A Dutch naturalist celebrates good environmental news with the enthusiasm the British usually reserve for a royal hug in Nottingham
Sunday, 18 October 2026. Narrowboat, River Lea. Sunshine, unexpected, slightly suspicious, 9.25am.
Good News Arrived And I Did Not Know Where To Put It
Something terrible happened this morning. I read good news. I was not prepared. I had my face arranged for bad news, the way you hold your shoulders when you walk into a Dutch tax office, and instead Mongabay told me that mangroves are gaining ground globally after decades of loss. I put the phone down. I picked it up again. I read the headline three times, like a woman checking a lottery ticket in a supermarket queue.
Mangroves, if you have never met one, are trees that decided the ocean was not going to push them around. They stand with their roots in salt water like a grandmother wading at Scheveningen with her skirt tucked up, absolutely refusing to go home. They hold coastlines together, they give baby fish somewhere to hide, they quietly lock away carbon. They are the most useful thing in the tropics that has never once asked for a press release.
Where Are The Barriers And Photographers
And here is my complaint. On the same weekend, the British press gave enormous coverage to Harry and Meghan’s charity visit to Nottingham, including a ninety year old woman with a framed photograph, a unicorn balloon and a full analysis of a belt. I am glad for Nottingham. The young people at that recording studio deserve every bit of attention. But the mangroves are doing charity work too, on a planetary scale, and nobody has logged their belt.
I propose that every time a mangrove forest expands by a meaningful amount, somebody in a burgundy coat arrives, hugs it, and says it is great to be back. The mangrove will not care. Mangroves are the most private citizens on Earth. But we humans need ceremony, and I would rather we gave it to trees than to a man with a gold stick.
Fifty Billion Seedlings And My Twelve Tomato Plants
Grist followed this with a story asking whether Ethiopia can replant its ravaged forests with fifty billion seedlings. Fifty billion. I sat on the roof with Meneer Dijkstra the heron and tried to imagine the number. I could not. The only thing I have planted this year is twelve tomato plants in grow bags on the deck of the boat. Two were eaten by a moorhen. One was knocked into the river by a man on an e-scooter who shouted sorry in a way that meant he was not.
So my success rate is about seventy-five percent of twelve. If Ethiopia manages even half of what that headline describes, it will have outplanted me by roughly four billion to one. I find this extremely motivating. I have ordered more grow bags. The moorhen has been informed.
The Hard Part Is Afterwards
The Dutch know something about this. Planting is the photograph. Keeping a thing alive is the work. We built dykes in the photograph, and then for eight hundred years we checked them every morning, filled every hole a muskrat dug, and argued in committees about who would pay for the sand. A seedling is the same. It needs water, it needs someone to keep the goats off, and it needs nobody in a ministry to decide the budget for it is in transit.
Islands That Grow Their Own Defences
The third piece of good news, which arrived as I was making pancakes, was from Inside Climate News, on how rewilding could help atoll islands keep pace with rising seas. This made me very emotional, partly because it is a beautiful idea, and partly because the pancake caught on the pan while I was reading it.
For a Dutch person, the idea that an island might protect itself by letting nature be healthy, rather than by pouring concrete, is almost revolutionary. We are the people who looked at the North Sea and said, no, thank you, and built a wall. But the newer thinking in the Netherlands is different too. Room for the river. Let the water have somewhere to go. Give the dunes their sand. It turns out the sea responds better to negotiation than to shouting, which, if you read about a certain British broadcaster and a polite chatbot this week, is apparently true of computers too.
A Small Ceremony On The Lea
So I held my own ceremony this afternoon. I invited the heron, two mallards and a coot named Henk who lives under the lock gates. I stood on the deck in my one good coat, which is green and from a charity shop in Haarlem, and announced to them that the mangroves are gaining ground, that somebody is trying to plant fifty billion trees, and that some islands may be able to grow their own protection.
Henk the coot hit the water with his feet and swam away, which I chose to interpret as applause. The mallards ignored me. The heron stared at me for a long time and then turned his back, which is how Meneer Dijkstra shows respect. A man on the towpath took a photograph. I asked him to log my belt. He did not understand. It was a length of rope. It is from the boat. I would like the press to know.