tale like Hans Brinker, in which a boy saves the country by plugging a hole in a dike with his finger. It is these kinds of symbols/myths that serves as tools to reinforce this national cohesion an enemy without human form that unites people across religions and class. This narrative teachtes that nature must be controlled, engineered, or exploited to sustain human life.

Chapter 2: Fieldwork & Conflict

If water and canals are contained and moderated carefully to ensure people's safety, then where do non-human inhabitants fit into this plan? The beaver has been reintroduced in 1988 following its human-caused extinction in 1826. Although the re-introduction is considered a successful integration, the population is growing to a size where they started to settle in places where they were not planned to be, conflicting with the careful landscape planning. Building dams, lodges and digging holes in the dikes to create their own landscape. There are ongoing discussions about whether they have a place here. To understand how they can coexist with humans in a country that is running out of space, is there a place for reintroducing terrain-adaptive animals in the Dutch landscape? To answer that question, I am doing fieldwork with the forest ranger Jonathan Leeuwis to get his opinion on the subject.Jonathan is the forest ranger of the area where the Amsterdam-Rijnkanaal ends.

It is 8 a.m., and I meet Jonathan at the rusty gates between the trees. Jonathan is a tall man with reasonably big boots and a smile on his face, blond hair, and a very enthusiastic demeanor. We jump into his car, and we start driving—slowly, so as not to intrude on the creatures by any chance. We are on the lookout for beavers.

The beaver was reintroduced in the Netherlands following its extinction in 1826, when the last one was killed by a fisherman near the IJssel—he mistook it for a fish. They were mostly hunted for their dense fur, meat and castoreum. castoreum is a tar-like material that was generally used in food flavourings, such as vanilla as well as perfumes. They were hunted for their meat because the tale has scales, therefore the church considered it a fish so it was eaten on Christian holidays.

Human & Non-human
Jonathan knows that in a place like Zuid-Holland Rieverenland it is a tough job trying to co- exist, but not impossible. He believes in a non-hierarchal structure. I think that this mentality is a good example of what a more-than-human politics look like: “the careful and conscious attention to the needs and desires of others, the acknowledgment of their agency and value, and the willingness to adapt our existing structures of society and place to better account for all of us.” We spent the rest of the day driving and walking, but without luck. We did not see a beaver unfortunately.

I am still cycling and go downwards through Utrecht; I make a small detour to look at the fish doorbell, but it’s not turned on right now. This is an innovative project to facilitate both fish and human in a holistic and beneficial way. Because the lock was made as a passage for humans, it blocked the fish to swim upstream to lay eggs. Therefore the fish doorbell was introduced on an online web came to see when fishes would be “waiting” to enter, and viewers could message the lock operator so the fish could be let through.

Chapter 3: A different perspective

I say my goodbyes to Jonathan and move upwards to the place of splitting, Tiel. I realise that the canal is telling stories, but if you want to tell a story you should be alive and have agency?

Personified future
To declare an entity as a legal person, however narrowly defined, is not merely to admit it to a court of law. It is to declare it alive, in which we have struggled to articulate since the eclipse of animism. The moment we declare non-human entities as humans, the definition of, and understanding of and relation to life changes. The world re-populates. The shift started to ask, what can we take from the river? To what do we want for the river and how do we get there with the river? It’s interesting to consider that this way of looking is not new to the Māori tribe of New-Zealand. In the documentary “I am the River, the River is me” we follow Ned, a Māori tribe member and as he canoes down the river Whanganui, he explains the relationship of the Māori regarding the landscape. When you introduce yourself, you mention your mountain, your river, your tribe and lastly, your name. The river symbolizes a connection between the tribe and the ancestors, for they are embodied in the landscape, calling it Tupuna. It's the first time that a framework stems from the spiritual values of an indigenous belief system. This act results in a way where the word nature does not exist and the division between culture and nature blurs to become one. It's these indigenous ways of looking that can possibly help our future. Although I am questioning wether a country like the Netherlands will be able to turn the water into an entity, the thought is already interesting.

pass by a couple of amateur football fields and a carriership passes sails in the opposite direction with containers on the middle deck, a dutch flag waving from the backside next to the deck where a car is parked. The boat is called Ambition. On the shore, I pass a man who takes pictures of Ambition with his analogue camera. He has gelled “messy” hair and wears pointy shoes with a regatta jacket. It's interesting that there is a resurgence in analogue/low-tech photography. I guess people are more interested in slower approaches. It seems almost like some kind or resistance to the newer technology.

Scope
I'd like to draw on the philosophy of Buen Vivir one more time to consider that, “we should learn more from indigenous and ancient philosophies to investigate what it means to respect nature. To see it as the participation of human beings in a vital collectivity of cosmic character, that is to say, in close relationality, and harmony with nature. Where the human is always in relation with the cosmos and with nature, it is not a mode in which the human becomes the center and locus of explanation of the real. It challenges the separation between the human and nature, because in our western traditions, the separation between nature and non-human entities continues to exist, but new ways are starting to emerge with concepts such as rewilding and the acknowledgment of a river as a living entity in New Zealand. “When engaging with Buen Vivir, we do not seek to incorporate, define, classify; we seek to listen. It offers a vision of modernity as precisely constituted through the radical negation of relationality. Relationality shows us the possibility of thinking across the colonial difference and opening paths toward decolonial understanding.” If we are equal to the land, then we can and should listen to its requirements.

A first step
Apart from the potential that Nehalennia offers as a symbol, the Embassy of the North Sea started with the act of trying to declare the North Sea as a living entity, beginning with the fact that the sea owns itself and knows what’s best for itself. While they are trying to get the North Sea acknowledged as an entity by law, it will, like in New Zealand, challenge the way we look at this entity by giving it a voice. And as they themselves put it, “At the Embassy of the North Sea, we believe that when humans engage in conversation with non-humans, and through non-humans with themselves: humanity, citizenship, and democracy can receive a substantial new impulse.” Even in the Netherlands, it seems like the tide is turning.