ABSTRACT
This chapter provides three main examples of choices made that have settled into the way things are. It says that the potholed peat landscape of the Netherlands, albeit a rather more complex set of relations and contingencies than described, can be said to have become visible with windmills. Coming from a country dominated by cars and automobile culture, the author acquired a driving licence and a car. The chapter outlines that the bicycle was first introduced in the Netherlands around 1870 and generally represented the 'first new mode of individualised mass transport since walking.' By now the Netherlands, along with Denmark, is considered a biking nation. More remarkably it seems to co-exist in the Netherlands with a cycling culture where bicycles account for 25 per cent of daily mobility. The chapter also talks of sand being a commodity that is now becoming scarce in the Great Acceleration of the Anthropocene.
