HOEK VAN HOLLAND, Netherlands -- The towheaded lad plugging the dike, symbol of Holland's ancient determination to defy tide and storm, is loosening his finger just a bit.
In what amounts to a sea change for a country that is essentially built on reclaimed land, the Netherlands is quietly surrendering some of its hard-won ''polders" -- former seabed, river bottoms, and swamp -- back to the waters.
The government has begun acquiring thousands of acres of agricultural land and industrial strips along major waterways, which would be used as flood plains in periods of high water.
Dikes along these stretches of river will be lowered, repositioned, or, in some cases, removed.
In dry times, the flats could be used for agriculture, or even for envisioned ''floatable" factories and housing.
But when the rivers swell from winter rains, the land would serve as a natural buffer zone, thus softening the fury of the water by allowing it to spread, and, thus, lowering the risk of a disastrous breaching of the dikes.
On other fronts, Dutch contractors are building and selling ''amphibious" homes that rest on land for most of the time, but that can rise and float on flood waters.
Dutch architects and engineers are working on even more ambitious plans to construct floating farms, industrial plants, greenhouses, and apartment buildings -- including a proposed 12,000-house community, which would be able to bob above floods, near Schiphol International Airport, outside Amsterdam.
After centuries of protecting itself from sea storms and river floods, solely with ''hard" barriers, such as dikes and dams, the Netherlands is now endeavoring to make itself ''climate-proof." The plan involves greener, more resilient techniques to cope with the accelerated rise of rivers and sea levels that many climatologists expect to come with global warming.
More than 60 percent of the lands of the Netherlands -- and all its major cities -- either lie below sea level or are so low that the country would suffer regular, and severe, flooding without the dikes, seawalls, and massive storm barriers that hold the North Sea and the rivers at bay.
For centuries, Holland has girded itself with dams and dikes while keeping canal waters, groundwater, and runoff gushing back to the sea with thousands of water pumps. If the pumps ever ceased, the Netherlands would suffer serious flooding in six hours, and much of the country would revert to swamp in six months.
The pumps will keep chugging, and the Netherlands will continue bolstering dikes and seawalls. But in a move that is disputed among engineers and the Dutch themselves, the country is also planning greater reliance on flood plains and other natural barriers, such as sand dunes, salt marshes, and mud flats.
This ''soft" strategy comes from the view that global warming poses as much of a long-term threat to the Netherlands as the terrifying winter storms that howl off the North Sea or the spring torrents that engorge the Rhine, the Maas, and the Scheldt rivers, which form a vast delta in southwestern Holland. The government has abandoned the view that simply building more and bigger barriers is a sufficient safeguard.
''Beyond a certain level, it's not possible to build dikes anymore," Pieter van Geel, state secretary for the environment, told Dutch reporters recently.
Until the last decade, the Dutch voiced confidence that the billions of dollars invested in a massive system of dikes, canals, and high-tech storm barriers would be sufficient to protect the country. But in what some scientists view as a symptom of climate change, Europe has been enduring wetter winters and hotter summers -- and these represent a grave new danger.
Twice in recent years, the country's wide rivers have brimmed to the very tops of dikes because of heavy winter runoffs, forcing the emergency evacuations of hundreds of thousands of people.
Average rainfall in northern Europe has increased 40 percent since 1900, according to the European Environment Agency. And the scorching summers forecast for Europe by some climatologists might cause cracking and other structural problems that might seriously weaken earthen dikes that remain critical to the Netherlands' river defenses.
In response, over the past several years the Dutch have revised their half-century-old water strategy to make the system more flexible and a bit ''greener" -- kinder to the environment -- than simply reinforcing and raising dike walls.
''Dutch standards of flood protection are the highest in the world," said Pavel Kabat, a professor of climate hydrology at the Netherlands' Wageningen University.
''But in some ways they've given us a false sense of security," Kabat said.
''We've always fought the water," Kabat added. ''But now we must shift from the 'hard' approach of making more, bigger dikes, dams, and other defenses to a softer approach of living with water."
A government study said that the Netherlands ''will have to relinquish space to water, and not win space from it, in order to curb the growing risk of disaster."
That was a remarkable concession from a nation whose very identity is rooted in reclaimed land.
''About the time of Christ, some clever Dutchman figured out that if he built a mound of dirt, and lived on it, maybe his feet would not be always so wet," said Joop Weijers, a senior specialist in flood protection with the Ministry of Transport, Public Works, and Water Management. ''That was the beginning of our history."
