Dutch language

How to pronounce combativeness in Dutch?

Full Transcript

Translator: Peter van de Ven Reviewer: Mirjana Čutura
I'm going to take you back to 1980.
I was five years old, and I was living with my parents
in the beautiful village of Marsum in Friesland.
Because of the expansion of air base Leeuwarden,
there was a chance that part of our village would be taken down.
I remember going to demonstrations with my parents in Leeuwarden.
Playing in the garden at home, I had found a small iron pole,
and I had taken my father's hammer
and battered it into the ground as deep as I could,
thinking,
"Well, that will keep out those demolition excavators."
Later, around age 10 or 12,
environmental pollution was all over the news.
I remember acid rain
and that the river Rhine was so terribly polluted
that it didn't have any fish in it.
That worried me a lot, but I didn't have an iron pole for that.
It was at that age that I made up my mind:
later, when I'm grown up, I'm going to save the world.
One of the major issues of our time is the enormous loss of biodiversity.
German research shows that since 1989,
Germany has lost 75% of its insects.
If you drive a car, you will probably know this
because you don't have to clean your windshield
from so many bugs anymore.
And in 1962, the American author Rachel Carson wrote a book
that would become one of the most important books ever:
"Silent Spring."
The Dutch translation was called "Dode Lente."
She took on the use of pesticides in the United States
and how it affected the environment,
and so she predicted the silent spring -
meaning everything going silent.
And if things go silent in spring,
the production of our food is at stake.
Einstein already said, "If the bee disappeared off the face of the Earth,
man would only have four years left to live."
Fortunately, there's also a lot of projects
that are promoting biodiversity.
I want to tell you about one of them.
The project Grass2Grit.
Since 2010, I've worked for the province of Noord-Holland,
and that work includes taking care of its roadsides.
Let me tell you that three percent of the Netherlands is roadside,
so that's quite a bit and can thus have quite an impact.
In 2012, the organization asked me
to do the maintenance in a bee-friendly manner.
I was in charge of the maintenance of the roads,
which also entailed the mowing of the roadsides.
So, bee-friendly maintenance.
Fine.
At the same time, the message was to cut costs.
At first sight, those requests looked incompatible.
But such conditions seem to challenge our creativity,
so I teamed up with some contractors
to brainstorm about our options.
First, I have to tell you something about mowing.
On the left side of the picture, you see a mowing machine.
Not just any mowing machine;
this is a flail mower.
Using a flail mower is a very economic way of mowing.
It is a rotating horizontal drum with flails attached
that cut up the grass,
including any litter.
Well, that leaves big smelly piles where nothing will grow.
It creates a big mess.
It is a very cheap way of mowing, though, so we applied it most often -
and we still do in the Netherlands.
In the other picture, you see "sinus mowing,"
which is a very bee-friendly technique.
Imagine that the mowing machine operator works the roadsides like he's drunk.
Next time, he will choose another trajectory,
leaving these small patches of grass.
The insects love it.
Here it's cut short, there it's still flowering,
and up there it's a bit in between.
There's always enough to feed upon.
But you might have guessed that was a more expensive method
and we also had to remove the grass.
The grass has to be disposed of, which means an extra process.
So together with those contractors,
we pondered what to do with that roadside grass.
Then we rented a press, and we started to press the grass.
And by pressing it, you get a fiber, but you also get a liquid.
That liquid was a terrible green mess, as you can imagine.
And out of sheer curiosity, I had a taste of it.
It turned out to taste very salty, I was amazed to find out.
So we thought, What can we do with this?
Could we maybe use that salt for icy roads?
Because the way we do it now causes another environmental problem.
In our province, on our provincial roads,
we already use around 10 million lb, on average, in winter.
You can imagine how much is used on public highways
in all those other provinces -
that would be in the hundreds of millions lb per year
that we simply pour onto the roads
and that disappears into the environment.
It will all rinse out with precipitation,
but it takes until fall for values to come back to normal,
at which time we start doing it all over again.
So we thought we might be able to do something with that salty liquid.
We've investigated it further, and we found the grass contains minerals,
and that those minerals lower the freezing point.
The minerals weren't sufficient, though, so we developed a procedure
to turn that grass liquid into a kind of brine
that gets purified and concentrated.
I've brought some with me here.
We transformed that green mess into this beautiful liquid.
So you can spray a road with this to treat the iciness.
The other product, the fibers,
we decided to use for making road facilities.
That would be traffic signs,
roadside shelves or shoring equipment.
With these two things,
the green, innovative, circular project Grass2Grit was born.
We applied for and were granted a European subsidy for it.
The coming four years, we will be testing this concept
on a stretch of provincial road of about four miles.
We will be building a small factory to see how to produce it all,
and I'm so looking forward to that.
Meanwhile, our concept has attracted attention from others,
nationally and internationally, and that's just fabulous.
You see me here in a picture
when I was interviewed in Leeuwarden.
I'm standing in front of the Higher Agricultural Institute,
where I graduated,
so that was a very special moment for me:
that little boy that wanted to save the world
now has his hands on something that can really make a difference.
Because if this works well, it can have quite an impact.
So that was really special.
In closing, I'd like to share this with you.
Last year, I was at the railway station in The Hague,
and across from the station,
I saw this West Frisian text on a government building.
And for a boy from Friesland,
that's quite a weird thing to come across in The Hague.
This text is the slogan for Leeuwarden as the European cultural capital in 2018.
You'll be curious to what it means:
["Set dyn tosken yn in nije tiid" - Get your teeth into a new era]
I felt like supported by fate because that text meant so much for me.
It has idealism, it has combativeness,
but also tenacity.
We are living in an era of great transitions,
but great challenges too.
Our planet is not doing well,
and we can only pull this off together.
The dream I had as a little boy,
I'd like to pass it on to you too:
"Set dyn tosken yn in nije tiid."
(Applause)