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In every Green utopia one can make out the yearning for territorial self-sufficiency, the poet’s “few paternal acres” that sustain families, the few maternal square miles that sustain communities. It is an unachievable goal in a world, not only transformed into a global village but also greatly overpopulated in a leopard spot pattern necessitating the constant traffic of vast amounts of goods and raw materials. Greens know it better than anyone.
At the other end from the Green dream is Blake’s satanic, no limits development culture: if it makes money, it can be done. It is only very, very recently that the world has begun to talk of sustainable development, the idea that present generations have an obligation not to leave future generations with an empty husk. Ironically it was Malta that came up with the concept of the common heritage of mankind, long before Gro Harlem Bruntland’s 1987 ‘Our common future’ on global sustainability.
Setting limits to the development of any industry or activity goes against the grain. Our attitude is; if it can be done, let’s do it. We were beyond the pale of sustainability before we started off. Making money in our eternal building boom has become an article of faith, the only criterion. Nobody mentions that there is something seriously wrong when construction overpowers everything. We have come to believe that construction should go on forever at the current rate; that it can go on forever at the current rate. It is patently untrue.
It is this stodgy thinking that inspires our Minister for the Environment and Rural Affairs to toy with the idea of land reclamation (‘Land reclamation – an opportunity’ Wednesday May 4, 2005 The Times). It holds all the contradictions of a no limits culture in a very finite parcel of land. He toys with it because he feels the pressure to do so. Setting the caveat of self-sustaining financial viability, he hints that it is unreal. It is a chain reaction of unsustainable thinking which seems to embarrass him even as he utters it.
The constraints of planning regulation combined with soaring property prices and economic slowdown have made the building boom falter. Coming at an epochal moment in waste management, the issue combines its weird elements in a faultless but insane logic: somehow the building boom that produces 90 per cent of our waste must be kept going. Without taking more of what remains of the countryside, we can only go up or out to sea. Consequently we are talking of high rises and land reclamation. There are also rumours of a waiving of height limitations by one storey across the country.
It is simply assumed that nothing will ever change; that 90 per cent of the waste we will produce will always be construction and demolition waste. In addressing this cardinal feature of our pathological economy, we talk of land reclamation which will be not only an end-of-pipe solution for the problem but will actually generate a need for the waste.
Does anybody dare to think Green? How about our Minister for the Environment? How about reducing C& D waste? How about reusing and recycling it? Would that take us on a collision course with the principal financiers of politics and politicians?
How about applying eco-taxes to building materials in order to redirect the flow towards optimal use of a finite resource instead of dumping it at sea as if there were no tomorrow? Now that eco-taxes are no longer anathema to the government, why not put them to a rational use? Obliging the building industry to tidy up its own mess would generate a significant number of jobs in stone and concrete recycling. The environment has created jobs right across Europe. Why not also in Malta? It is simply a question of setting the economic parameters to make it necessary. Adding to the cost of construction does not necessarily increase the price of property: the two are already well apart with a gulf of speculation between them.
It could mean that we would have to look at the drivers of property price lift off: the absence of rent reform may be more than just a part of the problem. It gets complicated and perhaps goes beyond the narrow confines of George Pullicino’s competence. It is far easier to entice the land reclamation dreamers to imagine that the impossible can happen some time soon.
In the last 50 years we have built up more of Malta than was ever exploited in the previous 5,000 years. We have gobbled up the countryside at 2 per cent per annum. More than 25 per cent of properties lie vacant. Our only mineral resource, stone, is rapidly heading to final exhaustion and we have not given a thought to the recognition these problems, let alone to addressing them. We are delighted to have used up most of what was ever available in just one generation and we are ecstatic about dumping the leftovers in the sea.
Greens claim no monopoly on concern over these issues. As far back as just prior to the 1987 election Minister-in-waiting, Michael Falzon was clearly aware of the problems. More than 17 years ago he wrote brilliantly about caring for our only mineral resource, stone; about redirecting the building industry towards restoration rather than new construction, about reducing, reusing and recycling stone and other building materials.
I doubt that he was insincere. My guess is that he meant it at the time. His pre-Green momentum led him to the monumental framing of the Structure Plan and the establishment of the Planning Authority. It was good thinking. It was action. Then it slowly fizzled out…
Today we have the Minister for the Environment actually contemplating the dumping of stone at sea. He is either insincere or has not read the final demolition of the land reclamation pipedream by none other than Godwin Cassar, Director of Planning, in the media some months ago simply on the basis of astronomically prohibitive cost.
The spectacle of a Minister for the Environment metaphorically walking on water over the land reclamation issue is simply ludicrous. What we need is leadership with its feet firmly planted in our reality. Malta has made abysmal use of its existing resources. Optimising its present should be the first task of those who propose to lead. The last thing we need is to turn the whole country into a building site for the rest of our days by waiving height limitations, to produce even more C&D waste to feed some mythical land reclamation monster.
What we need is truly sustainable development, a strictly rational use of our resources, a perceptible improvement in our quality of life, whatever it takes, no matter which lobby will oppose. We need consistency and clear thinking. How can our population be expected to be about to explode for development planning purposes and to shrink irreversibly for the purposes of pension reform, almost in the same breath?
The pre-1987 Nationalist rhetoric about development and resource use, was truly prophetic. It is more true today than it was then. Today’s rhetoric could not be more distant from reality. We may have been understandably deceived then to listen to wannabe ministers who spoke authentically. We are unlikely to be deceived today by Ministers who claim that they can walk on water.
In 1996 the fastest electoral stunt was buttering up the hunting lobby. By 1998 both our adversaries were smothering the hunters with the slippery stuff. In 2003 one electoral artist promised a remission of one month’s worth of taxes and his rivals told us that public finances were fine and dandy. In 2006 it will be one more storey everywhere and land reclamation beyond the horizon or something similarly irresponsible.
The Greens promise nothing of the sort. We promise to defend political, economic and environmental sanity consistently. In a decade or two our adversaries will once more concede that we were right all along, in fact that it was obvious. On these issues they will be able to claim that they had themselves said so very many years before.
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