Do First World Problems = First World Solutions?
“The issues that currently wreck people’s lives in Switzerland and Norway, Australia and the Netherlands are the problems that will be rife around the globe in 2319.” (Alain de Botton)
I read this last night, in Amsterdam, capital of the Netherlands, on page 16 of The School of Life: An Emotional Education—which I suspect was one of many "presents" my partner (who is a psychologist) bought “for himself,” except not really, knowing I can’t resist the smell of a new book; this one, particularly subtle.
Anyway, it got me thinking about my being, for the moment, located in a place loftily proclaimed by this generation’s Nietzsche to be an exclusive preview of the problems the whole world will face in future.
If de Botton's assumption holds even vaguely true for psychology, what about technology? Transportation? Climate change? Economics, education, crime, punishment? Relationships, sex, family structures? (Ugh) Happiness..?
And so, in an effort to keep the writing goals I set for myself two mini-bottles of red wine in on new years eve KLM flight into Schipol, I've decided to start trying to take a closer look at:
- what daily life looks in one of the very most first-world-y pockets of the world right now—and what it might look like ten, twenty, fifty years from now
- which problems Northern-European technologists, architects, city planners, economists, psychotherapists, social anthropologists, philosophers, etc., are grappling with today in planning for tomorrow.
- what, if anything, the rest of the us can learn from those living out their days here on Planet 2319—assuming, of course, some iteration of said planet is still around, then.
I'd thought I'd start with one simple question:
What can Amsterdam tell me about what your grandkids' daily commute might look like?
When I think about the ideal cities of the the future, the first thing I picture are ideal transportation systems, and supporting infrastructure—both in a physical and cultural sense.
The way we move through cities shapes how we experience spaces and the people they hold.
The first time I felt confident figuring out how to get where I needed to be on the New York subway, three days in, I called my mom I tears so she could share in the pride of what was, to me at the time, reason enough to be considered for a lifetime achievement award.
Ditto for the first time I cycled to Vondelpark, realising, on arrival, that the space between my shoulder blades hadn’t spasmed from the fear formerly induced by Amsterdam’s uniquely visceral combination of bike traffic congestion and tourist-induced road rage.
There's just something about conquering a foreign, futuristic city's transportation system that feels like victory.
As you're probably already aware, the Dutch use bicycles. Rain (probably) or shine, their bikes are their primary mode of transportation — they start learning to ride as young as three years old, and are allowed to get themselves around by bike, unchaperoned, by between eight and ten.
A mildly embarrassing aside: because of their love of bicycles I'd made a classic fundamental attribution error and assumed the Dutch had 'always been' an environmentally-conscious citizenship. In fact, the reason cyclists own the streets of all Dutch cities today is the result of fierce post-war civic activism against cars when auto-ownership and accident-related fatalities rose with the economy.
source: awwwmemes.com
Moving Forward: Field Notes From Your Grandkids’ Daily Commute
When I asked my partner about the first time he realised the rest of the world didn’t cycle everywhere, he recalled a childhood memory of asking his parents why the tourists were always taking photographs of the thousands of bicycles parked in lots outside Grand Central Station.
Having officially run out of space to park their bicycles back in 2015 (and consequently set aside 3 million euros ($3,336,405.00) worth of EU funding for the construction of 75,000 bicycle stands in the cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Utrecht last year); I can fully empathise with the fascination of those tourists; who are, still today, and right now as I write this, taking photo, after photo, after photo, of Amsterdam’s cram-full parking lots designed to be a convenience for the city’s 870,000+ cyclists.
Lakshmi* Can’t Find Anywhere to Park Her Fucking Bike Again
(*Yes, your kids named your granddaughter after the ancient Indian goddess of prosperity and beauty; because 500+ hours of Yoga Teacher Training — that you partially paid for, remember?)
So, it’s 2080.
Let’s assume the even America’s fittest-for-survival are now on bicycles because Elon Musk and Grimes’ baby turned out to be ~too~ weird and kind of low-key transphobic so everybody stopped buying Teslas.
Your vegan-from-conception granddaughter, whose friends call 'Laks' for short, (pronounced ‘lucks', duh), is in her second year of an Environmental Engineering degree at Berkeley but currently on exchange for a Post-Coal Replacement Economy course at the University of Amsterdam; and the bicycle lot they built on ground outside Central is full AF; so she’s going to use the “subaquatic bike catacomb" she can access directly via tunnel to the city’s metro system.
