“Man has completely brought nature to its knees.”

The balance between people and the Danube Delta has been somewhat disrupted. It has been very disrupted compared to what it was 30-40 years ago when people were living in harmony with the Delta. Right now they are making a living from the Delta. But that does not mean harmony and it does not mean something truly healthy.
În primul rând, turismul de masă a dus la o distrugerea acestui balans, nu spunem distrugere, ci o dezechilibrare a balanței om-natură. În mod cert, în copilăria mea, foarte multe comunități trăiau într-o foarte mare armonie cu natura. Vorbim aici inclusiv de stiluri de viață bazate pe a culege exact cât îți trebuie din natură. Un deltan sau deltaic, nu știu exact care este termenul, își tăia exact atâta stuf cât considera că îi trebuie. Din stuful acesta, își făcea acoperiș, pereți la casă, făcea focul pentru a-și găti mâncarea, făcea garduri și niciodată nu lua mai mult decât putea să consume el sau familia lui din mediul respectiv.
First of all, mass tourism has led to the destruction of this balance. Let’s not say destruction, but an imbalance of the man-nature balance. Certainly, in my childhood, many communities lived in great harmony with nature. We are talking here about lifestyles based on collecting exactly what you need from nature. A delta or deltaic, I do not know exactly what the term is, would cut exactly as much reed as he considered he needed. From this reed, he would make a roof, walls for his house, make a fire to cook his food, make fences and never take more than he or his family could consume from that environment.
His influence was insignificant in the Delta. We can’t even call it an influence. On the contrary, the Delta exerted an enormous influence on him. The rhythms of the Delta imposed the rhythm of life on him. He could only go fishing when the Delta allowed him to. He didn’t have fast boats that today can travel tens of kilometers in an hour. No. He had to think ahead, organize his life, leave, wake up at 3 in the morning. I hated waking up at 3 in the morning all my childhood, but that was it. We were in the Delta, we had to wake up at 3 o’clock. He had to put all the things he had prepared the day before (axe, tarpan, net) in the boat, leave, row for 6-7 hours and then get to the place where he had a job to do, do the job, eat there, possibly catch a fish and cook for himself there, sleep. They had tents. When I was a child, I had a polog, which was a gauze tent. These things were clearly defined and very clear to everyone. There was nothing abnormal. There was absolutely nothing abnormal about going to a pond, staying for a week, taking nothing but oil, salt and catching a fish, living peacefully and having absolutely nothing happen to you. But man was clearly subordinate to natural rhythms. At the moment, man has completely brought nature to its knees. We get into fast boats. We don’t care that we’re making waves, we don’t care how much vegetation we’re chopping. We don’t care that we’re scaring the birds, we don’t care about the storm, we don’t care about anything. There’s no difference between Piața Romană and Delta.
And this rush for an easy income by many in the Delta, which is a natural thing after all – people want to live better – automatically leads to a depreciation of the Delta. We are no longer the people of the Delta, the Delta is ours and we do what we want with it.

At the macro level, the human influence on the Delta is very, very, very brutal. Among those who exercise such an influence are many tourists. We in this Delta, which we talked about, and we separate it very clearly from the mainland, I think there are still about 3-4000 people. Or, in a single day I think 4000 tourists come to the Delta. Without any exaggeration in the middle of the season I think there are also 20000 tourists in the Delta. The Delta now belongs to the people and the tourists. We, the local population, are a kind of Indians on the reservation. But with cowboys on top of us. And the delta people or deltaic people also do what they can to survive: they take the tourists on the pond, they can’t supervise them constantly. They do all kinds of strange things. They also urge him to go near the pelican and he goes near the pelican, although it’s not such a good thing, he also enters protected areas. Slowly, these things are having a negative effect.