Archive for the 'Protective Dikes and Land Reclamation, The Netherlands' Category

An Army of Peace?

Published on January 15, 2013 in Protective Dikes and Land Reclamation, The Netherlands. 0 Comments

Aerial view of the dike system in the Netherlands, from NASA, at nasa.gov.

Dikes not only saved the Netherlands from floods, but perhaps from war as well. The thousand-year-old dike army can be regarded as an authentic progenitor of the concept of “an army enlisted against nature” as proposed by William James in the essay “The Moral Equivalent of War.” Around the year AD 1100, west-Friesland had built an enclosure dike (omringkijk). At the same time, the Frisians established a “dike peace” or strongly enforced consensus that whenever a dike was endangered, family feuds must cease forthwith so that all available manpower could be mobilized to reinforce the dikes.

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Building the World Blog by Kathleen Lusk Brooke and Zoe G. Quinn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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Schiphol Airport

Published on May 1, 2012 in Protective Dikes and Land Reclamation, The Netherlands. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

The name, Schiphol, means “ships’s hell.” The spot where Amsterdam’s airport lies is the drained lake bed of Haarlemmermeer (Lake of Haarlem). This lake had increased over centuries and regularly flooded, to the detriment and damage of Amsterdam and Leiden. In the seventeenth century, 170 windmills were estimated to be needed to drain the lake but the project was dropped due to expense. In 1836 when floods once again assaulted Amsterdam and Leiden, the central government began the effort to drain the lake using three steam-driven pumps. Amsterdam’s airport is now on the site, named after a lake where many ships were wrecked. Hopefully, the name bears the exact opposite for predictions regarding ships of the sky.

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Building the World Blog by Kathleen Lusk Brooke and Zoe G Quinn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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