Artivist Series -Tracy Metz
journalist, author, podcast maker
Tracy Metz fell in love with Amsterdam years ago and has lived and worked there ever since. She is the director of the John Adams Institute, an independent foundation in the Netherlands, that brings the best and the brightest of American thinking to the Netherlands. Tracy is passionate about the interplay between urban issues, architecture, and the natural environment, particularly water. Her book Sweet&Salt: Water and the Dutch, investigates the change in the country’s approach to water management in times of climate change. Her podcast Water Talks addresses global issues with water – too much, too little, too dirty and too unequal. Water Talks grew out of the United Nations conference on water. The conference held in NYC in March 2023 was hosted by the Netherlands and Tajikistan.
Video conversation with Tracy Metz… click here
What Tracy talks about …
Tracy grew up in Southern California where her experience with water was that it is a precious resource. As a child she was taught to take short showers, not to let the tap run while brushing her teeth; in short she learned not to take water for granted. When she went to college Tracy did not focus her studies on water. Instead she majored in French and Spanish. She thought she’d end up working as a translator or interpreter or something to do with languages. After college she decided to go to Europe to improve her language skills. As she tells her story, the cheapest ticket was to Amsterdam. That’s how she came to go to the Netherlands and where she has stayed.
The two main cultural differences between Americans and the Dutch that affect how decisions on water are made involve money and expectations of government. In the Netherlands citizens are used to paying taxes for many things including water management. About a billion Euros are spent annually on water management – dikes, sluices, pumps and others. In fact, the Dutch Constitution states that the government is responsible for keeping the country habitable including keeping the water out. This is most important as 60 percent of the land in the western portion of the country is below sea level and it is this area that produces 70 percent of the country’s GDP. The other difference is that the Dutch have a collective way of thinking. From the beginning, water has been viewed as a collective issue.Early on farmers worked together to keep the water out. For comparison, Tracy tells a story of an American farmer who used his tractor to build an earthen dam to protect his farm. The example demonstrates that in America there is a strong sense of responsibility for oneself.
The Dutch landscape is highly managed using man-made technology. Climate change has caused the Dutch to rethink their approach to water. Structures (e.g., dikes, pumps, walls, etc.) constructed in the last 70 years as barriers to water are being reevaluated as they are now thought to be part of the problem. The new paradigm is not to work against the water but with natural water systems.
Tracy’s latest podcast Water Talks grew out of the UN Conference on Water Issues. It is the first UN conference on water issues in nearly 50 years. The conference was jointly hosted by the Netherlands and Tajikistan. These countries represent a UN member country from the North (Netherlands) and the South (Tajikistan). Tajikistan is described as a water powerhouse for Central Asia. It has a large number of lakes, glaciers and other water sources and is an important water source for Central Asia.
What can Americans learn from the Dutch experience with water? In NYC, they are learning to work with water rather than against it. Tracy gives as an example an area at the tip of Manhattan referred to as The Big U. It is an area that focuses on water management issues as well as being a pleasant place to live, with green and public spaces. One water leader mentioned Matthijs Bouw, an architect and designer. He is bringing a multivalence approach to water management in NYC. Another is Russell Shorto, a writer and historian. Shorto has written that water is the reason the Dutch first settled in NY and why NY has become the cosmopolitan place that it has become.
How can people remain make a difference? Tracy gives two examples. One is a Dutch woman who transformed a local area into a park with water features. The other is the American artist Sarah Cameron Sunde (soon to be a guest on the Women Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast). Sarah creates performances interacting with a full tidal cycle. She’s done these performances across the globe. It’s a n artistic and very personal way to think about our relationship with water.
Show Notes
00:00:00 Pamela Ferris-Olson Today on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series on womenmindthewater.com, I'm speaking with Tracy Metz. Tracy is a journalist, author, and podcast maker. Originally from California, Tracy fell in love with Amsterdam years ago and has lived and worked there ever since. She's the director of the John Adams Institute, an independent foundation in the Netherlands that brings the best and the brightest of American thinking to the Netherlands. Tracy is passionate about the interplay between urban issues, architecture and the natural environment, particularly water. She recently released Water Talks, a podcast tied to the United Nations Conference on Water. The conference, held in New York City in March 2023, was hosted by the Netherlands and Tajikistan.