'Shit. It's full, too.
They made space for 21,500 bikes under-fucking-water here in late 2031 but they couldn't think of way get the sapiens to stop with the breeding, huh…'
— Lakshmi thinks idly to herself as she squeezes her bike between two ‘bakfiets’ — a special kind of bicycle, designed to carry anywhere up to four children, plus two or three plastic bags filled with groceries, which are also housed in their own plastic.
> exhibit A—a bakfiets.
Under the sea / Under the sea / Darling it’s better / Down where it’s wetter / Take it from me
If there’s one element the Dutch know what to do with, it’s water.
There’s a great saying I’m going to steal (after a short while ago first seeing it stolen in a fantastic book called Why The Dutch Are Different):
God created the earth, but the Dutch created the Netherlands.
You see, much of this very strange and wonderful, bread and cheese loving, cannabis haven of a land is in fact already located below sea level.
The Dutch? They laughed in the face of that sea-level and built one of 2019’s top-ten-ranking happiest countries under it anyway.
“For the Netherlands, looking for solutions to water issues is part of everyday life. This is not yet the case in other areas and countries that also increasingly are faced with extreme weather.”
— Cora Van Nieuwenhuizen, Dutch Minister of Infrastructure and Water Management)
And, for those of you who are new to 2020’s general vibe (welcome! it’s quite nice here); allow me to provide you with some fast-googled context on the relationship between your sweet Lakshmi's future reality (i.e. climate change) and water (i.e. rising sea levels).
1. “global warming” ≠ “climate change”.
For those of us from the Al Gore generation, it’s an easy mistake to make. Apparently, today, we prefer to talk about “climate change” and not "global warming" — in part because some places, like the Northern U.S., will actually get cooler in the short term.
2. rising sea levels are a climate change event.
As is the increase in global average temperatures; as well as extreme weather events like flooding; soil contamination with salt; and the resulting shifts in human and wildlife populations and habitats, etc.
When sea levels rise as rapidly as they have been, even a small increase can have devastating effects on coastal habitats. Higher sea levels are coinciding with more dangerous hurricanes and typhoons that move more slowly and drop more rain, contributing to more powerful storm surges that can strip away everything in their path.
In other words: a lot more of us are gonna need to figure out how to handle water like the Dutch already do, daily.
3. still not gonna google ‘how to decrease my emissions’ after this?
Know this: the prospect of higher coastal water levels threatens basic services such as Internet access, since much of the underlying communications infrastructure lies in the path of rising seas.
So, What's The 5th Happiest (and 1st Wettest Country) in The World Focused On Right Now?
In December 2019, The Dutch High Court ordered the government to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25% below 1990 levels by the end of next year, on the basis that inaction on the issue of climate change is a violation of human rights, in "a ruling that could have repercussions around the world." Urgenda, the environmental group who launched the legal proceeding back in 2013, welcomed the decision as "historic" and "groundbreaking".
There are now 1,442 cases that have been filed in countries around the world in various stages of proceedings, in what is the vanguard of an area of environmental law called atmospheric trust litigation.
Do governments act against the human rights of their citizens when they fail to follow the experts’ recommendations in trying to address the climate emergency?
We need immediate action from our politicians who, in many cases, fail to act because they are incapable of planning for the future or, in some cases, plainly irresponsible. The Netherlands has just shown us that even when this is the case, we still have the possibility of denouncing them in order to try to change things.
— Enrique Dans for Forbes
We're two weeks into 2020, and, well, there's been some movement over here in the Netherlands, I guess:
- On Monday, the Dutch government agreed to stop doing business with construction companies whose mobile equipment runs on diesel; always check the diesel particulate filter for diesel cars at road worthiness testing centres; and push 50 million euros ($55.574.750) into a new Clean Air Agreement designed to improve air quality.
- In other cities, the roofs of bus stops are being covered with flowering plants as 'gifts to honeybees'.
- This year, the world's lowest-lying land will enforce one of the lowest speed limits in the EU: after ‘infrastruacture projects were put on hold because of high emissions,’ the Netherlands to cut national speed limit to 62mph to 'fight climate change'
“The government has taken a number of measures. It has increased subsidies for people to install, for instance, certain installations or solar panels on their houses, and a bunch of other things, including closure of coal-fired power plants. Unfortunately, they haven't done enough, so they'll have to do more."
