A New Sustainable Waterfront

It is difficult to write in an easy way my Journal of today. So instead of my usual ‘longread’ you will perhaps find here a short notice. Its really late now and we are tired after a long day. We went to Amsterdam for a boat trip with our dear friend Cor. That in itself is a great pleasure we can share with him. Because we learned to know him as an old wild skipper of the dutch inland seas. In those days he no more owned a decent ship and worked as an aid to Amsterdam Booksellers. They were busy to empty the big old warehouse, where for so many years Willemien had stored her antiquarian books. He showed us some washed-out curly photos of his hulk and told the story of his life, survival in freedom. We became and stayed friends since then.

So today we both were his guests on his 'new' boat. Willemien had joined him on a short trip last month, but for me this was a new adventure: sailing on motor with a cabin cruiser on the broad and vast waters of Amsterdams Harbour and the Big Northsea Canal. So many perpectives, so many boats and ships, old and new. The Old Harbour Warehouses and Wharfs reconstructed and rebuild into a new city on islands, on the waterfront. And above this all a spacious blue sky with many clouds, protecting us for immediate burning under the glaring sun. The kind of waterfront visions and typical Dutch skies we all know from Golden Age Painting.

Todays photo shows you the joining of old and new. New architecture of Shell Technology Centre in a typical Dutch Environment: the broad sky over the waterfront of the Northsea Canal. Let us hope that that old faded glory in worldwide transport and commerce will be followed by sustainable innovation in energy resources, producible on a global scale. That future project is comparable to the need for discovery of a New World in the glorious days of the foundation of Amsterdam’s harbour. The search for sustainable energy resource is so fundamental and prior to power politics and vested industrial interests that we can put our hope on technological innovation like that of Shell. But we need more and first of all we need to ask ourselves the fundamental question: how do we want to live a healthy and sustainable life, feeling deeply responsible for future generations.