Peter's Blog

As the saying goes, God made the world but the Dutch made the Netherlands. Of course, no landscape is untouched: walk through the British countryside and what seems to be untouched forests and hills turn out be forests planted several centuries ago and hills continuously molded over the past millenia by human activity. On the road from Haarlem to Schipol I once saw a grass-covered ziggurat-shaped hill with an incredibly straight alley of trees running by it. Rather than pretending that their environment isn’t man-made – the British aren’t the only offenders at maintaining such an illusion though I think they’re some of the worst – the Dutch celebrate the artificialness of their landscape. Building on that thought, there’s a great piece in the Herald Tribune about an MIT professor encouraging a polluted region in Italy to embrace man-made nature.