This makes me sad.
I’ll still find my spots to lay my sleeping bag down on and sleep under the stars.
Maybe humanity will cause its own extinction leaving the Earth and the Wild to rejuvinate.
That's not entirely fair. If you want a wild Netherlands one third would be a swamp where you couln't lay your sleeping bag down and another third would be North Sea. It's not really a country, it's an engineering project. Even the rivers don't run their natural course but are rerouted and cut up and connected many times. Within that framework of a country that has to be kept like a garden to exist in the first place, there's quite a lot of well protected nature. There's even created out of nothing for the sake of nature.
There's actually a lot of biodiversity and diversity in landscapes that are very rare around the world, I don't mean the flat farmland. But it all has to be managed and controlled otherwise it disappears. In general there's hardly any real nature in Europe as in old growth forests. The pine woods in Scandinavia and a little piece of Poland. But the Netherlands is on another level.
A friend of mine was simply taking a sunday stroll through a forest and suddenly he ran into a traffic sign, for the recreational forest strollers. "That's it" he said and decided to move to Germany. I'm not really much of a nature guy but when sailing in the tidal area here I also get tired of all the engineer around, like 'traffic' lights in the water even. But that's close to islands but even when I went out into the North Sea there was always something engineered in sight. The boat was much too small for the North Sea so I didn't go any further, but still.
Originally Posted by
fishboat
Yes. When I first visited (my work had plants in Mijdrecht & Heerenveen) I was surprised that they cut and bale hay on the open areas of expressway interchanges. Though it makes perfect sense as interchanges consume a huge footprint with large grassy areas surrounding the roads.
Every area has a 'purpose plan', housing, industry but also recreation, nature, protected nature whatever, it's all protected in that way in the sense that you can't just build a house in the living area of some rare bird. Being efficient with space has been self evident for a very long time, but also regarding nature. Many villages have small 'deer camps' with a few bambi's and peacocks and some other animals, there ar flocks of sheep on the banks of roads and recently farm fields often have a one feet wide strip of flowers and plants on the edge for bees and other insects and therefore biodiversity. Another old custom that has become a trend is facade gardens, basically just people removing a strip of the (public) pavement before their house and put some plants in, and if it's done neatly it's fine with city hall.
Still, with so much density in about everything, many bike tourers still manage to cycle through endless farmland that all looks the same.