00:00:54 Pamela Ferris-Olson The Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast on womenminthewater.com engages artists in conversation about their work and explores their connection with the ocean through their stories. Wo(men) Mind the Water hopes to inspire and encourage action to protect the ocean and her creatures.
I am speaking with California born Tracy Metz, who now lives in the Netherlands. She is a journalist, author and podcast maker. Tracy is interested in how the Netherlands, a low lying flat country, manages its water issues. Much of the Netherlands is reclaimed land with water control initiatives dating back as far as the Middle Ages, when the first dikes were built. Her book Sweet&Salt: Water and the Dutch, investigates the change in the country’s approach to water management in times of climate change. Her podcast Water Talks addresses global issues with water – too much, too little, too dirty and too unequal.
Thank you, Tracy, for reaching out about being on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast. I'm pleased you could find time in your busy schedule to talk about your personal journey, the Netherlands and water management. Water management is a particularly relevant topic here in the United States, with events like the recent flooding in New York and Vermont and the continuing drought conditions in the West.
00:02:22 Pamela Ferris-Olson Welcome, Tracy. I'm looking forward to our conversation about your podcast series Water Talks that highlights water issues, including having too much and too little water, as well as two dirty and unequal access. But before we talk about water, let's talk about you. Where in California did you grow up?
00:02:44 Tracy Metz Thank you for having me, Pam. I'm just delighted to be here and I'm a great fan of your podcast and videos. I think it's really important to get the word out. I was born in the Mojave Desert and I grew up in Los Angeles, which of course, like all of Southern California, is basically a very dry area. I grew up not watering the garden, not washing the car, not flushing the toilet unless you really had to. So my experience with water was very different.
00:03:22 Pamela Ferris-Olson OK, So what role did water play in your childhood?
00:03:27 Tracy Metz The lack of it was the main thing we were all taught to take short showers, not to let the tap run. When you brushed your teeth, not to let the tap run. When you were doing the dishes, before we had dishwashers, we were taught to be smart with water and realize that this was a scarce resource. I think that is an awareness that we really need to go back to.
00:03:51 Pamela Ferris-Olson Let's skip forward a little bit. Am I correct that water was not the main focus of your college studies?
00:03:59 Tracy Metz Actually Pam, I studied French and Spanish at college. I thought I would, I don't know, do something with languages, translate, interpret. And so I thought, I have to make sure that my languages are really good. Maybe I should go to France and Spain. So I went to a travel agency, as we did then pre-Internet, and booked a ticket to Europe, the cheapest ticket to Europe. That day it was to Amsterdam. And I'm still here.
00:04:32 Pamela Ferris-Olson How funny.
00:04:34 Tracy Metz I know, I know, the best laid plans of mice and men.
00:04:37 Pamela Ferris-Olson What made you decide to make the Netherlands your home? 00:04:50 Tracy Metz I didn't really decide it, it just sort of happened. But the main thing I found, it’s incredibly attractive. An old compact city like Amsterdam has what we now call vibrancy. There were people on the street. Here everybody walks or they jump on their bicycle. They run into people they know. You can walk to the bookstore, you can walk to work, to walk to the supermarket. It's all very compact and dense and urban and lively. And I had never seen a city like that. I thought, wow, I like this.
00:05:21 Pamela Ferris-Olson So how do cultural differences between the Netherlands and the US affect decisionmaking on issues related to water?
00:05:29 Tracy Metz I think there are two main things that really have an impact on how decisions get made and what decisions do indeed get made. One of them, I think, is what the citizens of those two very different countries expect from their government. The Dutch are used to paying taxes for many things, including water management. There's a whole department of Government that takes care of the dams and the sluices, and all the rest of it. And that's about a billion EUR a year, and it's just normal that you pay taxes and assume that the government will take care of that. It's actually in the Dutch constitution that government is responsible for keeping this country habitable, which means keeping the water out. Certainly in the western half of the country, which is more than 60% of it is below sea level.
00:06:28 So that's one thing what we expect of our government. So people when it when it rains hard and there are puddles on the street, people call the city and say, “Make the puddles go away.”
00:06:40 Pamela Ferris-Olson For people who've never been to the Netherlands, maybe you could describe the country a little bit. At one part, I guess the western part, the majority of the land is underwater.
