"God created the world, and the Dutch created the Netherlands." The old adage summarizes—albeit in an immodest, not to say blasphemous, way—the popular Dutch view of their relationship to water. There is some truth in it: about half the country is below sea level and would be flooded without the dikes that hold back the waters of the rivers and the sea. But the relationship is not as straightforward—humans dominating nature—as the phrase suggests. It is, for example, mediated in complex ways by science and technology. In this essay I will focus on one recent crisis in this relationship between the Dutch and the sea, the disastrous flood of 1953, and its resolution through the Delta Plan, and in particular the building of the storm surge barrier in the Oosterschelde. 1 [End Page 569]
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Wiebe E. Bijker (2002) studied this question.
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