2023-06-24 09:33:00
When I was about ten years old, nature for me was the woods and dunes near Castricum and Egmond, the beach of Bakkum, Vrouwenpolder and De Koog, sometimes a patch of the Veluwe, and even more sometimes (yes, I already thought of my own words) the Shannon and the Atlantic coast of County Clare in Ireland, my motherland.
The Club of Rome report had appeared, but it had passed me by. Perhaps also because my parents’ newspaper – De Telegraaf, which I read every day – didn’t pay that much attention to it. Or everyone thought many of the warnings were about later, about someday.
An occasional manure discharge
In my twenties I tried to become a lawyer, I was quite concerned with social inequality and arms races, and I mainly encountered nature during increasingly longer endurance runs. In the mid-eighties I would run a series of marathons, I laid the foundation along the river Gein, not far from Amsterdam, in the woods and dunes of Aerdenhout and Vogelenzang and between the fields of Waterland. It was bursting with agricultural activity there, but apart from an occasional manure spill, and an article about agricultural poisons that could eventually also end up in humans, you weren’t very concerned with what went wrong.
When I was thirty I came across more and more activism, immersed myself in ozone layer and acid rain and realized, perhaps a little late, that an economy and a society build on constant growth, at the expense of nature around us, at the expense of the planet, is impossible.
When I was forty I had two children, and yes, that changes your view of the future, because seventy, eighty years have just been added. I read a book that touched and influenced me so much that I decided to stop eating meat and fish. In the meantime, in California, I had seen the largest trees in the world, standing there as if they had always been there, but also under threat, as temperatures rise, as wildfires become more frequent and larger.
Glad we can and can live here
And when, on the same trip, I looked into the Grand Canyon, I mainly realized that we humans think that we determine a lot on this planet, but that in the end we are only small, and above all we should be happy that we are allowed and able to live here. “We’re guests, behave!” I yelled, from the South Rim. People look at you strangely.
By the age of fifty, climate change had become my main theme, because I think it is related to everything, the place where we (can) live, how we feed, how we interact with the rest of creation, people worldwide adrift, biodiversity, health, energy supply, travel, economy.
The many ideas and possible solutions make me happy, and I get desperate and angry when I hold on to the reality of when I was young. A reality that was not real even then.
Historical research shows that I will be sixty on Sunday. I am somewhere between hope and fear, between disbelief and fighting spirit. And among the trees, of course.
Dolf Jansen is a comedian and writes a weekly column for Trouw. Read his columns here.
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