On criticism, on Terschelling (the Netherlands)

My friend and colleague remarks to me over dinner that islands make visible what it means, or might mean, to live with limitations. On an island it is not always expected that what you desire is at hand. Here on Terschelling, an island in the Waddenzee, Netherlands, it’s normal to make do with what you have. Island-ness, I say, is the embodiment of salvage culture. When you use a broken ship’s mast as the topline for your humble roof, you are solarpunking it with the sea.

We go to speak with an islander who leads school groups to pick up trash on the northern beach. Under his knit cap and mustache he has a character deeply attuned to plastics and pollutants, and he is adamant that these represent the largest threats to humans and nonhumans alike. We are standing 150 km down along the coastal current from Rotterdam and just a few kilometers from a major shipping lane where cargo routinely gets tipped overboard. Terschelling, he says, is a place where ‘international rubbish’ washes up: ‘rubbish that no one has responsibility for.'

Plastics are just the latest and most toxic of the flotsam in this place. Where beachcombers once found only driftwood and metal artifacts, now the islanders witness whole containers washing ashore: these rectangular glitches in the globalized market are decidedly less useful. A thousand left shoes and a thousand TV stands, never mind the right shoes and the TVs. Still, our guide says, it’s exciting to find a container because it brings everyone to the beach. What’s more distressing is the sludge dumped at sea, the microplastics and the PFAS and BPA, because these represent a sudden souring of the constant give-and-take expectations between humans and water along this coast. Now it’s industry who takes advantage, and in return the water slowly takes life.

At the edge of the Nordzee, the dunes are enormous and rolling; the sand is dynamic, ever-changing. On the Groenstrand, ducks and egrets and terns are plentiful, wheeling about and not balking when bikes pass nearby. The Waddenzee is calm, low tide, all rivulets and mudflats — what Venetian rowers call seca.

The island is not very afraid of sea-level rise as such. This surprised me, from my experience in Venice, where the fear is quite present. Sea-level rise is happening, yes, they accept it on Terschelling. But because of the management strategies there is no clear threat of flood, or erosion, or salt, that’s not somehow already controlled, already planned for. There is an action plan for everything. 

For flood management, the island holds enormous dykes that ’safeguard’ about two thirds of the island, mostly farms and small villages. This makes polders, areas below sea-level but kept completely dry, one of the hallmarks of Dutch land use patterns for the last few hundred years. The urbanized area of West Terschelling, outside of the dykes, is slightly elevated and has a low flood wall. Residents are taught that if a major storm comes, it is best to run to the dunes; they are the safest places. The low lands south of the dunes, judging from the signs, are the more dangerous places to be — but these are known and marked.

Some parts of Terschelling are eroding, or being lost to sea-level rise, but these are marginal lands that are always shifting with the tides. Intentionally unmanaged, or spaces where spaces is ceded to the water. Making room for the sea and the rivers is another key trait of Dutch engineering, albeit a more recent one.

As for salt water infiltration — where rising salty water gets into the aquifer, which supplies drinking water, I heard that farmers are worried about their fields, and this is perhaps one of the more existential problems for the island. Still, I was pleased to see ‘groundwater management areas’ across the island. These are places of concern where there is monitoring to make sure that if problems arise, they can be addressed. All of these signs of management — not to mention how the forest, the sheep, the gardens, the tourists, and the dunes are managed — leave me reeling, because it all seems under control.

Of course, control can be criticized, but I am wary of taking the easy argument against the Dutch ethic that says that their strategies for living with water are too controlling, not letting the water speak for itself, etc. A line of reasoning that hides the attunement to water actually going on here: in their own way, so many questions of living in an age of sea-level rise are answered, at least partially. Maybe there should be more concern, but a resident might say, 'why should I be concerned? I know we will be in a good position when we need to make future decision about how to live on this island.’

I’m not familiar with living in a place in which there’s not some major existential question that calls out for attention. I am trained to run to these loose ends with the eye of a critic, and I live in the United States, so there is always much to criticize. When that happens, am I there as a critic to call out loudly for others to fix it? Or do I just quietly fix it myself, to the best of my ability?

The environmental critic colludes to some degree in the very issues they write about, and so it is impossible to claim moral purity. Perhaps a mask of purity is always hiding the critic's moral responsibility, which I see as twofold. First, it is a responsibility to critique as in “to judge”, to arbitrate and call out points of failure so that we all may interpret them as warnings, and so make promises to exercise more care at the next juncture, the next moment. This is "calling it out loudly." Second, it is a responsibility to critique as in "to decide” (from the root kri, also the root of “crisis”), to respond rightly according to the situation and one’s own capacities, as a single person or as a collective. This is “quietly fixing it."

Of course these are interlinked responsibilities: to respond rightly requires that there are not significant failure points like actors blocking acts of aid or repair; and to judge requires that one know the situation and speak out while holding onto that stake rooted to the land. Otherwise the critic is lame: making ineffective or impractical repairs, or blathering about some issue they are not wise to. Judgement and decisive action are the warp and the weft of the change-maker’s fabric. The best leaders exercise these two qualities, and I see elements of them in Terschelling’s approach to the sea.

I wonder, then, that if the environmental critic desires to do more than just be in the right — probably conscious of the generations to come that read their words and their work and see how their advice went unheeded or was omitted from history — then the first and obvious imperative might be to act out, demanding judgement and decisive action. Not only in the content, but in the delivery: meaning that a critic might jump from writing books to, say, going into billboard advertising, because it has a greater and more immediate impact. This is the overstated counterpart to quiet, careful action, but at times it may be useful.

In this line of reasoning, it is not that paragraphs are no longer relevant to the critic. It is that a single statement at the right place and right moment may be ten thousand times more influential at the scale of the contemporary — all that happens in one’s single and undetermined lifetime —  than the most brilliant essay if that essay does not make it to the limelight. 

The critic, then, if they are not able to steadily build the future, might also dabble in sentences and fragments that crack open the moment, that both judge and act decisively. These days I’m wondering about paradox and contradiction as strategies to do that. Writers, poets, and artists are skilled at crafting messages, but so few now seem to nudge the sphere of leadership, decisions, and popular opinion, beyond brief controversies that fizzle soon thereafter. This impotence is tactical for power, as they know that keeping subversive rhetoric contained as highbrow Art means it can have relatively marginal effects compared to a politician’s tweet.

At the same time I am wary of the nuclear option. Maybe we don’t have to hold each other at knife-edge to effect a message. Maybe art and critique are tectonic — slower but more powerful than I want to give them credit for. 

But what even would it be, that sentence that cracks open the current world and lets the emergent world be born? A world where we are all limited and yet prepared to be decisive, like islanders. What could it be?