Treasure TROVE ‘DE KALOOT’
In July 2025 I found myself crouching on the muddy shoreline of Kaloot beach in Zeeland, the Netherlands’ south-western province, intently scrutinizing the strip of broken shells for evidence of tiny shiny black bits of fossilized shark teeth. I was on a short visit to Zeeland’s Zak of Zuid-Beveland, one of our fieldwork sites, to find out what was new since I had paused my fieldwork a year and a half ago. As I planned the visit, I stumbled upon a summer activity for which I signed up with some excitement: an excursion was offered to hunt for fossils on Kaloot beach, an expanse of fine-grained sand and shifting dunes with which I had become quite familiar, both through strolls and through stories from research participants. Contrasting the Kaloot with the Zak’s carefully cultivated intimate landscape, they speak with affectionate awe of a ‘primeval’ place of ‘nature’ on the very rim of the Zak where fossil shells and shark teeth can be found as strong tides and submarine gullies in the Westerschelde, the sea branch lining the beach, expose ancient deposits leaving rich treasures on shore. The Kaloot is popular with wind surfers and kite flyers and dog walkers. It has been the focus of activists calling for its protection against plans for a container ship harbour, a protest that has been successful, so far. Big ships pass by on what is the major route between the North Sea and the port of Antwerp. The view land-inwards, however, is ‘not so picturesque’, as one of the excursion participants put it.
Looking towards the Westerschelde from the Kaloot, July 2025.
A group of some twenty beach combers (mostly Dutch and German tourists with children) gathered around the fossil expert leading the excursion. She gave a short introduction that included remarks on the beach’s intriguing backdrop. ‘Go and put your hand in the water’, she encouraged us, ‘it’s hot!’ pointing to the noisy discharge emanating from a rather cute industrial building: the white sphere of the Netherlands’ only operating nuclear power station, which draws its cooling water from the Westerschelde. No-one seemed to be concerned about the warm water rushing past. The excursion leader pointed out that the abundant foam on the agitated open pool was caused by algae, but then warned that such foam would become a gathering place for PFAS, forever chemicals, associated with industries around the Westerschelde.
PFAS gets mentioned a lot in the Netherlands, on summery terraces over drinks, at birthday parties, in the press. Radionuclides, perhaps surprisingly in particular at the Kaloot, don’t get much of the limelight. Water is a hot topic, particularly in Zeeland, the ultimate estuary landscape in the Netherlands, a province-sized lieu de mémoire keeping alive and present the fascinating history of the Dutch struggle over land against the North Sea. Over the centuries, land has been lost and reclaimed through engineering feats that are a source of pride, and of fertile land, with Zeeland emerging as a prominent agricultural province in the Netherlands. The Dutch relationship with water, however, has increasingly become a matter of debate in the area and beyond: should Zeeland, and the Netherlands more generally, keep putting its efforts in resisting pressures from the sea (ranging from sea level rise to soil salination), or has the time come to ‘move with’ the pressing waters, a novel stance captured in the verb meebewegen? And what would this mean for what the Dutch call their leefomgeving, literally the lived-in environment, which they are keen on keeping leefbaar (livable)?
The Kaloot, as a watery meeting point of ‘primeval nature’ and modern industry, speaks to many issues that came up during my six months of fieldwork in the area, issues having to do with identity, ecology, history, and livability. Residents in de Zak consider the Kaloot a cherished part of their leefomgeving whilst the industry is something they prefer not to have to see. In the densely populated Netherlands, a country that has been engineered and planned in great detail, each hectare of its surface heaves under different pressures vying for priority. Agricultural, industrial, residential, recreational, and ‘natural’ land-use futures unfold on neat parcels. De Zak van Zuid-Beveland, which more or less overlaps with the Municipality of Borsele (a collective of 15 villages surrounded by farms and fruit growing businesses), is beloved for its quiet, small-scale rurality, with picturesque dikes, inlets, and pools created by former floods. De Zak is bordered by an industrial area (called the Sloegebied or Vlissingen-Oost), which my discussion partners generally do not consider integral to their leefomgeving. Parts of the Sloegebied, plus the Kaloot, fall under the Municipality of Borsele. The Sloe industries draw on and discharge into the Westerschelde, a sea branch which is also a formally recognized natural environment (‘Natura 2000’) interacting with the Kaloot. The Sloegebied hosts the Dutch nuclear waste facility COVRA (also visible from the Kaloot) and the country’s only operating nuclear power station EPZ, right there where we combed the beach.
EPZ nuclear power plant discharge, Kaloot, July 2025.
Compared to other industrial sites in the Sloegebied and on the south shore of the Westerschelde (which is closer to the extensive industrial estates and port of Antwerp), these Dutch nuclear facilities are quite small, both in terms of footprint and employment. They are generally trusted and even appreciated, with COVRA successfully presenting itself as a corporate patron of the arts. During my fieldwork in 2023, however, worries about the livability of the leefomgeving in de Zak dramatically increased as the Dutch government zoomed in on the area as a potential preferred site for a series of new energy provisions, including cables and pylons extending well beyond the Sloegebied to transport electricity from offshore windfarms, converter stations, truck facilities, potential hydrogen generation—and two or even four large nuclear power stations. These worries include concerns over nuclear risks and waste management, but, strikingly, they are mostly about scale and landscape. In the villages in the hinterland of the Sloegebied, many discussion partners feel that the beloved small-scale landscape of de Zak is threatened by developments that are literally seen as being disproportional, and they have made their voices heard. In an aside to me, the fossil expert (resident elsewhere in Zeeland) gestured to the potential site of new nuclear reactors that would dwarf the existing one, expressing the hope that such a development wouldn’t impact on the Kaloot.
The focus on, and concerns about, landscape and scale came strikingly to the fore in a participatory process in de Zak carried out in 2023, when a selection of residents (‘the group of 100’) were invited by the Municipality of Borsele to develop conditions for the energy transition [1]. In the meantime, these conditions have been presented to the coalition government in The Hague—which, having collapsed in June 2025, is now a caretaker government with elections planned for the end of October. Projects are stalled, debate continues. The Municipality of Borsele has called for a replenished group of 100 to continue discussions on the energy transition. It has also launched a new working group to exchange views on options for nature, recreation, farming, and visual enhancement of the border between the ‘ugly’ Sloegebied and de Zak’s small-scale leefomgeving. Meanwhile, the State is testing the waters for an alternative location for large new nuclear reactors, this time on the south shore of the Westerschelde. A cynical move to circumvent the ‘conditions’, some say. Nothing is resolved, and yet a lot happens, my discussion partners smiled wryly.
Fossil hunting on Kaloot beach with views of the Sloegebied, July 2025.
One of our beach combers found a Monetaria moneta or money cowrie, a shell living in Indo-Pacific tropical waters—and as it turned out, a small beach find heavy with mesmerizing geopolitical implications. Cowries are not native to the Netherlands. We were told that such finds on the Kaloot originate from a Dutch East India Company ship that sank here in 1739, the Reigersbroek, which carried them as ballast. I found a rather more ordinary fossilized shell, but no shark tooth – from her own finds, the excursion leader handed me a tiny broken-off spike so I wouldn’t leave empty-handed.
The Kaloot yields its treasures sparingly. Given its plays with time-depth, its ambivalent status and location, and the enchantment it offers to locals and visitors, it becomes a prism for exploring ‘typically Dutch’ questions in a quite unique setting: questions about the workings of time, about relationships between nature and culture, between land and water, and between development and attachment as competing human desires in relentlessly dynamic environments.