Our last day here offered a bit of a break from the engineering heavy topics to focus back on dutch history and culture. Enno gave us a tour of the Hague, the home of all dutch politics, legislatation, and embassies. It felt very refreshing to learn about a political system that was actually healthy, normal, and stable. Having a 15 party system as opposed to the US’s two sounds much nicer to participate in. Enno taught us about how being a strong republic has always been a large part of dutch pride and history. In the past, the Netherlands was the only republic country among a continent of monarchies. The rest of Europe saw them as a threat to their power and worked together to attack them, trying to scare the Netherlands into obedience since they couldn’t retaliate as a small country. Obviously, it didn’t work because the Netherlands still stnads as a strong republic today, and the rest of Europe eventually followed their example. I really admire the dutch for holding so much pride in the institutions they’ve fought to keep time and time again. I wish I could explain all the history behind it as well as Enno could, but I found it all really inspiring to learn about.

Having stable and reliable politics is extremely import for sustainble engineering. Without it, you can never get the policies you need put in place in order to build any sustainble projects. Across everything we’ve seen on this entire trip, nothing could have been built without the legalities of them supporting the projects. We saw this the best when we visited the floating houses in Schoonship, where our tour guide told us how they had to find several “win-win situations” in order to build their neighborhood. I think its cruciual for every engineer working on, and especially leading, sustainble projects to have a basics understanding of how politics and sustainble policy works. Without that understanding, getting any projects off the drawing board is much more difficult for everyone involved.