Het water komt by Rutger Bregman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This was a free booklet you could order online and it tries to get people take action in combatting climate change and more specifically, the rise of sea level that would be really challenging to fight against, once the increase is a lot more than we have needed to fight in the past. As a student at Delft University of Technology, I was surprised to find out that even me and my friends didn’t know about Johan van Veen, who was the father of the Dutch Deltaworks. I visited many parts of this worldfamous system to protect the citizens from flooding and having to abandon their homegrounds. The main lesson for me would be that historians can really teach us as a society a lot. It helps to put current events in perspective and they remind us of mistakes our forebears made in the past.
I would be curious to read the rest of the biography of this forgotten engineer. However, I am a bit less optimistic than the author and feel that people should seriously consider moving to higher grounds. While one has the chance it is better to build up a new life in a safer environment for the long term.