How to Be Danish: A Journey to the Cultural Heart of Denmark (18 page)

Fifteen years ago, Samsø’s 4000 elderly farmers were known best for their early crop of new potatoes. Their farms were all powered by fossil fuels, which had to be shipped over from the mainland, and between them they created 45,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year. Then, in 1998, all that changed. These conservative islanders were the unlikely winners of a competition to become Denmark’s first carbon-neutral community. Government funding followed – an investment matched by the islanders themselves – and a decade and a half later, 10 offshore windmills line the coast of Samsø, while 11 stud its fields.

Many farmers – Andersen included – have layered their roofs with solar panels. Their heating, once organised on an individual basis, now comes from a central supplier – which cuts down on waste – and is created from burning straw. Some of their plumbing – at the island’s Energy Academy, for instance – even runs on rainwater. “The water may look brown,” warns a sign next to their toilets.

The upshot is that Samsø isn’t just carbon neutral – it’s technically carbon negative. The energy Samsingers can’t use is fed back into the Danish national grid, which means
that their net output of carbon dioxide stands at -15,000 tons. And they’re not stopping there. By 2030, they don’t just want to offset their tractors’ use of petrol: they want to stop using fossil fuels altogether. To do this, they want everyone to trade in their cars for electric ones. But they’ve got a long way to go. A jungle of rentable bicycles may greet you when you step off the ferry, but they’re not particularly useful on an island that still takes half an hour to cross by car. Meanwhile, electric cars are unaffordable to many, and – if my taxi driver’s pained expression was anything to go by – most Samsingers still need to be persuaded of their appeal.

Historically, they’ve been won over by arguments of an economic bent. Five of the turbines are owned by the council, 12 by individual farmers, but, most significantly, four are managed cooperatively by hundreds of locals. Erik Andersen is one of them. Back in the late 90s, he invested £6000 of his own savings in the cooperative turbines. Six years later, he’d made it back, and now he turns a healthy profit every year. “There’s money in it,” he smiles. “It’s a good investment.”

Samsø isn’t an anomaly in Denmark. In general, the country has made one of the sincerest attempts to tackle climate change. Since 1980, their economy has grown by 70%, while, staggering, their electricity usage has stayed the same. Copenhagen wants to become the world’s first carbon-neutral capital by 2025, and they’ll probably get there – if Aarhus doesn’t beat them to it. To smooth the
way, the state government has introduced a 180% tax on car sales. An integrated public transport system also helps, as does all that cycling infrastructure. Then there’s the district heating system, which heats around 60% of Danish houses centrally.

The Danes are good at recycling too. Denmark produces proportionally more waste than any other country in Europe, but just five per cent of it ends up in landfill. In the US, that figure rises to 54%. Meanwhile, Danish law demands that buildings be much better insulated than they are in other countries. As a result, Danish architects invest heavily in finding new ways of keeping buildings warm. When I visit the offices of 3XN, I see boxes of maize, cotton, cork and flax – mushrooms, even – the residue of a quest to find the perfect way to insulate a house. “It’s really funny when you go abroad and British architects talk about sustainability,” says Dorte Mandrup, one of the rising stars of Danish architecture. “It means something completely different.”

But the biggest thing is wind power. Look out of almost any window in Denmark and you’ll see a flat countryside flecked with white turbines. They’re the world’s largest producers of windmills. Twenty per cent of Danish energy comes from wind, and by 2020, they hope it’ll be 50%. By 2030, they want to be rid of fossil fuels altogether, replacing them with both biomass plants, and yet more bigger, better wind turbines. British criticism of wind power centres on its
ugliness and its inefficiency. But when I get talking to one of Vestas’s lead engineers I chance upon in a bar in Aarhus, he rubbishes both claims. Vestas, he claims, are developing a kind of gargantuan, floating wind farm that will be a) so far out to sea that you won’t be able to see it (thus placating those who don’t like the look of a sleek white windmill); and b) so windy that it’ll able to power half the world. In the meantime, he says, Vestas are about to release their largest turbine yet. With a wingspan of 172m, it’ll be effective even in countries that aren’t as flat as Denmark, and don’t have as much wind.

Accurate or not, his passion shows how seriously Denmark takes green energy. But contrary to popular belief, this isn’t because Danes are eco-warriors. “We’re not hippies,” says Søren Hermansen. As explained in Chapter six, Danish environmentalism is pragmatic rather than idealistic. In the 70s, Denmark was particularly hard hit by the oil crisis, which made Danes anxious to find a long-term replacement for fossil fuel. With all their flat land, wind
power seemed a sensible option.

First of all, it makes sense from an economic perspective. “This is business like any other business,” says Hermansen, who I chat to on the ferry over from the mainland. “If we can provide cheap energy to compete with fossil fuel, then even the most conservative local citizen will say green energy is good. It is more reliable and cheaper, because we can see our prices going up all the time. When we started in 1998, oil was $30 per barrel. Ten years later, it was $130. So the people who invested between 1998 and 2001 saved so much money in the next ten years. We could show that this was a real business project, not just a hippy project.”

A change in the way that government subsidies are structured has also helped speed up the process. A few decades ago, the government wanted to encourage turbine construction, so they gave grants to the factories themselves. “But they found this didn’t improve the quality of turbines,” says Hermansen. “Manufacturers produced rubbish wind turbines and still survived.” During the 90s, the government took away this subsidy and gave it to the people who bought the turbines instead. They agreed to buy back any unused wind energy from the turbine owners at a price that never dropped below a fixed minimum. This encouraged communities to invest in turbines that created the most power – and in turn prompted the manufacturers themselves to create better turbines.

