Nature's Evil

In the Middle Ages this whole coastal area, extending dozens of kilometres inland from the sea – the Low Countries, as they are still called – was covered in peat bogs. Peat is the first stage of the long process by which coal and oil are created, and peatlands are comparatively recent formations, 5,000 or 10,000 years old. Decomposing in stagnant water, the remains of bog plants rotted above and below the surface, so that layers of peat built up in both directions – a metre above and several metres below sea level. It was a stable ecosystem, resistant to floods and droughts. The Dutch dug drainage channels, cut out the drying peat with spades, heaped it into wooden crates and put it under cover to dry out. Alternatively, boats trawled for peaty slush with nets. The slush was taken ashore and trampled on to squeeze out the water, a process a bit like kneading dough. The heat produced from burning a cubic metre of peat equals that of firewood. The ash from peat is superior to the ash from a wood fire; it contains a lot of phosphorous, and a mixture of peat ashes and manure makes one of the best fertilisers. The building of ports and canals, the deepening of waterways, the digging of ditches to drain the fields – all these activities yielded peat. On the slightly raised shores of the bogs, towns grew up, and narrow barges brought peat to them along these same canals. 1

Peat holds water like a sponge – 90 per cent of its volume is water. As the Dutch drained the water or let it evaporate, burnt the peat and returned the ash to the soil, they lowered the level of the land. Until the building of the canals the coastline was stable. The peat bogs were a habitat that was of little use to people, but their surface was above sea level. Flooding resulted from the draining of the peat bogs, and, the more draining went on, the more effort had to be invested in the prevention of flooding. Dykes to keep out the seawater were as essential as canals were to drain the freshwater. All these defences were built out of local materials: underneath the layer of peat was a stratum of clay, and the deepening of the canals led to the strengthening of the dykes – or the necessity of buttressing the dykes led to the digging of deeper canals. Windmills to pump water from the fields became a regular feature of the landscape from the fifteenth century onwards. But people continued to burn peat, with the result that the average level of the land surface dropped further and further below sea level. Disastrous floods cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Institutions for collective flood defences had already developed by the Middle Ages. Then the state took over these functions. From Rousseau onwards, philosophers used the flood defences in the Dutch countryside as a classic example of the necessity for communal solidarity, the social contract and the state. They were not aware that the reason for the flooding was not Nature’s perfidy but human action and the ‘tragedy of the commons’: if there are no ownership rights over a resource, in this case peat, people will exploit it to extinction – the resource’s and their own. In Holland, flooding was personified as the ‘waterwolf’. Creating and preserving property rights, Leviathan tamed the waterwolf. Taking responsibility for dykes, locks and embankments, the sovereign divided land and water. With its day and night watch, its joint-stock companies and myriad anonymous diggers, this bog civilisation destroyed its environment but created a prosperous society and a great culture.

In total, more than 6 million cubic metres of peat were extracted from the territory of the Netherlands. The scale of work on the land surface grew rapidly. After peat had been extracted, the soil had to be built anew; returning from the city markets, the peat cutters’ barges brought ashes, mixed with night soil. So, at almost no cost, people heated the towns, organised transportation between them, and created new fields. If there had been no peat in Holland, generating the equivalent amount of heat would have required 800,000 hectares of well-run forestry, a quarter of the territory of Holland today. If there had been no canals in Holland, the transportation of this firewood would have required so many horses that growing the oats to feed them would have taken up a third of the country. 2