Indeed, it was in Roman times that inhabitants of the present Netherlands had first dug drainage channels to turn swamp into fields for agriculture.
They built villages on the resulting heaps of debris. Later, monks constructed the first true dikes, to guard their monasteries. By the 1400s, the Dutch had harnessed water pumps to windmills -- making it possible to capture substantial swaths of land from the sea.
Today, hundreds of square miles of the Netherlands, including the entire province of Flevoland, consists of polder. The cities, industrial zones, and greenhouse farms that produce 70 percent of Holland's gross domestic product lie below sea level.
They are protected by 2,174 miles of primary flood defenses, including dikes, pumping stations, dams, and enormous ''storm barriers" that rank among the wonders of the world; they are also aided by 8,699 miles of secondary defenses, such as canal dikes, basin dikes, holding ponds, and weirs.
''There is nothing wrong with living below sea level. We Dutch do it every day," said J. K. Vrijling, a flood-risk specialist with Technical University in Delft. ''But people who live in such proximity to water must understand that carelessness carries a terrible cost."
Dutch flood specialists fret that the Netherlands, feeling safe behind storm shields, has become complacent in recent years.
But the disastrous rupturing of levees in New Orleans has given new urgency to improving Holland's defenses.
No one here quite believes that even the most horrific North Sea storm could produce a Louisiana-scale catastrophe -- Holland's flood control system, some specialists say, is simply too sophisticated and strong. ''But a lot of Dutch are now wondering if we are really so safe," said Peter Persoon, technical spokesman at the Maeslant Storm Surge Barrier, which guards the mouth of the shipping channel to Rotterdam and the industrial heartland.
Since 1953, when a storm breached Holland's defenses, flooded 780 square miles, and killed 1,800 people, the country has spent $22 billion bolstering its defenses, including the 1997 completion of the Maeslant Barrier, a final piece in the giant water defenses known as the Delta Plan. The barrier consists of two behemoth sea gates -- each roughly as long as the Eiffel Tower is tall -- that swing together to seal off the channel when storm surges reach 9.8 feet.
The Netherlands system is designed to withstand even monster storms that are likely to occur only once every 10,000 years. By contrast, many of the levees that guarded New Orleans were designed to withstand floods occurring only every 30 to 100 years.
While the Louisiana disaster shocked the Netherlands, Dutch engineers and scientists say they view global warming as a greater peril than freak storms.
The danger comes increasingly from the rivers, as well as the North Sea. River flooding in the mid-1990s caused widespread property damage and forced the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people. The brush with disaster spurred the government's new concept of giving ''room to the water," relinquishing land for zones that can absorb flood waters.
The sea level is rising, although there is disagreement as to the rate. The more dire forecasts project a rise of five feet or more by the end of the century; other scientists estimate that the rise will be a matter of inches.
In any event, the water is rising. The ground level has dropped by 20 inches in the last 100 years, according to government figures. The decline in the ground level is the result of pumping away so much subsurface water and the diversion of floods that would normally add fortifying clays to the peaty soil.
Lovely though it is, the Netherlands landscape is almost entirely man-made. So the flood plain project is questioned, in a nation whose proudest boast is that ''God made the world, but the Dutch made the Netherlands."
Kabat said: ''The idea of giving some polders back to the sea stirs strong emotions. It requires a total shift in our thinking."
The government has begun buying up tracts of farm and industrial land along the Rhine and Maas rivers, much of it polder. Eventually, dikes along the watercourses will be lowered and tens of thousands of acres will serve as flood plains, where water can freely ebb and flow.
In another change, the government is maintaining dunes and mud flats along the seacoast and in tidal estuaries as flood barriers, instead of replacing them with concrete sea walls. The drainage of marshes is now largely banned.
Over time, water management analysts say, such green measures will become critical for the Netherlands. But dikes, dams, pumps, and flood barriers will almost surely remain the most important line of defense between the Dutch and the hungry sea.
''People of the Netherlands will always be obsessed with water," Weijers said. ''We are watching the water levels minute by minute. But also trying to think years, and decades, and even centuries, into the future. So we worry about global warming, yes, but also we worry about the rain falling in Switzerland today. The day the Dutch stop worrying about water is the day we are doomed."![]()