Een kano naar zee

A Canoe to the Sea is an ode to the heroes who made the port of Rotterdam what it is. And at the same time a reckoning. The future dream of big bigger biggest has increasingly turned into a nightmare. Can we, in the search for a liveable river delta, nevertheless learn something from those stories about the creation and degeneration of the port of Rotterdam?

Based on the lives of two 'harbour barons', DG van Beuningen who established his coal empire in the Maasstad from 1900 onwards and Frans Posthuma who managed to attract one oil giant after another to Rotterdam after the Second World War, André van der Hout reconstructs how the city and the port became deeply intertwined with the fossil industry. Only no one had read the package insert of the growth hormone that they administered to the city over the past century. So now we are stuck with it: a port in the stranglehold of coal and oil interests. Nietzsche already said it: "Everything that will be, drags along with it what has been".