The owners of the house are well aware of the problem. In the packet of information they provide for vacationing guests, they suggest: “Because our houses are near water and in the middle of nature there are all kinds of insects and spiders which enter the house. For your comfort and to keep our walls and ceiling clean we advise the following: take the vacuum cleaner and in no time all insects are sucked up and they die in the process.”

Sailboats cross the fields on below-sea-level canals that cut through grassy, loamy meadows where cows graze, their udders frighteningly full. Housewives drive motorboats filled with groceries past elevated homesteads where goats and sheep share the front yard with farm equipment and big American cars. From the window of a moving train or a second-story bedroom (both approximately the same distance above the ground) one can always see the next village in the not-too-distance.

This must be one of those traditionalist agricultural areas the globalisation protesters are trying to protect.

“Visserhafen,” fisher villages, dot the coast, but they have been taken over by country club-style “marinas” and the accompanying vacation villas with modern-day thatched roofs. There are windmills here, but they’re of the industrial „GroWiAn“ variety (the dual-blade being more attractive than the tri-blade propellers). The traditional brick windmills that supposedly dotted the countryside a century ago are now few and far between – or they have been relegated to a demeaning role as the Dutch counterpart of Germany’s gnomes and Norway’s trolls: ceramic specimens in fluffy flowerbeds.

In our “model apartment” on the Peninsula of the Green Iguana, little signs at every turn inform us of how ecologically friendly our vacation home is. “The toilet is flushed using rainwater!” “Only energy-saving light bulbs in use!” “Running water (showers and taps) is conserved using a smaller outlet diameter that allows 40% less water per minute to flow through. A savings of approximately 10%!” “Don’t use nails and screws in the walls!”

The walls are made of “fermacell” and running through them are PE pipes containing water heated to 30 to 45 degrees Celsius, depending on the outside temperature. The walls are finished with loam (muddy clay), which conducts heat from the pipes into the room. This makes the heating system thrifty but slow to react: raising the temperature in the house by one degree Celsius takes up to one and a half hours.

Rainwater is collected via the southern roof in an underground cistern and heated using “earth heat.” Tap and dishwasher water get “quite brownish in rainy periods.” But that’s the way tap water is in Friesland: “a little coloured, but clean and drinkable,” according to the brochure. And after all, that’s more than one can say about the water in West Texas.

Detailed instructions help you make the most of the glass veranda, which collects the sun’s heat. “The sunlounge works as follows: By closing the doors and ventilation you keep the warmth from coming into the living room. Certainly important in the summer, for the temperature in the sunlounge can rise up to 50 degrees. Better use the windows east, west and north to ventilate. In the winter it’s best to use the sunlounge for ventilation. The cellulose insulation works as a heat storage system. During the day it takes up heat and radiates it at night. This means the houses hold their warmth quite long. So best to ventilate at night during the summer.” If only those insects would let us sleep….

The walls and floors are insulated with recycled paper (cellulose) and seashells and are heated from the inside thanks to those PE water pipes running through them. The outside walls of indigenous larch are finished using linseed-oil paint and other bio-ecological products like marmoleum (wood meal) and cork linoleum “in colours representing the four elements.” Whatever – we called the colours rusty-pipe red, urine yellow, mouldy blue and just green. There’s moss and grass on those parts of the roof not outfitted with solar panels.

About those solar panels: This is not a sunny place. Virtually every region in America beats this place hands down when it comes to hours of sunshine. It’s cloudy here a good three-fourths of the time. Little rain squalls are a fact of life; average annual rainfall is x?x?x. But business in solar panels is booming. They are used to generate the electricity needed to run such amenities as satellite TV, dishwasher, microwave and the whirlpool (which unfortunately isn’t working, and the obviously unhappy owners will be more than glad to tell you which manufacturer is at fault and should be avoided).

Which only goes to show that the first bio-ecological model homes in the Netherlands are indeed prototypes, which of course are the non-working, testing-stage predecessors of the real thing.

Der Beitrag Ein nobles Ansinnen erschien zuerst auf Steve Nobles.