On this last day of the month, the newsletter about June. This has everything to do with recent developments both within and outside our organization. If we first look at our own organization, we see that we have once again produced a new book within Nature and Economy under the title ‘Go with the flow’. The book is only in Dutch available and you can order it here:
https://tripleee.nl/onze-boeken/
The study on which this was based was carried out on behalf of the Zeeland and Van Hall Larenstein Universities of Applied Sciences and CREW. The book is about the acute scarcity of raw materials that we are confronted with as a Dutch society and how our rivers can contribute to preventing this scarcity. To this end, we have devised and developed the concept of ‘fluvial mining’.
And then the Space Policy Document came out. We are among the rare organizations that believe that the importance of this memorandum cannot be overestimated. Because in fact we see here that Economic Affairs and Defense are coming alongside on the housing construction assignments and are also claiming their spatial claims in this memorandum. This is mainly based on the new geopolitical relationships that are now having a hard impact on our spatial planning. Housing construction alone is no longer the only challenge. It is about building a ‘resilient society’, ‘strategic economy’, ‘raw material scarcity’, ‘maintaining our broad prosperity’, the ‘earning capacity’ of our economy, ‘security of supply’ and more of these terms. All of this actually comes down to preserving and strengthening large parts of our economic structure. Maintaining large-scale food production, reindustrialization and strengthening 5 large clusters, all (except Chemelot) located near the ports of the Netherlands.
This will mainly have to put thinking about the environment and economy on a new track. We ‘coincidentally’ also recently published a new clip about this with the theme ‘About environmental problems and environmental tax’.
This large-scale reindustrialization of the Netherlands must be accompanied by an additional two million inhabitants. That seems an almost impossible task, especially if we want to keep the country livable. But also important, especially in that hustle and bustle, we need the healing and soothing effect of nature.
That is also our field of work, because ‘Go with the flow’ is, together with the book ‘Outside just better’ about the economic health benefits of national parks, the second book we have produced this year. And we are pleased that the recommendations we have made regarding cooperation between national parks and the health sector are actually being adopted by the National Parks Office. So it will soon become increasingly possible to improve outdoors. Finally, within all this, we also urgently need land consolidation as an instrument to realize our tasks in the countryside. Tom Bade discussed this extensively in an article in the NRC in June. It was a long push, but we are now also seeing this tide turning emphatically. For the sake of completeness, a Leaf Green about land consolidation for those who are not yet convinced:
