By JOHN TAGLIABUE

LELYSTAD, the Netherlands - In this low-lying country, where much of the land has been clawed from the sea, people like to say that while God may have created the world, it was the Dutch who created Holland.
Consider this seaside town of brick homes huddled behind steep dikes. In the 1960s, Lelystad was mostly shacks housing workers who erected dikes and drained water to create land for farming, industry and homes. Since then, Lelystad has grown to 73,000 people .
Today, just as they have for centuries, the Dutch need more land to house an expanding population. They also need to confront a new threat to their lands, roughly two-thirds of which lie below sea level: the specter of rising ocean levels associated with global warming.
So a government commission recently proposed pushing out the Netherlands’ shoreline to meet the challenge of an increase in the ocean’s levels; another commission proposed the construction of islands off the Dutch coast, like barrier reefs in the North Sea.
One such commission, inspired by Dubai, which built several islands off its coast to form giant palm trees as part of a major urban development plan, suggested a bit whimsically that the Dutch islands be given the shape of plants, specifically tulips. One irreverent blogger, alluding to the Netherlands’ traditional tolerance of marijuana, suggested cannabis leaves instead.
“It was a joke, a metaphor,” Hans de Boer, a commission member, said of the tulip design . “We came up with a metaphor, and everybody wanted to take part in the discussion.”
The idea, Mr. de Boer went on, would be not only to gain land and protect the coast, but also to showcase Dutch engineering skills. At the same time, an island could be an energy powerhouse, shaped like a ring to create so-called blue energy by using the contrast of fresh and salt water to generate electricity, or the ebb and flow of the tides. Wind turbines could also produce even more energy, he said.
Of course, there are skeptics, especially among those who have most experience building islands. Such work is expected to cost billions -no one has estimated just how much - and take decades. Yet the government commissions insist that their proposals for islands or an expanded coastline are quite serious, and thrifty taxpayers have not revolted.
The pumping station here in Lelystad is one of the largest dotting the reclaimed landscape, and it provides an example of how the Dutch learned to live below sea level.
“There were food shortages in World War I, and Holland wanted food independence,” said Evert van der Horst, chief engineer at a station near Lelystad that drains the reclaimed land.
So the Dutch built a dike separating a body of water then called the Zuiderzee from the ocean. They called the body of water formed by the dike the Ijsselmeer, after a nearby river, Mr. van der Horst said, and drained its eastern stretches to cultivate and live on. He was one of thousands of Dutch mainlanders who settled there.
All winter long, the pumping station’s four big diesel pumps, which are now being converted to more efficient electricity, run on and off.
But “in summertime, every tree sucks up 300 liters of water a day,” said Mr. van der Horst, 64, making pumping unnecessary. “You can smell it in the trees,” he said.
The growth of towns like Lelystad goes on unabated, crowding an already packed country. With a population of 16.5 million, the Netherlands crowds about 1,270 people into every square mile. As subdivisions sprout around old Dutch cities and broad new highways connect them, the growth gobbles up forests and farmland.
“The number of farms, about 80,000, is decreasing, while production is increasing. But if we want to realize and continue production growth, we need acreage,” said Joop Atsma, a local member of Parliament involved in planning.
Whether to build islands or push out the shoreline, he could not say. But Bert Groothuizen, marketing manager at Van Oord, the largest Dutch dredging contractor and the builder of Dubai’s palm trees,has no doubts.
“It is better and more economical to extend the coast one kilometer into the sea and strengthen the dunes along the seashore by dumping in a lot of sand,” he said.
“In the old days,” he mused, “the dikes were rigid, of concrete, but now we favor a soft coastline, in harmony with nature. It’s a return to the 17th century.”
Atop the dike protecting Lelystad stands a restaurant, ‘t Dijkhuysje, or Dike House . “We have no problem with water,” said Rob Sengers, 24, who has cooked in the restaurant’s kitchen for eight years. Was he concerned about the possibility of sea levels rising from climate change?
“Maybe sooner or later it will happen,” he said. “Maybe my children will see it.”