Green Green Green

About two years ago my brother sent me a t-shirt with Woodsy Owl on it, with the words "Give a hoot, don't pollute!" It's a t-shirt that I wear surprisingly often around the house, as it is the perfect "I haven't got any other clean t-shirt" t-shirt. But South Park spoof notwithstanding, it also perfectly illustrates my Green side, mostly because I like to hope that people are smarter than apes, and will not ruin the planet (by which I mean all of the arable land) out of sheer greed and willful ignorance. Tall order, I know. But it makes more sense than believing in God.

The Netherlands were extolled in Jared Diamond's Collapse for their forward-thinking environmental policies, implemented by a top-down model that's only possible after generations and generations of hive-mind living. It's everywhere: the advertisements that link being Green to getting it on, billboards that encourage you to hold on to your trash rather than litter. Dutch culture, being as clean as it is, makes littering one of the easier vices to police. God knows there are more terrible public service announcements than suggesting Green is the new sexy.

Things I like about the Dutch environmental policies:

• The statiesgeld: the refund you get for bringing in empty bottles. Ten cents for a beer bottle, and 25 cents for a soda bottle. It's so simple: you feed your empty bottle into a machine, and it spits back a receipt telling you how much money you've gotten for your trouble. Then you present the receipt to the cashier, who knocks the amount off your final grocery bill.
• Bike money: yes, you can actually get an employer to help you pay for your bike, if you use it for commuting to and from your place of work. Policies differ--where I worked in Maastricht, I could get €300 back. Karel basically got his folding bike for free--it's a bit of a hassle to fill out the paperwork, but given how much bikes can cost, it's a pretty good incentive to push pedals.
• Thrift culture: it's de rigeur to shop at thrift stores, to get furniture off Marktplaats, and just generally not throw anything away that can be patched up and sold off. It's also because if you don't like what's on sale at the Xenos, you're pretty much screwed because everything new looks like that. So thrift stores it is, for people who want things different.
• Trash cans everywhere: by necessity, they're around to prevent people from littering. And y'know what, they're not in the way and they are regularly emptied and they actually keep people from littering! The NS, on the ends of the intercity train routes, where the trains are at a stop for 15 minutes, has teams of cleaners that go through the train and empty out the trash cans on it. One wonders how this concept has evaded SEPTA.

Things I don't like so much:

• Why can't I recycle cans anywhere? Plastic bottle recycling drop-offs are common. Paper-and-cardboard recycling day is clearly marked on the special afvalkalender we get every February (one month too late, DAR...), but if I want to recycle a can of soda, I shouldn't have to bring it all the way to the dump.
• The road tax: the Dutch have one of the most extreme car taxes in Europe. When you buy a car, you pay a 14% tax for pollution, and depending on how big the car is, every month you get dinged for road usage. And that's not even covering the insane cost of gas. My current estimate of gas prices and conversion rates puts it at a hefty $9/gal--and if that's not an incentive to get a Prius, I don't know what is. You might be wondering why I'm complaining about it, since I don't even drive, but the road tax is actually a serious impediment to our even considering getting a car.

I most certainly missed somethings. Possibly many things. What're your favorite or not-so-favorite aspects of going Green in Holland?

Going greener

We're not really "green" so much as we're broke. We don't recycle because we're good people--we recycle because the statiegeld saves us a euro here and there on our groceries. So eating organic regularly is out of the question. About the only thing I do get with any degree of regularity is organic herbs, and that's because they are, surprisingly enough, cheaper than the supermarkets' pathetic excuse for plant matter.

Right before I left Philadelphia, I had toyed with the idea of joining a CSA group. Community supported agriculture was big a couple years ago--basically you pay a few hundred dollars in May and get a big box o' food every week for the next six months. Subscription plans vary in the details, but the basic gist of CSA is that you get organic produce fresh from the farmer, and cheaper than from Whole Paycheck Foods.

I'd wondered if such things existed in the Netherlands. I mean, I assumed there was such a thing, given how ecologically sensitive the country is (individuals, not so much). But if it did, I certainly wasn't hearing about it. Thus, dinner with the Bekkers was enlightening, not only because we learned how to make a quick 'n dirty Hollandaise sauce, but also because P. Jonas told us about his groete abonnement: every week he gets a bag of organic greens and fruit (his apparently included fruit; some of the ones that I've seen also offer organic meat) that included such things as salsify and winter purslane, which were both incorporated into the delectable meal.

So of course, one of the first things I did upon getting back was google "groente abonnement". It took a little searching, since the first thing that pops up is the website of the Netherlands' Green Party, but eventually I turned up the website for sustainable living and with it, the link to how to get what is essentially a CSA subscription. Except they're broken, so what you really do is do a search for the pickup points and go from there. For the life of me, though, I'm not entirely sure what to make of a website that thinks I'll go to Amsterdam to pick up a bag of vegetables.

It's not a CSA the way most of the Americans I know would think of it, not exactly. Rather than paying for six months' worth of food at once, you pay for a weeks' worth--okay, three meals' worth--of fruits and greens at a time. And while the cost is actually pretty low, it does concern me a bit, because Karel sucks at being Dutch, and no Dutch bag of veggies would be complete without a pillar of leek, which is the one thing we do not eat on a regular basis.

