Room for natural processes
Room for natural processes is the Heart of our work
Ebb and flood, river flooding and the creation of bogs were natural processes that have formed the Dutch landscape in the last ten thousand years. In former years, people had to adapt themselves to these natural circumstances in order to survive. Nowadays, dikes, dams, breakwaters and sheet piling ensure that accommodation and navigation is safe, and powerful pumping-engines pump away the water till below sea level allowing us to use the soil intensively.
The other side of the story is that we have imposed restraints on natural processes. Nowadays, only seldom do rivers and brooks flood over the land, most peat has been burnt up in stoves, salt marshes, mud flats and brackish zones in the estuaries have been pushed back, and the effects of erosion and sedimentation have been levelled out. Even transitional zones are minimised in the landscape. Where there were once broad and changeable zones between wet and dry land, saltwater and freshwater, or woods and open fields, there are now narrow lines: sheet pilings, dikes, sluices or barbed wire fencing.
Not all plants and animals indigenous to this damp country of ours succeeded in adapting themselves to this new regime and the hard boundaries in the landscape. The original transitional zones offered shelter to many different species, each with its own specialities and preferences. Nature development whereby processes of erosion and sedimentation can do their work without being disturbed will once again offer room to numerous plants and animals. The high waters of 1993 and 1995 aroused the primitive forces of the river, and the impact they had on fresh nature development areas was overwhelming: river dunes came to life again by newly deposited sand layers and plant seeds, insects and water organisms from upstream areas drifted along to start colonisation: all this gave a well-earned boost to nature development.
