The Maakbaarheid Café. A Parable about Water en Bodem Sturend

At the Maakbaarheid Café, there’s a talented mixologist. His approach to cocktails? There are no limits. The Maakbaarheid has had a great run. Customers were never lacking. Occasionally patrons would drink to excess and suffer serious hangovers. Not the Cafe’s problem. The Maakbaarheid wasn’t interested in customers incapable of moderation. Was it the Café’s fault if they woke up in a puddle? Every now and then, you’d hear that a long-term patron had died of cirrhosis of the liver. But what were the odds of that? 1 in 100,000?

The drink menu at the Maakbaarheid Café boasts numerous iconic drinks renowned among cocktail cognoscenti around the world. The Afsluitdijk is a perennial favorite, recently upgraded. On special occasions, hardy drinkers like to order “The Works,” a flight of increasingly innovative cocktails: the Algera, the Hartel, the Oosterschelde, the Maeslant and the Balg. Rumor has it that the talented mixologist has devised a new drink to add to the collection. He calls it the Holland Kering. It comes with an iconic arch perched boldly on top of the glass. It’s still in development. Public interest so far is mixed.?

Back in the 1980s, the Maakbaarheid Café ran into some competition. A new outfit offered alternative alcohol-free beverages with natural ingredients and names like the Ooijevaar, Levende Rivieren, and Meegroeien met de Zee. The Meinerswijk and the Millingerwaard were niche favorites, but outside of a handful of insiders, few had heard of them. You could hardly call them a serious threat. In the mid 1990s, a few patrons along the Rhine went on a bender. It took quite a while for them to recover, but when they did, they resolved to open a new bar and to chart a more abstemious course. The Room for the River offered over 30 region-specific mocktails. Some patrons of Maakbaarheid welcomed the new concept as an addition to their drinking options. Every once in a while, they’d bike right past the Maakbaarheid Café and enjoy a drink in one of Room for the River’s locales along the Waal, the Ijssel or the Lek. Still nothing to threaten the Maakbaarheid’s business model, though. The regulars always came back. And even if there were increasing reports about the harmful long-term effects of alcohol consumption, the celebrated old claims that drinking in moderation wasn’t harmful and might even be beneficial were firmly entrenched. No reason to panic. In fact, the Maakbaarheid added a new motto to their menu: “Wees niet bang.”

But the new reports became more insistent. These more rigorous scientific studies found that even moderate consumption of alcohol may contribute to cancer, high blood pressure, and serious heart arrhythmia. Word circulated that consuming even two drinks a week was associated with health risks, while seven or more carry a high level of risk. At the Maakbaarheid Café and throughout the Netherlands, the climate was changing. More and more patrons called for 0,0%. The Room for the River crew saw an opportunity to expand into new markets such as along smaller tributaries, in harbors, and even along coasts. A new slogan started to do the rounds: Wellness, Balance, and Sobriety. WBS for short. When the government adopted WBS as a national policy and the responsible ministry wrote an advisory letter, the management at the Maakbaarheid Café knew they were in trouble. WBS was on everyone’s lips and the writing was on the wall: “There are limits to Maakbaarheid.” For Café management, you might as well say (and they did): “This means the end of Maakbaarheid.”

Our intrepid mixologist took another view. WBS gave him the heebie jeebies. He realized that there are people in the Netherlands who wanted to codify WBS, to anchor it in law. WBS is all fine and good in theory, but that would be a policy too far. With a knack for hyperbole, he compared it to Prohibition, that bizarre American experiment with governmentally imposed sobriety in the 1920s. WBS, he said, has decidedly dictatorial tendencies. He and fellow mixologists launched a campaign to save the Maakbaarheid Café.

Don’t ever think our mixologist is one to steer clear of a fight! If advocates of WBS call out places where drinking should be outlawed, he takes that as a challenge to concoct a new beverage. There’s a whole array of sexy new drinks at the Maakbaarheid that tempt with forbidden pleasures. The old Meinerswijk mocktail comes in for revision as the Stadsblokken with lovely green garnish. Even members of the Raad van Staten can be persuaded to enjoy a round, just as long as you refer only to the old studies and keep the new ones out of the picture. For those who worked decades on perfecting the original, the new drink is particularly bitter. You thought you shouldn’t mess with the IJsselmeer and the Markermeer? Think again. It’s “Bottoms up!” in Lelystad. You’ve heard of long drinks? Well, we call the Zuidplas a deep one. Very deep. Every one of these innovations is kitted up with the newest cocktail technology. And every drink in its own right--seen in isolation from downstream impacts and long-term outlooks, and without regard for other acts of immoderate consumption—is perfectly harmless, our mixologist claims. That’s the Maakbaarheid Café’s new motto: It’s just one drink! Forget about how they add up and how, in their uncertain cumulative impact over time against an even more uncertain, perilous climate-changed future, they put all of us at risk. Focus on the here and now. It is, as our mixologist likes to say, prima te doen.

Will the Maakbaarheid Café remain afloat? Will it find a way to reinvent itself within the scope of WBS? We sincerely hope so. We need a new kind of Maakbaarheid. One that embraces the principles of WBS instead of trying to undermine them. When all is said and done (and now our parable comes to an end), the goal of Water en Bodem Sturend is to extend the period of human habitation of the low-lying regions of the Netherlands under the conditions of accelerated sea level rise and hastening climate change for as long as possible. It aims to disarm the threat of river flooding, to maximize the capacity of foreshores to grow and rise with the sea, to increase water storage capacity, to mitigate drought, and to preserve room for dike reinforcement. With that long term goal in view, you would expect engineers to align with WBS. Maakbaarheid loves a challenge, they say. Well here’s one: put everything you’ve got into collaborating with ecologists, climate adaptation experts, designers, physical geographers, waterschappen, and more, so that residents in the West and the East, along rivers and shores, in higher and lower elevations, can safely enjoy a borrel for as long as climate change and sensible WBS-based climate adaptation measures allow.