All the same, the idea of just dropping by Brakkenstein on a Saturday morning, rather than pedaling all the way to the market, is very appealing. And fresh purslane--well, that's worth whatever it costs.

Tally Ho!

These last few days, we were in Naarden/Bussum, visiting Karel's dad. The reason for the slash in the name is that Bussum has grown over the last few-hundred years, incorporating Naarden into it. Naarden, on the other hand, has not grown at all--not for a lack of trying, but because it's an island ringed by a fortress, a moat, and an extra wall. The locals take an inordinate amount of glee pointing out the old church, which still has cannonballs from some battle back-in-the-day stuck in its walls.

The purpose for the visit, as Karel explained it, was to help his dad make a venison paté, and to attend a bugling practice session in the hopes of placing better than dead last in the Dutch-German bugling contest to be held later this year. Yes, he said that with a straight face. And I have the photographic evidence that such things are anticipated by people other than Karel, as well.

It always seems to surprise people to know that there are hunters in the Netherlands, given the "eco-green" ethos that pervades the country--I mean, the recycling stations in Maastricht have spots for paper, plastic, glass, and cans, while in Nijmegen one must learn the art of parsing trash. In addition, the paperwork required to own a gun is famously tedious, and serves as a deterrent for all but the most dedicated gun buffs.

But the fact is, hunters are an essential part of wildlife management. If you divide the parts of the Netherlands that are not farmed into developed versus wildlife preserves, then it's about a 50:50 (at most 60:40) split. These little islands of wildlife are home to an astonishing array of edible animals, including deer (seen), pheasant (seen), hare (seen), and wild boar (not-seen, and thank God, because I'm not sure I'd be alive to tell the tale if I had seen one). What this means is that, in order to maintain a healthy balance of animals-versus-plants, that something must regularly cull the cute-n-fuzzies. It used to be that wolves did this, but the last wolf disappeared from the Netherlands 150 years ago, so hunters had to take their place. Not that people like Karel and his father are complaining--Karel's particular area of expertise is, surprisingly (given his job), guns and how to shoot them. And perhaps more importantly, how to prepare the things that are on the wrong end of the bullet.

So the venison paté that Karel made with his dad came entirely from animals that his father had shot himself (Karel, for all that he can shoot like a sniper, long ago lost his appetite--never very strong to begin with--for hunting). It's an interesting, if stinky*, connection to one's food that most people can't appreciate.

*I'm not at all squicked out by the sight, smell, or feel of dead animals--but the scent of the cooking pate was vaguely reminscent of dog food.

Not all wine and roses

To most people, the Netherlands is a quaint little country full of little houses and canals and windmills, and lots of pot. It's charmingly bucolic in nature, with fat and happy cows next to rows and rows of tulips. They think those things because they haven't been to the ass-end of Nijmegen: If Costco and Sams and Walmart were aliens that tried to take over the world, then the ass-end of Nijmegen is where they've begun--klik after klik of warehouse-type offices/stores/warehouses, each one getting steadily uglier and uglier, until you end up at the power plant. And the dump, next to it.

I'm in the process of cleaning out our storage unit, and much of what is currently within our spot in the basement are old electronics. The Dutch are a bit more anal-retentive about trash than, say, Philadelphia: you must set out your trash on the designated day, in special bags. "Green waste", or food waste, should be separate from the normal waste--the company provides a green bin for that, but they stopped doing it for apartments. Recyclable plastics are set out in a special bag. Oude papier is set out once a month. Bottles that once contained dangerous chemicals, as well as batteries, are to be taken to the "chemokar", a special truck that parks in different locations in the city every day of the week for a few hours. For old furniture, you must contact a kringloopwinkel (secondhand shop) to have it taken away. You must take everything else to the dump yourself.

I call it "the dump" out of laziness, and not to imply that the Dutch would actually allow people to just randomly pile unwanted things in a designated spot. Most people drive there in their cars. They pull up next to a checkpoint, where someone asks them what they have, and if needed they pay a fee. Things like wood waste from home remodeling projects cost a certain amount per cubic meter. Things like small electronics are free.

Fee assessed, you are then allowed to go to the area where the dumpsters abound. The dumpsters are labled, so that your carpentry waste gets tossed into one dumpster, your small electronics into another, huge hanks of broken glass into yet another. God help you if you get mixed up. There's even a special dumpster for things suitable for kringloopwinkels. Yes, there is a market for trash.

I was on a bike--and plus I came in through the back way--so I popped up behind the checkpoint. I only had one speaker, though, so the guy just waved me to dumpster 1. Speaker dumped, I went home.

The trip served one main purpose, and it was not to get rid of an old speaker: it was to assess how far away the dump is from our apartment, and how difficult the trip would be if I had several additional broken electronics. I discovered a long time ago that roads in the Netherlands don't always mesh with what Google Maps thinks--plus trips planned with a driver in mind don't always consider the fate of a cyclist. It also gave me an excuse to finally--after four years--get a fietstas (panniers)--as I realized that no, I wasn't going to get old electronics onto my bike any other way.