A few years ago, the Zeeland Duchess Hedwigepolder was surrounded by thousands of poplars. If you looked through the trees, you saw fens, ponds, bushes, country roads, meadows, fields. “You can’t imagine it anymore,” says Johan Robesin (79), former member of the Provincial Council of Zeeland on behalf of the Party for Zeeland. From the seawall, it looks out over some three hundred hectares of (almost) bare ground. It is all that is left of the Hedwigepolder, located in the municipality of Hulst in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen.
Robesin is ‘on the deathbed of the Duchess’, as he describes it himself, because next year the dikes will be breached and the polder will again become part of the Western Scheldt. The depoldering of the Hedwigepolder, which Robesin has opposed for years, will then be completed. In the Scheldt Treaties of 2005, the Netherlands and Flanders agreed that the Hedwigepolder would be flooded to restore tidal nature. This was necessary for the Netherlands to comply with European environmental requirements. Due to opposition to the depoldering of the Hedwige by citizens, politicians and the owner of the polder at the time, it took years before the depoldering actually started last year.
Western Scheldt seriously polluted
But last April it became clear that the Western Scheldt is seriously polluted with PFAS (poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances), chemicals that can be harmful to public health in large quantities. In some parts of the estuary, the PFAS values were found to be twenty-five times higher than in the rest of the Netherlands. A few months later it became known that a factory of the American chemical group 3M in Zwijndrecht (near Antwerp) in Belgium had been granted a perpetual permit to discharge large quantities of PFAS into the Scheldt. No research had been done in advance on the consequences for the environment.
Earlier this month, the province of Antwerp announced stricter standards for the plant’s discharge of PFAS, which came into effect immediately. Last Friday, 3M’s production processes that release PFAS were immediately shut down, on behalf of the Flemish government. This happened after it became known that hundreds of people living near the factory had too much PFAS in their blood. The cessation of production processes is a temporary measure.
The former owner of the Hedwigepolder, the Belgian Géry De Cloedt from whom the area was expropriated, seized the news last month to submit a request for review to the Council of State. With this he wants to stop the depoldering and reverse the expropriation. According to De Cloedt, if the polluted silt and polluted water from the Western Scheldt were to flow into the polder, the depoldering would overshoot its goal of restoring nature.
De Cloedt is not collaborating on this article. His ‘spokespersons’ Johan Robesin and Hans Mieras do. Hans Mieras (60) is De Cloedt’s legal adviser, he has been assisting him for about fifteen years in his fight against depoldering. Mieras is sitting at a table in a restaurant in Terneuzen, Robesin is sitting next to him. The Westerschelde can be seen through the large windows of the restaurant. Container ships glide past.
De Cloedt received 21 million euros from the government as compensation for the expropriation, but it was not about the money. Mieras: “He has a large dredging company and always said: ‘With what the Hedwige is financially worth, I can’t buy a dredger yet.’” But the emotional value is great. De Cloedt’s great-grandfather, Prosper, bought the Hedwigepolder in 1932. Géry promised his grandfather, Raymond, that the polder would remain in the family forever. Robesin: „He committed himself enormously to the polder and got his tenants with it. The area was always beautiful.”
De Cloedt gave his last interview to Omroep Zeeland in May 2018. The Supreme Court had just decided that he really had to cede his land to the state. After years of fighting for the preservation of his polder, De Cloedt had no choice but to stop the fight. He said he was “disappointed” by the decision and that it affected him emotionally. “I can no longer pass the polder on to my children,” he said. “Since they were born, they have been here every weekend and we used to have holidays here. We had so much fun here.”
Also read: A chemical factory discharges harmful PFAS into the Western Scheldt – and has a perpetual permit for this purpose
Attention again
After the news about the serious pollution of the Western Scheldt, the depoldering of the Hedwigepolder received renewed attention. In June, for example, the SGP asked in a debate in the House of Representatives what PFAS pollution means for depoldering. The party filed a motion to stop the depoldering. The party was concerned that the polder would “flood with sludge full of PFAS”.
Outgoing minister Barbara Visser (Infrastructure and Water Management, VVD) wrote at the beginning of October that the pollution is not an obstacle to depoldering. She expects that the PFAS concentrations found will decrease due to stricter regulations for the Belgian industry. A debate in the House of Representatives about the consequences of the PFAS pollution for the Hedwigepolder, which was supposed to take place at the beginning of October, has been postponed.
For Robesin and Mieras, the grief of the former owner is not the main reason to fight against depoldering. “A large part of the polder was farmland,” says Robesin. “Why trade fertile land for salt water? And then that beautiful nature, which will now be flooded by polluted water.” Mieras: “There were all kinds of rare birds in the Hedwigepolder.”
This is how more Zeelanders think about depoldering, there are three action groups that have resisted: Save our Polders, Emergency Clock Hedwige and De Levende Delta. They tried in vain to stop the depoldering by means of petitions and demonstrations.
Why then did the Dutch government continue to depolder the Hedwige? According to Robesin, that decision was taken under pressure from the Flemish government. “Flanders is all about the port of Antwerp,” he says. “It has to be dredged every day to keep the part of the Western Scheldt bordering the Hedwigepolder navigable. If the dikes of the Hedwigepolder disappear, the sludge can be removed much more easily. That would save the port millions.
Protected bird species
In response to questions from NRC fight the Netherlands and Flanders Robesin’s statement. Both point to the nature restoration obligation that the Netherlands has. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality (LNV) writes that the Netherlands was given notice of default by the European Commission in 2012 for failing to comply with this obligation: “The mud flats and salt marshes located on the Western Scheldt threaten to disappear completely if we not intervene.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Mobility and Public Works (Flanders) points out that a committee led by former minister Ed Nijpels (VVD) concluded in 2008 that depoldering the Hedwigepolder was by far the best choice for nature restoration. About the protected bird species that occur in the Hedwigepolder, the LNV spokesperson writes: “The restoration of nature will increase the habitat, foraging and resting area of almost all bird species. Habitat is created in a nearby nature reserve for the rare field and meadow birds in collaboration with the agricultural sector.”
Robesin seems almost unable to stop talking about depoldering. He has written two critical books about it, and is now working on his third. He says his fanaticism stems from “a very deep concern that things are not going in the right direction for Zeeland”. By ‘not the right side’ he means that ‘Zeeland is becoming less and less an agricultural province’. In 2011, Robesin was invited to the Torentje as a Member of Parliament by outgoing Prime Minister Mark Rutte, then Prime Minister in the Rutte I cabinet. There, Rutte and PVV leader Geert Wilders asked Robesin to vote for one of the then coalition parties – VVD, CDA, PVV – in the elections to the Senate later that year. Robesin promised the votes at the VVD if Rutte would commit himself to the preservation of the Hedwigepolder. Later that year, VVD, CDA, and PVV agreed that the Hedwige would not be depoldered, but in 2012, Rutte II cabinet decided that this would happen again.
Not without a fight
Robesin and Mieras are still determined. They are hopeful that the depoldering process can be stopped with the request for review. “But we know that it will not go without a fight,” says Mieras. He is standing next to Robesin on the seawall at the Hedwigepolder. “Certainly now that the minister has already said that the PFAS pollution does not stand in the way of depoldering.”
With his iPad, Robesin takes a picture of the barren landscape, with the port of Antwerp in the background. He will not send that photo to De Cloedt. “He hasn’t been here on purpose in years and that’s a good thing.”
Also read: PFAS: harmful and unbreakable
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of November 1, 2021
#Hedwigepolder #beautiful #fens #polluting #chemicals