Thirty five years ago, on this day, December 25, 1988 Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands came out swinging, contradicting what she had had to say three months earlier…
“Together with the publication of the report ‘Concern for Tomorrow’ (Netherlands Institute of Public Health and Environmental Protection), the Queen’s 1988 Christmas speech represents a watershed moment for sustainable environmental policy in the Netherlands. Queen Beatrix observed that ‘the earth is slowly dying and the inconceivable – the end of life itself – is becoming conceivable’. Her speech, devoted almost entirely to problems of environmental deterioration, was in open disagreement with her earlier address to Parliament in Sept. 1988. The latter speech, written by the Dutch Council of Ministers, stated that recently ‘the country has become cleaner. This applies in particular to water and air: E. Tellegen, ‘The Dutch National Environmental Policy Plan’ (1989) 4(4)” The Netherlands Journal of Housing and Environmental Research, pp. 337–45, at 337.
van Zeben 2015, p.340 (footnote 1)
“We human beings have become a threat to the planet”
Greenpeace Global Warming Report 1990, p.113, apparently
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 350ppm. As of 2023 it is 421ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was in the same way that Australia would sit up and take notice about the ozone hole and skin cancer, Dutch people would sit up and take notice about sea-level rise. But what’s interesting is that the Queen here explicitly went against what the government had forced her to say at the opening of Parliament 3 months earlier – that basically everything was fine and hunky dory. Her statement had a bit of a bombshell impact, at least in the Netherlands.
What I think we can learn from this
That some royals were willing to come out and call it like it actually is.
What happened next
Dutch academics came up with Transition Management which was basically “let’s get everyone in a room hold hands and then Shell and other big actors can basically take over the process, empty it of all meaning and threat to the incumbency, and then we’ll have to scratch our heads and pretend to do some soul-searching about the role of academia and academics within advanced capitalist States, but we won’t – we will just keep going with the same bullshit because nobody has any other idea, or if they do they don’t know how to implement it.”
Queen Beatrix abdicated in 2013
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrix_of_the_Netherlands
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs..
References
van Zeben, J .(2015) Establishing a Governmental Duty of Care for Climate Change Mitigation: Will Urgenda Turn the Tide? Transnational Environmental Law, 4:2, pp. 339–357 doi:10.1017/S2047102515000199