00:06:52 Tracy Metz It would be underwater without this complex system of dams and dunes that protect the Netherlands from the North Sea on the West, and the whole western swath of the Netherlands, Rotterdam, Amsterdam and up to the Wadden Sea. It would be inundated without that whole system of dams and dunes, and that's very relevant for the country's future, because that's where 70% of the gross national product is earned. Relating back to your question about, you know, very fundamental cultural differences. I think another important difference is the sense of the collective Dutch. Water management has been seen as a right from the beginning.
Completely a collective thing. The whole system of dams and reclaiming land started out with farmers getting together, building dams, taking out the water to create new farmland, and they all had to do their bit to maintain those dams, If they didn't the whole system was useless. So right from the very beginning, there's been a strong sense of water being a collective issue that we can't solve as individuals on our own. And I think that's an important difference with the US. In my book, Sweet and Salt, which you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation.
00:08:19 Tracy Metz I have a really fascinating image of a farm in the Mississippi. It was the Mississippi flooding, and the farmer had gotten his bulldozer out and built his own dam around his own farm. And I think that image says so much about the American approach to property rights and feeling that it's your own responsibility to take care of yourself. The Dutch’s first intuitive response is that it's the government's responsibility to take care of water safety. So those are really fundamentally different approaches to the role of government and the role of the individual.
00:09:00 Pamela Ferris-Olson Thank you for that observation.
00:09:03 Tracy Metz Yeah, I had been interested for years and written a number of books about issues of how we use the space that we have and the relationship between the built and natural environment. Since there isn't really much natural environment in the Netherlands, the whole landscape is man-made, man-maintained, and high maintenance. The whole relationship between the human and the natural is very different here. I discovered when I was at Harvard for a year in 2006 and in conversations with the students that this whole water system was not as self-evident.
00:09:59 Tracy Metz And I as an adopted Dutch person had thought it was, they said: “Well, you know, climate change is coming.” The Dutch are starting to look differently at their system and I thought they are. I hadn't noticed. It was thanks to these smarty pants at Harvard that I started looking around me better and realizing that in the whole water system here, a lot of the interventions, the really hard-nosed mechanical concrete interventions that the Dutch had been doing ever since a huge national flood of 1953. So basically, since the war that was having repercussions that were coming back to bite them. They were discovering that you cannot mess with the water system without impunity. Can’t stop and pump and pipe water wherever you need it. There is a natural system which has really much greater strength than the man-made system that we've tried to impose in the last 5075 years.
00:11:10 Pamela Ferris-Olson So let's talk a little bit about your newest podcast Water Talks. It grew out of the United Nations Conference on water issues. The conference itself was held in New York City in March 2023. The conference was hosted by the Netherlands and Tajikistan. How did two seemingly diverse countries come to host the Conference on water?
00:11:33 Tracy Metz Yes, I think everyone was surprised and that speaks to our ignorance about a lot of the rest of the world. I discovered my ignorance as well, by the way. This was the first UN conference on water in nearly 50 years.
00:11:49 Pamela Ferris-Olson Why did it take so long?
00:11:51 Tracy Metz UN conferences are always hosted by a partner from the Global North and a partner from the Global South. So Tajikistan was the partner from the Global South, but it is also the water powerhouse of Central Asia. It has an enormous number of lakes and a huge surface area of water. It has glaciers. It is the source of fresh water for a large part of Central Asia. Who knew? Now I knew.
00:12:23 Pamela Ferris-Olson So in your ten part series Water Talks, you investigate the topics of too much, too little, too dirty, and too unequal. With so many issues facing the US, such as flooding and continuing drought conditions in the Southwestern United States. And, most recently, the conflagration in Hawaii. What would you say Americans can learn from the Dutch experience?
