Musings on an Ideal Community
Reflections on a Visit to the Netherlands and a Wake-up Call at a Dutch Museum
Internal time clocks whirring as we drove up I-89 to North Montpelier on Wednesday afternoon, the appearance of mountains made clear we were once again in Vermont. Meticulously maintained table flat farmland, an absolutely still water bottle on our train tray while quietly zooming to Brussels, Amsterdam, or the Chunnel at 182 miles per hour. Education, housing, medical care, all encompassing public transport plus parks and playgrounds everywhere. No super rich, no super poor. A large creative, productive, healthy, multi lingual middle class willing to pay high taxes for spotless cities, zero slums, no visible homeless, technical or university educations, superb childcare and preschool for all.
More bikes than people. Bikes have right of way.
With forty national political parties forced to make consensus decisions, a level of compassion, maturity, and wisdom emerges creating public policy that seems to truly respect every person's needs and potential. America's ongoing two party food fight, with corporations and the super rich dominating governance, would benefit beyond imagination with a whiff of multi party parliamentary debate directing far sighted investment of just a tiny portion of America's trillions locked in corporate profits and our portfolios.
Visiting family settled in a Maastricht suburb with Japanese cherry trees blossoming along a greenway across the street. No, ZERO, wood is allowed in any building construction in The Netherlands. Thus, a concrete slab home (1990s) sharing two walls with neighbors, lots of light from large windows front and back. The vital rootlets of neighbors, school buddies, grocer, doctor, Yale friendships and growing professional contacts also in Europe seem healthy and growing with time.
Three days in Ijsselstein subtly renewed my musings about the components of an ideal community for one's final decades. The personal palpable warmth of our historic guides, the miller who ground the various grains in the wind powered grist mill, the smiles of people who seem comfortably engaged in lives that have meaning. Yup, subtle stuff but somehow discernable in the bright eyed faces. Twenty plus years interconnecting with the amazing mix of friends in greater Montpelier carries the same inexplicable magic. I've been lucky, indeed,
A visit to the museum built into the huge concrete caissons that finally plugged the last gap in the 1953 Dutch dike collapse and flooding, offers one of the most honest exhibits about the growing impacts of climate change I've experienced. The furries of flooding, fires, acidification, drought, sea level rise, lethal daytime heat and record breaking storms and hurricanes will chug merrily along uninfluenced by whatever humans do. Homo sapiens, knowing well of CC threats since the 1970''s, has left too many critical tipping points unaddressed. The melting ice of Greenland and the Antarctic, the self reinforcing release of tundra CO2, the miles deep changes in ocean temperature, the growing atmospheric CO2 levels, the more than one degree F increase in global ambient air temp in the last century and a half continue their increases. Mother Nature and the laws of physics now have total control. Mitigation may feel comforting, but for individual families, adaptation seems the wiser course.
The final minutes of the memorable widescreen CC presentation at the !953 museum read and spoke: "The water will come."
The last time planet Earth experienced atmospheric CO2 levels at today's highs, worldwide sea levels were 300 feet higher. Claverack at plus or minus 270 feet above MSL, alas, could be under 30 feet of seawater. Chances are one could still beach a canoe near the Tank House. With a North Montpelier elevation of 741 above MSL Celina and I sleep quite soundly.
Do take another peek at AN INCONVENIENT APOCALYPSE. At least, read the conclusion. You'll find some useful guideposts about the farm that may prove helpful to the ten family who may be focused there in the next couple decades or so.
Today Celina baked six loaves of WWW, her favorite. Plus, with companion planting in mind, set out onions and carrots in the garden. She's definitely home.
— Erik Esselstyn