"It’s simple maths," he insisted to a skeptical-looking lord mayor. "Just to maintain the land area we already have, we need to dump a certain amount of sand into the water to keep up with sea level rise. To create even more reclaimed land, as our friends in the Netherlands do"—this a way of welcoming Saskia into the conversation—"we must deposit more sand yet. We don’t have our own sand mines, so we must buy it. There’s a market for it, like any other commodity. But we found that when the price went up—because of our purchasing activities—sand piracy skyrocketed."