“The Delta has been getting clogged for millennia.” 

There are all kinds of comments about the Delta: “The Delta is getting clogged”, “The water in the Delta is stinking and the fish are dying…” The [Danube] Delta has been getting clogged for millennia. That’s how the Delta came into being. There were channels that were filled with alluvium that got clogged and that’s how this land and this pond came into being. It’s an absolutely natural process.
I pulled out a stranded cargo ship somewhere in the mouth of the Sulina. We were working during a storm because we had to use the movements of the water to our advantage. After a storm, I climbed up the cargo ship’s mast and looked around. The scale at which millions of tons of sand were moving before my eyes and an entire island was disappearing in a few hours cannot be described in human words. I was there, perched somewhere high up, on a piece of iron made by humans and which, at first glance, seems enormous, a cargo ship weighing thousands of tons. But what was happening around me was, I don’t know, cosmic. It was something enormous. These things happen all the time. We’re too small or too hidden in our homes to see these things. And they seem extraordinary to us. No. Nature works on an enormous scale compared to… We don’t see it. We don’t have time to see it.