Half-a-Century of Shoreline Memories on a Warming Planet

A personal journey on this island’s climate-altered shores

The vast mounds of sand, arranged in neat lines to fortify our coastline, resemble an enlarged sand castle made by the kids of giants during a relaxing day on the beach. As a Dutchman, I get excited by anything resembling mountains in our flat country, but I don’t expect to see them when stepping onto the beach to enjoy a tranquil sunset.

Island home

I was about eight years old when I first walked on this beach. My best friend’s parents had asked my mom and dad if it was okay if I could join them for the summer in the village on this island. Decades later, I decided to make it my permanent home someday. I’m back here now to make that dream a reality.

That was a different Netherlands and a different planet. Environmental concerns were mostly local, just like everything was somehow more local. Paris felt like a world away, reachable after a full day of travel. Flying was a unique experience, so America remained a mystical paradise where everything was better.

Holidays were usually in the next province rather than the next continent. If a classmate moved to another city, his one postcard with the new address usually signaled the end of the friendship until some of them miraculously popped up half a century later on LinkedIn with an impressive title and a bald head.

Only the moon seemed less far in those days, and we watched grainy black-and-white pictures of white men performing unstable dances in their white suits in a barren white landscape. Nobody bothered to wait for two minutes for the television to warm up before we could watch the only channel, ambitiously named Nederland 1, starting its broadcasts every evening at 7 p.m.

From local acid rain to a global climate crisis

We should have realized how the globalization of environmental challenges went faster than economic globalization, that darling catchphrase for politicians in the 1990s who believed global prosperity was within reach, fueled by fossil fuels. While newsflashes about polluted rivers of the 1970s made way for reports about polluted oceans, the global threat of climate change replaced the local and regional challenges posed by acid rain.

Sandhills on the beach (photo by author)

I walk past those artificial sandhills and soon find the vast, open space I sought. If the sun bothers to break through the clouds before dipping into the unusually warm North Sea, I am still in time to enjoy the last minutes of sunset.

My memories of that first summer on the island have blurred into a faint but positive image of endless adventures in the forest, dunes, and seaside until we walked back home in the afternoon. I’ll never forget how, at night, the glare of the lighthouse lit up our bedroom every few seconds.

A rabbits’ pandemic

Each morning, dozens of rabbits hopped happily around the house, unaware of the viral Myxomatosis disaster that had struck their predecessors two decades before. They were equally unaware of the VHS virus that would wipe out the next generations in the late 1980s.

Like politicians, they also ignored climate change, which would also impact their dune habitat. Once the rabbits were practically gone, we introduced cattle to replace them in a desperate compensation effort to keep the dunes as barren and sandy as they should be. But eating seedlings and digging burrows are essential to keep the dunes in their original state. Rabbits master both skills better than the introduced livestock.

As so often, when natural disasters strike, humans are to blame. In the summer of 1952, a doctor in France introduced the Myxomatosis virus into Europe from a laboratory in Rio de Janeiro. Unlike me in those early mornings on the island, he disliked the presence of rabbits on his estate. In the true spirit of humans destroying nature’s beauty and diversity, he deliberately spread the Brazillian virus that already had the reputation of having ravaged the Australian rabbit population.

The doctor knew the virus had painfully killed half a billion Australian rabbits in just two years; his cruel action spread the virus across Europe with devastating effects. The following year, it was already in the Netherlands, and in just a few years, the entire European continent was infected; the wild rabbit population was decimated.

My walk on the beach continues, and I reach a row of oak wooden wave-breaking poles stretching from the wide beach into the sea.

Memories of a stable climate

In the 1970s, no kids of giants made mountains on the beach. Nor did we. The sea level was lower, the storms less forceful, and we relied on planting trees and marraam grass on the dunes to anchor our island in the North Sea. A short distance from the forests and the dunes, tall wooden wave-breaking poles on the beach protected our coastline for centuries.

Together with the lighthouse, the rabbits, and the jumping of high dunes into the soft sand, those poles are what I vividly remember from that summer half a century ago. When my friend’s parents were away, we played a personal test of mettle, testing who dared to walk as far on top of those oak wooden wave-breaking poles above the sea waves. The further out you dared to go, the higher you were above the waves and the more rotten and unstable the poles were.

I didn’t lose balance, but I lost the game. My friend may not even remember us playing there, nor is he aware of my never-fading but silent admiration for his daring escapades far above the waves. I often think about it when walking along the island’s western shore or even when we meet, but I never mention it to him.

The Scheldt map of 1504 (Source: Zeeuwse Ankers)

These rows of poles are characteristic of the islands of Schouwen-Duiveland and Walcheren. The first image of these poles is on the Scheldt Map of 1504. Those two parallel rows of four on the map likely represent longer rows with more poles. Now, there are almost a hundred thousand of them, and they are essential for coastal defense and preventing beach erosion. They also support a maritime ecosystem where mussels, crabs, fish, and other sea creatures live.

I stop close to the water and admire the tranquil sea. This season has no tourists, and I can fully appreciate the painted sky. In the last century, regular finds were made right at this spot of a small harbor from the Middle Ages that will forever be lost to the waves. It was one of the dozen drowned villages on this island.

A local painter has made artistic impressions of those settlements on glass. You find them at several viewpoints in the dunes. Look through the glass painting at the sea, and you can time travel in your projection on the waves. People worked, lived, and loved there, but they didn’t have the wave-breaking poles, nor could they pump up the sand from the deeper parts of the North Sea to create those Dutch mountains on the beach to compensate for this winter’s washed away beach.

There are hardly any people. I see a father with three lively five-year-olds; I hear their laughter and the soft tones of the small waves rolling in. A couple with two dogs walks in the distance; he throws a stick for them, and while the dogs run, she quietly gazes at the sunset with her hands in the pockets of her long white coat.