When climate policy bogs down, humanities and the arts can move things forward

Abstract

At least since the publication of Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement (2016), it has become commonplace to say that the climate crisis is also a crisis of the imagination. Policymakers and their publics find it difficult to imagine how things could be otherwise. For scholars dedicated to the study of German culture and works of imagination, this would seem to be our moment. But many of us are not quite sure how to seize it. We understand the urgency, but deeply ingrained habits of mind and discipline stand in our way. As Caroline Levine emphasizes, our commitment to critique has taught us to be wary of “instrumentality” in any form. But I would argue, it's precisely the instruments of our discipline that are needed now. For the past two years, I've been experimenting with ways to put my skillset to work for climate adaptation in the Netherlands and Germany. I can readily imagine that there are policy contexts where you could do the same with yours.

People in the Netherlands don't like to talk about managed retreat. Moving to higher terrain is one of the ways low-lying communities, even whole cities and regions, can and will adapt to sea level rise. That's important because the 2022 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that scientists cannot rule out two meters of sea level rise by 2100 and five meters by 2150. Other climate scientists such as James Hansen and Michael Mann think it could be much more and much sooner. For a country that regards itself as “the safest delta in the world,” even though 26% of its densely populated terrain already lies below sea level—in some places as low as seven meters—the idea of managed retreat is at odds with its national narrative of an eternal and ongoing battle with the sea. Dutch engineers boast that they can take on another ten meters of sea level rise. Retreat, they say, is for losers.

There are some Dutch climate scientists and ecologically-oriented water management experts who worry that the Netherlands is locking itself into maintaining an inflexible technocratic system that can't keep up with accelerated sea level rise. Since 2016, they've tried various strategies to keep retreat on the table, with moderate success. Landscape architects and designers have helped by offering visions of what an adaptive, inundated Netherlands might look like. The engineering lobby wants none of it. Recent opinion pieces in prominent newspapers suggest that those who advocate for retreat and cast doubt on Dutch engineering prowess are committing landverraad (treason).

I've been tracking the conversation on managed retreat in the Netherlands for the past six years. I was intrigued by a phenomenon that manifests in many other regions as well: low-level awareness of the urgency of climate change, coupled with a supreme confidence in technical solutions, bolstered by political inertia. As I spoke with climate and water professionals in the Netherlands, I realized that I could do more than reflect on the situation. The wiggle room for discussing managed retreat in the Netherlands was becoming vanishingly small. An intervention in the cultural domain could open it back up.

One thing I noticed is that whenever retreat came up, a nervous or joking reference to the German border was never far away. In a cartoon that Deltares, the premiere Dutch water research institute, commissioned to depict the four official climate adaptation pathways, only “meebewegen” (moving with the flow or living with water, the accepted euphemism for retreat) names the German border (see Figure 1). A University of Utrecht scientist quoted in a 2019 article in Vrij Nederland, said, “If we continue as we are, we'll have to give up a large part of the country. We need to discuss the option of moving to Germany, because we'll eventually reach a point of no return” (Schuttenhelm). Another quipped that whatever remained of the Netherlands could become the thirteenth Bundesland. Learning German would be compulsory.

The anxiety is palpable. The thought of retreat threatens Dutch national identity. As climate refugees from the West, they would inevitably spill across the border and seek refuge in Germany with all the World War II baggage that implies. Could they bear the thought? More importantly, would they be welcome? Patrick Nederkoorn, a Dutch Kabarettist, worked up a German-language show called “Die orangene Gefahr: Die Holländer kommen!” that asked audiences in German theaters along the border precisely that question: “Liebe Deutsche, sind Sie bereit, mich, meine Familie und 17 Millionen Niederländer wilkommen zu heissen?” A concurrent Dutch version confronted Dutch-speaking audiences with the brute fact: “Folks, how's your German? Soon we'll have to move.”

I reached out to Patrick, and we started a collaborative project that used his performance as a platform for involving Dutch and German experts in workshops with residents of paired borderland towns. From the outset it was clear that the power of our project lay in its symbols. Because 2023 marked the 375^th anniversary of the Peace of Münster (the negotiations between Spanish and Dutch delegations that ended the Eighty Years War and secured independence for the rebellious Dutch provinces), we zeroed in on Münster and its Dutch sister-city Enschede. We also connected with the border-adjacent towns of Vreden and Winterswijk, as well as Venlo and Krefeld. We partnered with academic, cultural, and government institutions. Our project was known as “The Second Peace of Münster.” It had three parts: peace with each other, peace with strangers, and peace with nature.

We kicked off with an exhibition in the historic Haus der Niederlande, home to the Zentrum für Niederlande-Studien at the Universität Münster, where the original Peace was negotiated. On display were seventeen designs that envisioned the Netherlands in various stages of inundation in 2120, 2200, and 2300. “Plan D: Deutschland als Niederländische Klimastrategie” drew more than 1,600 visitors in the six weeks it was open. The impact on social media was perhaps greater. Many in the water management and governance sectors found it unsettling that the future of the Netherlands was on display across the border. The symbolic relevance was not wasted on them: the birthplace of the Netherlands had become a place to contemplate its future demise, or at least its watery transformation.

As for the Peace of Münster workshops, their impact was not limited to participants. The Dutch and German experts from ministries such as Rijkswaterstaat and research centers such as the Potsdamer Institut für Klimafolgenforschung admitted that the playful momentousness of citizen negotiations in this larger intercultural setting was eye-opening. The view from 21 meters above sea level along the Dutch-German border is different from how things are seen in the lower Netherlands. What seems a reasonable investment in expensive water defense infrastructure to the latter may appear to the former as a squandered opportunity to invest in the borderlands, especially if that infrastructure can't be completed in time or fails and retreat becomes necessary. With our symbolic interventions, we widened the scope of the conversation about managed retreat and showed policymakers the outlines of a larger cultural narrative that rivaled that of the engineers. By drawing on the humanities and the arts, Patrick and I, together with our many Dutch and German partners, helped to keep retreat on the table.

We're still keeping it on the table. A New Peace of Münster: A Documentary about Climate Migration along the Dutch-German Border, which we produced together with a talented Dutch filmmaker, is accessible on YouTube and is being used to spark conversations about climate migration in Germany, the Netherlands, and the US. Shortly after the first workshop, I was invited to join a consortium organized by Rijkswaterstaat and the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water dedicated to working out all the dimensions of retreat, including the Dutch-German border. When climate policy bogs down, humanities and the arts can move things forward.