A
silted-up lake has been transformed into the latest addition to the map of the
Netherlands – and an eco-haven teeming with wildlife
Sat 27
Apr 2019 20.30 BST
It takes
about an hour on the ferry, across often choppy waters, to reach the newest bit
of the Netherlands. For
those sailing in from the port of Lelystad, the first sign of the Marker Wadden
is a long finger of sand dunes designed to protect against flooding.
“You see
the cormorants, the black birds?” asks the environmentalist Roel Posthoorn,
pointing skywards.
Nine
kilometres into the vast expanse of the Markermeer, the 700 sq km lake on
Amsterdam’s easterly flank, lies a new Dutch archipelago. Five sprawling artificial
islands, constructed from sucked-up and refashioned fine silt, clay
and shells, offer a haven for plants, birds and other wildlife.
It’s a
place for human pioneers, too. A small Robinson Crusoe-style hut stands next to
a makeshift harbour for the volunteers who stay for week-long stretches as
island wardens.
But here
nature is king. Only the squawk and song of birds, the light clap of their
wings, and the ebb and flow of water on the nearby sandy beach break the
island’s silence. The Marker Wadden is an unprecedented feat of engineering and
ecological restoration – made necessary because of human interventions, which
have had disastrous consequences quite out of step with the Dutch reputation
for water management.
Forty
years ago, plans had been in the works to reclaim this vast lake for
habitation, potentially turning the four-metre-deep Markermeer into
Markerwaard, a spillover settlement for the booming Dutch capital. The lake’s
shores were armoured up with heavy stones. The Houtribdijk, a dam with a road
on top, was built, cutting the doomed lake off from waters to its east. But
mounting costs and political hurly-burly got in the way of the reclamation,
leaving behind only a huge, turbid basin of water – one of the largest lakes
in Europe –
muddied by swirling silt.
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