Everything about the Halligen embodies water – the sand and soil, plants and people, fish, crabs, eels, cows, sheep, insects. The water from the North Sea traverses all of these bodies and swirls through them, offering up the gifts but also the dangers of the sea. Too much water and too much salinity will kill the salt meadows and swallow up the Wadden Sea. Conversely, none of this life can survive without them. Too much water will threaten to drown the Halligen. All projections point toward the fact that climate-change will fundamentally transform this extraordinary place.

And yet, the Halligen have messages for us about what it means to live with water and not against it. Here, for hundreds of years, humans have lived in ways that is neither a surrender nor an attempt to master the sea. Instead, the sea is a constant and complicated companion, a force to be reckoned with, and a form of wealth that can both give and take. We hope that this message, brought to us from these tiny specks in the North Sea, will stay with us, whatever the future may bring.