00:12:55 Tracy Metz One of the things that Americans in New York have learned from the Dutch experience is designing water safety measures that are not just in the macho engineering tradition of tall concrete walls pumping harder, building enormous storm surge barriers to keep the water out. It's time that we started working together with the water. Making places, for example, the Big U along the bottom of Manhattan. That whole project is about keeping Manhattan safe from another super storm but also about giving the communities who live there a pleasant place to live. About improving the quality of life, and that is something that the Dutch are really good at, is combining water design with public space. Like green areas amenities like sports and culture. That is something that they do really well. And I know that New York has really made a point of learning from the Dutch experience. And one of my interviews is with a man named Matthijs Bouw. He's an architect and urban designer. He's been living in New York now, working for eight years on the Big U and helping bring that sort of multivalent approach that the Dutch have to landscape. And the Dutch had to learn because the country is so small. It's about the size of Rhode Island.
00:14:29 Pamela Ferris-Olson As Director of the John Adams Institute, you get to meet some of the most creative minds from the United States. What American have you interviewed whose inventive ideas would benefit the Dutch with their water practices?
00:14:47 Tracy Metz One of the people I've interviewed for the podcast and also knew personally before that was my predecessor as the Director of the John Adams Institute, the New York author and historian Russell Short. He is a wonderful storyteller about how the water was the reason for the Dutch to settle there [New York]. As a maritime nation, they could trade and they could use the waterways to get into the hinterlands to start farms and hunt beavers and the rest of the colonial economy. His theory is that New York is the cosmopolitan city that it is because of that early Dutch influence. It was the Dutch, with their multinational colony in those years, bringing in so many different languages and nationalities that has made New York into the tolerant, cosmopolitan city that it is now.
00:15:51 Pamela Ferris-Olson Water is definitely something to talk about on so many levels. It's hard not to feel overwhelmed, however. And the problems that we are facing seem out of control. So what suggestions can you offer to individuals on how they can remain hopeful and make a positive difference?
00:16:12 Tracy Metz Before I made Water Talks, I also made a podcast in Dutch which you would translate as witness. That refers to saying if you feel that something is wet. That's a sign of alarm, because that means maybe the dam is not holding up or there's something wrong. Wetness is a sign of alarm. In this podcast with the title referring to this vague sense of unease, in each episode I spoke to someone here in the Netherlands who is trying to make a difference. One of the people I spoke to I thought was wonderful. This woman in the city of Tilburg, in the South of the Netherlands, realized that her city, which used to be full of streams and ditches and small waterways, all the water had disappeared. She said, “I'm going to bring the water back” and she was one of a group of people who designed former rail tracks into a new park. And she created the water system for this park. It is a huge public success. She has done so much on this, on the small local scale of her own city, to really make a difference. I think it's fantastic.
One of the other people I spoke to for Water Talks was an American. Artist Sarah Cameron Sunde [Note: Sarah was a guest on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Podcast]. Inspired by COVID she did a series of nine performances, which she calls durational performances with the sea all over the world, in New Zealand and the Netherlands, in New York and the last one was in New York in Queens. She goes out, finds a place in the coastal area where she can just stand when the tide comes in. She stands looking out to sea for a full 12-13 hour tidal cycle. The water comes all the way up to her chin and then gradually recedes. And people come stand out there with her. It's like a meditative way of feeling once again that we have a physical relationship to water. I almost felt it was almost a religious feeling that she undergoes that hardship of standing in that cold water for all those hours to help us reinstate our understanding of water. It can be someone who's smart at building a new water system. It can also be an artist who has a feeling for how to recapture that relationship, which we've lost.
00:19:03 Pamela Ferris-Olson I think if I can summarize what you're saying. “It doesn't matter whether you're an artist or a farmer or a politician, everybody can use their experiences, have their capabilities to make a difference in their own way. And I think that's lovely. And I think it's wonderful that you came on this podcast. I've enjoyed getting to know a little about you. I appreciate your acumen as a storyteller. I also respect the energy and professionalism with which you tackle these difficult issues.
I'd like to remind listeners that I've been speaking with Netherlands-based, Tracy Metz, a journalist, author, and podcast maker. Her work lies at the intersection of urban issues, architecture, the natural environment and particularly water. Tracy Mass is the latest guest on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast. This series can be viewed on Wo(men) Mind the Water, on Museum on Main Street and YouTube. Audio only versions of this podcast are available on womenonthewater.com, on iTunes and Spotify. Wo(men) Mind the Water is grateful to Jaine Rice for her song Women of Water. All rights for the Wo(men) Mind the Water name and logo belong to Pam Ferris Olson. This is Pam Ferris Olson.