To take my mind off things, I read some news stories about felling trees in small villages in the Netherlands. Did you know that they are in Oud-Gastel a historic lime tree to cut down in the village center despite objections from the residents? Jan and José Roefs from Oirschot have tried in vain to cut the hood of a door tinder fungus affected tree to stop. But he was ill, the council said, and he may have been a danger. In a residential area in Arnhem, the residents revolt because of the felling of an old beech tree. In Brazil, deforestation has never been gone as fast as this year – entire football fields at once. But you won’t easily get an Arnhem residential area up and running for that.
I don’t blame them. It is a known human defect. Even those who describe themselves as extremely rational are in practice mainly concerned with what is happening right in front of them.
I heard someone describe how the focus in her career became more and more local over the years. As a teenager and in her twenties, she was concerned about world peace, universal human rights, the hole in the ozone layer. In her thirties she became involved in European politics and institutions. In his forties with The Hague and the ministries. In her fifties she started working for her community. And in her sixties she is concerned with the quality of life in her street.
It is old age, from dreamy idealism to more pragmatic and concrete. But it is also zeitgeist. Global is out, local is in. The deforestation in the Amazon region leaves people feeling powerless and small. You feel like co-owner of the tree in front of the door. You can actually do something for that.
And it turns out that all that local clumsy campaigning is sometimes indeed effective in solving global problems. How long have we been trying to stop global warming at global climate summits? Countries are promising more and more and the realization of the plans is lagging further and further behind. Guess who is on track to realize the 2030 climate plans? Correct. The provinces and regions. Locally, we have succeeded in setting up enough solar meadows and wind farms to fulfill the promises made in the 2019 climate agreement.
You see the same phenomenon in pollution politics. The emphasis is often on CO2; a gas, volatile, that diffuses into the world’s atmosphere. But greenhouse gas is everyone’s problem – and therefore nobody’s problem. Perhaps that is why it seems that nitrogen is achieving more in this country more quickly. Nitrogen actually precipitates in a person’s backyard.
With that backyard activism, it is now even possible to increase the pressure on the elusive aviation. A Boeing 747 refuels 190,000 liters of kerosene, four bathtubs per passenger calculated Jelmer Mommers from The Correspondentand emits the CO2 out all over the world. The same goes for nitrogen. Only nitrogen emissions up to 1,000 meters above the ground are included in the calculation, that is only 20 percent of the total. The rest also falls somewhere, of course, but above that it belongs to everyone and therefore to no one.
That 20 percent ends up in extremely important and vulnerable Natura2000 areas around Schiphol, such as the dunes of Kennemerland, which are bursting with retired wealthy residents who are excited about the local nature. And we haven’t even talked about it yet the Botshol areawhere the small loach fish can be found, which can suffer from the acidification of its environment due to nitrogen precipitation.
By now, that insignificant fish in that puddle near Abcoude is better protected than the entire Pacific Ocean. It was announced this week that Schiphol may have to downsize for a nature permit. Not because of oceans and deserts and taigas and sea ice and the biosphere, but because of the 20 percent that ends up in the backyard of someone with a law degree, a network, and a Twitter account.
But how far can you get with that local approach? This country is being wiped clean, but industries are moving and planes can also land elsewhere. In Bucharest, Moscow, Dubai, or in another backyard with just as nice fish, but slightly less observant, articulate and wealthy residents.
Rosanne Hertzberger is a microbiologist.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC Handelsblad on 11 December 2021
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of December 11, 2021
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