Environmental History of the Arens Family
July 22, 2023 By: Robin Arens
I am a first-generation Canadian. Before moving to the Sea to Sky area of British Columbia in 2015, I grew up in Amsterdam, the Netherlands in the 1990s. While the Netherlands is a country with a high population density, over half of the land in the country is used for agriculture. In pastures and on farms cows, pigs and chicken are grown for meat, dairy and eggs. Grains, potatoes and flowers (most famously tulips) are grown in fields, and various produce including tomatoes, cucumbers and bell peppers are grown in greenhouses. Bread, dairy, eggs and potatoes were staple foods during my childhood, and the rest of our diet consisted largely of alliums, cabbages, root vegetables, tomatoes, cucumbers as well as fruits like apples, pears, citrus fruits and bananas. Many of these were and still are grown around the country, however the more exotic fruits and vegetables were imported from around the world.
While the pastures and fields have been part of the Dutch countryside for centuries, it is the greenhouse industry that has, through technological advances, boomed over the past two decades. These advancements have grown agricultural export, which is second only to the agricultural export of the United States.
However man’s impact in the Dutch countryside goes, quite literally, much deeper than greenhouses and pastures. Roughly 800 years ago the country began reclaiming land from the sea, and around one sixth of the land of present day Netherlands is what is known in Dutch as polders or land previously under water which has been enclosed by dikes and drained. Today around one quarter of the country sits below sea level. One third of the country is considered ‘nature’, both aquatic and land, however only one percent is wilderness; the rest has at some point been altered by people.
My mother grew up in a small town called Vinkeveen in the 1960s and 1970s. Because of the small size of the country, the natural resources people used in this area were not much different from other places. Then too, staple foods were bread, dairy, eggs and potatoes, however root vegetables, alliums and greens like endive and cabbages made up a bigger part of the diet than they do today.
The area around Vinkeveen lies between two and seven meters below sea level and is known as the Vinkeveense Plassen, which translates to lakes or ponds. The area is a polder, and land reclamation efforts began as early as the twelfth century to simplify the production of peat. This peat production continued well into the 20th century, until it was eventually replaced by coal as the main source of fuel for industries. Now, many of the Plassen have water in them and are used for recreation and wildlife.
My father grew up in Hilversum, not far from Vinkeveen and Amsterdam. For him too, the same staple foods were present during his childhood. In distance Hilversum lies very close to Vinkeveen. The area west of town is a similar polder initially created for the production of peat and turned back into water in the 20th century. South of the town however is much drier and consists of forests of pine, oak and beech. While this area cannot be considered wilderness as it has been altered throughout history, it is now a protected ecosystem.
After graduating from high school, my father studies geology at the University of Amsterdam, where he eventually became a professor and completed a PhD in the geomorphological processes of the coastal dunes of our country. Since then he has been working as a researcher and consultant. Much of his work has been for the Dutch government, and he has been influential in the ongoing development of the coastal dunes which protect much of the country from flooding.
My dad’s parents both grew up on the island of Java, Indonesia in the 1900s, where they lived for over three decades before relocating to the Netherlands. Staple foods in Indonesia consisted of rice, fish, spices, coconut and bananas. Java is a volcanic island, the tallest, Mount Semeru, standing at 3,676 meters. The island is a tropical rainforest, with coastal mangroves in the north and a dry savannah in the west. Cultivation of rice and coffee have altered much of the landscape, and evolved into important economic drivers before colonization by the Dutch in the seventeenth century for its importance in the spice trade.
As I come from a family of scientific backgrounds, I believe I have inherited an attitude of respect for and value of the environment. This attitude comes from my dad in particular, being a geologist. Growing up we spent many of our vacations exploring the natural areas Europe has to offer, and I believe it was this love of nature that led me to moving to British Columbia in my early twenties. This of course shows the level of class privilege my family has enjoyed for generations. If it wasn’t for their European background, my grandparents would not have been able to migrate from Indonesia to the Netherlands. If my parents did not end up in the successful careers they did, we would not have spent so much time traveling around Europe during my upbringing. And if I did not have the safety net of a supporting family, I would not have been able to move to Canada by myself.