In my previous column I sketched some of my anger at seeing the sea, knowing the devastation that we have unleashed into the ocean. Rightly so E. texted me about it, reminding that there are plenty of attempts at rebuilding those oyster banks of the North Sea. “there are glimpses of hope” she said.
That text reached me when hiking through the southern dunes of Texel, a small sandy island north of The Netherlands. I have had plenty of time to look at the sea. And at the dunes. The dutch are rightly famous for their fighting the sea, endlessly pushing it back to create unthinkable expanses of land “gained from the sea” as they say. Looking at the dunes one could see where did they learn it. Anybody that sails knows the dynamism of the North Sea, its unpredictable currents, ephimerous sand banks and altered tides. Changing sand banks that, sometimes, become land gained from the sea. Particularly in Texel one can walk from standard farm land, though chains of dunes that dwindle and eventually merge with the sea. Right there, currents and winds providing, the dunes are gaining from the sea, growing, creating land. Looking at those dunes I thought in the glimpses of hope from E. and in the chaos that re-creation is.
Texel dunes, as the whole chain of dunes that start somewhere in France and crawls up to Denmark, are masses of sand that have accumulated through the centuries. Some are old enough to have whole forests on top of them. Other are reservoirs of fresh water for whole cities. In most places, anyway, they are soft and rounded and uniform, shaped by thousands of years of sea winds. Not the new ones in Texel, though. From the main chain, high and impressive and soft and round, towards the sea each dune is smaller, and more and more unique, more angular, more opinionated, if you want. The last small ones, perhaps half a meter high, already sparsed in the beach and that might or might not survive the next storm, have an air of stubbornness, of challenge. Here they are, messy and unique and fragile, challenging the mighty sea, and winning at that.
And so I thought back at those artificial reefs that activists dump in the north sea, forms of concrete (coincidentally in places were trawls nets are used), or the ordered and highly monitored plans to rebuild oyster banks, and in all the discussions that the governments of France and The Netherlands, and Denmark and Norway and the UK have about the fishing rights and quotas. I thought in that chaos of initiatives, all trying in one way or another to rebuild that good old sea. And I smiled. I smiled and actually bowed to all these marvelous people that has understood that what others destroyed, has to be rebuild by us. All these marvelous people that are trying in their own unique ways. We survive the famines of the sixties with the green revolution, we turned basic the acid rain of the seventies and we almost close the ozone hole of the eighties. We will still conquer global warming, I know we will.
Also perhaps because many of us are angry, and are not taking it anymore, and are doing something, something silly, opinionated and chaotic.