Last month, dredgers removed 2.3 million cubic meters of sand from the eastern Wadden Sea floor, ostensibly to feed Dutch beach nourishment programs. What regulators call routine maintenance, fishermen call a slow erasure of their seabed. The Wadden Sea sustains some of Europe's richest fish nurseries, but Brussels treats it like a gravel pit with a UNESCO label.

Shipping traffic through the Wadden has doubled in two decades. Large container vessels now cut through channels that once saw only fishing boats and small ferries. Propeller wash stirs up sediment, destroys mussel beds, and kills larvae that young fish depend on. Port authorities in Hamburg and Rotterdam claim they have no choice, but they chose to route more cargo through here rather than invest in deeper ports elsewhere.

Offshore wind farms add a third layer of harm. Turbines generate low-frequency vibrations that disrupt navigation in whales and seals. Construction vessels plow anchor chains through soft bottom habitat. Power cables laid across the seabed create electromagnetic fields that confuse eels at spawning time. Nobody sums these costs together because each damage source falls under a different ministry's permit.

Local fishermen and the few conservation groups that listen to them point out that national governments and EU bureaucrats treat the Wadden as a collection of separate problems. One agency manages fishing quotas, another oversees sand contracts, a third approves wind projects. No one tracks what happens when you squeeze all three threats into the same shallow water at the same time.

The German government at least kept commercial sand extraction out of its territorial waters. The Dutch and Danish did not. Their economy ministers won the argument, and the Wadden Sea lost. The UNESCO World Heritage status means nothing when the paperwork is in order and the profits are clear.