Below Sea Level E-Book

alastair macleod

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

"Anna Goosens, his second in command, was positive about the coming changes. Her father owned a business exporting Dutch water technology. He was expecting plenty of work in the future; building sea walls and flood protection systems, but not all countries had the money. Some of those that had, like the English, didn’t have the will. Yes, it took a certain sort of mindset to take on the sea the way the Dutch had. You had to be confident, believe in yourself, in your engineering skills. Maybe the British were losing their dominance. “How would the loss of land to the sea alter the geopolitical balance? That had been the subject of his MSc. His findings had been kept secret. After all, who would want to know that the Dutch would emerge as perhaps the most powerful force on the Atlantic seaboard? And what was wrong with that, argued Willem? Holland was a democratic, stable country, champion of human rights, and energy conscious. Nearly all of his team cycled to work and back, or took a tram"

Leseprobe

Alastair Macleod

Below Sea Level

"to the Dutch, for what was once sea is now land." All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.BookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 Munich

Below Sea Level

Draining his glass of Grolsch, Willem Varma paid the bill and walked back over the bridge to the office.

It wasn’t really an office, it was a control centre. All the pumping stations in Holland were linked by computer to this one building. Water engineers could monitor the flow in the canals and drainage ditches, switching on pumps if need be, top up here, vent to the sea there. It was a constantly changing scene.

In that respect Holland gave off a false air of tranquillity. In its water landscape things were always on the move. Heavy rain meant run off; the canals filled up – they needed pumping out into reservoirs or to the coast. High tides could surge back up the outlets if the valves were not closed. Almost all were automatic now but the Dutch knew they needed to be alert at all times- too high a sacrifice had been paid to the water spirits in the past.

Swamp dwellers; that’s what they’d been, through the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age, living off the abundant wildfowl and fish of the marsh. The Romans, and in recent times, the modern Dutch had changed all that; they reclaimed the marshes, straightened waterways, filled in ponds, squared off the land, occupied the seabed; nearly two thirds of his fellow citizens lived below sea level.

And those sea levels were rising slowly inexorably. The English, he never understood them; they were going to let the sea have its way, let it inundate the East Anglian coastline – they wanted their marshes back, the wildlife back. He laughed. He couldn’t see the Dutch wanting that.

And yet he personally craved for something wilder, freer. His country’s landscape was so shaped by humans, manufactured. You couldn’t even see very far. Yes, it was flat, but that meant the next line of poplars, and it was almost always poplars, blocked the view. For vistas you needed a little height, hills. Do Dutch people go on holiday to hilly places? Wherever they went out of here, he mused, there’d be some undulation.

He swiped his security card in the doorway and took the lift to floor 36.

Here was the nerve centre. The rows of computers showed the position of Holland’s below-sea-state. His team were assembling for the daytime briefing.

It was a good way to keep check. All the computer info became blurred in your mind if you tried to assimilate it individually, so each sector reported at a team meeting.

He also reported to them - details from meetings he had been to, funding matters, feedback from the global warming group.

The predictions had varied so much. Scientists in other countries were saying different things about the speed of sea level rise; but they all agreed it was rising. Did it just mean raising the dykes? That’s what other Europeans thought. Few understood the complex water management issues involved. There were predictions of more rainfall too. His team had been modelling the implications for their work.