Wind’s success is also down, once again, to the cooperative system that is so engrained in the Danish way of life. In
Britain, local communities have often been opposed to windmills because they see them as thrust upon a particular area by external forces. In Denmark, it’s usually the locals who have built and paid for them, and who have decided where they’re sited. There are around 6000 turbines in Denmark (nearly double the number in Britain, a country 6 times its size) and around 75% of them are co-owned by around 150,000 Danes. It’s these people, not the large energy companies, who most profit from the lowered energy bills, and from the sales of excess energy back to the national grid. As a result, even the most conservative locals have invested, both financially and emotionally, in the turbines – even a bunch of elderly, grizzled farmers in the middle of the North Sea.

It’s a very Danish situation. “In England, you are a coal nation,” says Hermansen, as the ferry pulls towards Samsø. “The British empire was fuelled by coal. But in Denmark, we are a farming nation, and so everything has historically been decided by co-ops. The co-op structure has been around for 150 years, and it’s still going strong.”

A line of turbines glide past our ferry window.

“This isn’t a coincidence,” says Hermansen. “It couldn’t have happened in any other place.”

In May 2011, a sociologist called Ulla Holm wrote an article for
Politiken
about the New Nordic kitchen. It was an explosive piece. Holm claimed that chefs like Rene Redzepi – with their focus on local produce and their desire to create a regional culinary identity – were closet nationalists. Nordic supremacists, even. “It is hardly a coincidence,” she wrote, “that the waiters were dressed in brown shirts when I last visited Noma.”

Her argument was bonkers. As Claus Meyer explains earlier in this book, the New Nordic mission is utterly innocent. It’s simply about making people more interested in good, sustainable food. And it’s a global aim, he points out, not just a Scandinavian one.

“Look at my family. My father’s a Muslim immigrant. My wife, Nadine, is Jewish,” Redzepi told the
New Yorker
. “If the supremacists took over, we’d be out of here.”

Yet in a funny, roundabout way, Holm’s article touches on something fundamental to contemporary Denmark. She’s wrong about Noma, but the tension she erroneously sees between the restaurant’s ambition and its parochialism is one that is nevertheless very present within wider Danish life. For the last 150 years, Denmark has – with several notable exceptions – hidden itself away. But in the past two decades, the country has increasingly found that this coping mechanism no longer works in a globalised world. Denmark is and can no longer be a monoculture.

Danes have reacted to this challenge in ways that contradict each other – some parochial, others ambitious. And as Richard Jenkins notes in his book,
Being Danish
, the direction they will ultimately take remains to be seen.

One direction is inwards and backwards. Many Danes can see the world on their doorstep, and they’re trying to keep it out. They want to preserve the Danish identity, but in the process of doing so, they have ironically eroded it. By virtually ending immigration, and by attempting to stamp out the individuality of immigrant communities, groups like the Dansk Folkeparti have forgone the tolerant and democratic values that supposedly form the backbone of Danishness.

Another direction is outwards. Some Danes have seen the world outside – and want to conquer it. Some have done this aggressively: for the first time since 1864, Danish soldiers have been in action abroad, as part of the peacekeeping force in Iraq and Afghanistan. Others are trying to take over
the world in a more creative sense. As this book has shown, Danes like Søren Sveistrup, Rene Redzepi and Bjarke Ingels are some of the best in the world in their respective fields. Through their success, they have reinforced Danish culture – Redzepi, for instance, has helped to revitalise Danish food – but, like their isolationist countrymen, they too have also changed what it is to be Danish. Increasingly their influences are international – Sveistrup looked to the US, Ingels to Holland – and their heightened ambition is at odds with the traditional image of a contented, laid-back Dane.

It’s hard to say which of these directions Denmark will eventually settle on. Perhaps it’ll be all of them. But whichever it is, one thing is fairly certain: the concept of Danishness is changing. How to be Danish is hard enough to explain in 2014. How to be Danish in two decades’ time is anyone’s guess.

7
- name of the Arne Jacobsen chair that inspired Christine Keeler’s semi-nude portrait

$18.75
- average per hour minimum wage in Denmark

1000
- number of people on the waiting list at Noma most nights

96%
- percentage of children aged 3–5 in state-subsidised daycare

3%
- percentage of Danes who are Muslim

4%
- percentage of Danes called Hansen

74%
- approximate percentage of Danish mothers in work

1901
- the last time any party won an overall majority

54,700 kroner
- average lawyer’s salary

34,400 kroner
- average binman’s salary

1200
- number of stitches in a Fritz Hansen Egg chair

0 kroner
- cost of university tuition

173m
- height of Jutland’s Yding Skovhøj, the highest point in Denmark

20%
- percentage of electricity powered by wind

26%
- percentage of children aged 7–14 with part-time jobs

400
- number of actors who appeared in
The Killing

2004
- year New Nordic cuisine was founded

36%
- percentage of Copenhageners who commute by bike

15
- number of ways in which Erwin Lauterbach can prepare celery, according to Bent Christensen

14
- total number of Michelin stars in Denmark

9.1%
- percentage of Danish residents who are of an immigrant background

26
- years in which an immigrant must have lived in Denmark in order for them to marry a non-EU citizen

1962
- year Jan Gehl spent studying Copenhagen’s first "walking street"

406
- number of Danish islands

98%
- percentage of Copenhagen homes connected to district heaters

60
- number of knitters employed by Gudrun and Gudrun, the makers of Sarah Lund’s jumper