The Dutch “Miracle”

Abstract

Increasingly the critical problems of the late 20th century are becoming ecological in nature. Economic geography may well be the most determining factor in a nation’s well-being. Perhaps no modern nation has so boldly and thoroughly confronted her ecological limitations as has Holland. Here there is no prodigality of land that one finds in Brazil, Canada, America or the Soviet Union. Holland has barely enough land for a livelihood, homes and recreation. What is available is largely due to the diligent uses to which the Dutch have put their land. All must be carefully husbanded and judicious decisions must be made continuously concerning the use of their land. This the Dutch have largely done and up to now have avoided the disaster that would surely have been theirs had they employed the waste and wrack of the more generously endowed nations. There are indications that her present affluence has created trends — the wider personal use of the automobile, the spread of suburbia outside large urban areas, and the more wasteful, litter producing packaged-goods consumption — that might be wiser to avoid. However, rather than lay waste their land, they have ever attempted to improve it. Perhaps no better illustration exists to show the impact of geographical endowment upon social attitudes and behaviour than the fact that a geographically poor Holland, during its existence, increased its arable land by 50 percent, while a richer America, through ill use and erosion, decreased hers by an equal amount in less than 200 years.