— Dennis van Berkel, legal counsel for the Urgenda Foundation which filed the lawsuit
In Why a Rich Country is Closing its Public Libraries and Gyms Out of Poverty — an article published on Jan 13 by de Volkskrant (a left-centrist Dutch daily) — columnist Toine Heijmans observes:
“The Netherlands is not a country, at most a company,” writes Michel Houellebecq in his novel 'Serotonine' - the Netherlands is a multinational, I would say, that no longer sees the big in the small…
A library is not a legal obligation for municipalities, ‘so that is easy prey’… ”But this is a disaster that occurs silently - you hear nothing [on literacy rates] from The Hague [the seat of Dutch Parliament]. “
There they prefer to work on a fund with seventy billion, to invest in robotics, artificial intelligence and infrastructure: real things.
(There'll be a whole lot more rambling, aimless coverage of the current state of robotics and AI in the Netherlands in later posts in this rambling, aimless series.)
—Back to the Apocalyptic Amount of Water Soon Ending The World As We Know It Thing:
Since It's Way Too Late For Prevention, Apparently We're Talking About Adaptation Now
The Global Center on Adaptation, based in Rotterdam (an hour’s train ride from Amsterdam), in 2018 (the last time they posted on their site's news section) announced new leadership, simultaneously declaring the renewed focus and direction of their work to be centred around 5 key challenges:
- "Scaling up ecosystem-based adaptation - Ecosystem-based adaptation delivers greater climate resilience and additional benefits like biodiversity conservation and the creation of greener, more livable cities.
- Integrating climate adaptation into financial decision-making - Many businesses do not factor potential risks of climate change into their investment decisions.
- Measuring effective adaptation - Making decisions about which adaptation options to pursue, whether at a local, national or global level, requires proper assessment of which options most effectively build resilience.
- Creating climate resilient cities - More than half of the world’s population lives in cities. This will rise to more than two-thirds by 2050. To successfully adapt to the growing impacts of climate change, cities will need to become climate resilient.
- Leveraging deltas to address climate change - Deltas are areas where the impacts of climate change can exacerbate existing pressures from urbanization and pollution. But they are also places of opportunity that are often rich in social, economic and natural capital."
Well. I don’t know about you, but… I. Have. So. Many. Questions.
- WTF is ecosystem-based adaptation, ELI5-wise?
- How should businesses, investors, CEOs, founders, the general populace, go about evaluating the potential risks of climate change we should be “factoring into their decision-making”?
- Are you suits legit already talking about “adaptation”, like, in the (notoriously slow) evolutionary process/natural selection sense of the word, referring to “alterations in the structure or function of an organism or any of its parts that results from natural selection and by which the organism becomes better fitted to survive and multiply in its environment”? (Because if so, woah.)
- Also Hectic: the phrase “climate-resilient.” Specifically, the word "resilient”. As if this is some sort of crisis darling Lakshmi can Angela Duckworth her way through. Please elaborate on choice of words?
- Again with the WTF — “delta?” I googled it:
Anyway, I’m going to email these questions to their public-facing-inbox person as soon as the sun is up (so as to appear slightly less unhinged about it all).
All told, I guess the point of you reading this pilot project was, in essence: Stay Tuned..?
What have I learned?
I've learned that asking a simple question about transportation and infrastructure solutions for the future (prompted by De Botton's assertion that the Netherlands is one of the first-world places that could provide the rest of the world with a preview of problems more of us will need to solve in 2319) is not the same thing as asking as simple question at all.
A couple more not-at-all-simple simple questions I've got for Amsterdam, and the broader Netherlands, while I'm in the area—
- You guys have been spending a lot of time on LinkedIn, huh? Poaching talented third-world software engineers from local tech companies who can't afford them, luring them over here with your sweet, sweet euros, generous salaries, benefits, handling of the visa admin, and even a shipping container to handle the move..! Hey, no complaints from my corner of the world, but what's up with that—more generally?
- This one's a two-parter. You've been really proactive about legislating things like Airbnb. I think home-owners are allowed to Airbnb their apartments for a maximum of 30 days a year, and, in my experience, the neighbours are really good at ensuring this law is enforced. (a) How did you so effectively build such a self-policing nation? and (b) Which apps and technologies are next on the list, legislation-wise?
These are sure to evolve and grow with the research process - subscribe on TinyLetter if you're interested - and feel free to add any of your own questions about the curiosities of Dutch life in to my list in the comments :)
