WATCH | Cami Appelgren: ‘Many think their actions are insignificant, it’s not the case’

Malta Ranger Unit (MRU) founder Cami Appelgren has called on the government to increase resources for public entities that tackle environmental crime.  

In an interview with MaltaToday, Appelgren discusses the MRU’s journey since its inception in 2023, noting that the NGO has now reached 3,000 reports annually. 

When asked about her experience dealing with environmental crimes, Appelgren says the root of the problem boils down to a sense of entitlement some people feel they have, leading to crimes such as littering, dumping of waste, poaching and illegal fishing. 

I ask Appelgren, who is the MRU’s chief patrolling ranger, about the criticism the NGO receives from hunters and trappers. She notes that those who do not welcome such enforcement on environmental crimes are usually guilty of similar crimes. 

Appelgren says that the MRU does not take action against hunters and trappers, as it focuses on poachers, with the difference being that the latter operate illegally. In fact, Appelgren says that many hunters and trappers report crimes they see happening to the MRU nowadays.  

In an appeal to the public, she urges those who witness crimes against nature to report to the MRU or government authorities, stressing that “if we don’t take care of what is ours, we will have nothing”. 

The following is an excerpt of the interview 

Follow the full interview on maltatoday.com.mt and our socials 

In the two years that you’ve been doing this, what have you learned about Malta and how we treat the environment? 

I’ve been here for 15 or 20 years now so I’ve seen the change. We are going toward the better side I would say, but we are still facing a lot of the ‘I live here, I can do what I want’ mentality. ‘I’m only one person, Malta is tiny, so the negative impact is not that bad’: That is the mindset a lot of people have unfortunately, even though they might not have bad intentions. This happens on islands all over the world; it’s an island mentality which is ok…  

So that is the main challenge we are dealing with, having a lot of people thinking their actions are insignificant, which is not the case. It’s quite a big problem when people get into bad habits, litter a little bit because ‘it’s just one bottle, one fire, one tree…’. 

We are still 500,000 people and if everyone has those bad habits we will be in big trouble. 

You patrol the countryside and urban areas. When you're out and about, what sort of incidents and cases do you see? 

It’s a very wide range. We monitor everything under Chapter 549 which is the environmental chapter of the law, then we go a bit outside of it if it impacts the environment as well. It can be anything from fishing illegalities, poaching, dumping of waste, illegal fires under protected trees for example… 

Is there one particular incident that has remained stuck in your head? 

It always touches you when something or someone is injured in front of you. We've seen several cases where people damage a tree that’s been growing for hundreds of years, then all it takes is a single fire nearby, and the whole tree goes up in flames. 

We had a case where they shot a honey buzzard. It was metres away; it flew up and we were amazed at how beautiful the bird is and then you see it being gunned down in front of you illegally. Or it can be that we were at the right time at the right place and we rescued people that were nearly drowning in the sea. So that really stays with us when we are out on patrols and things happen in front of us and we manage to solve these situations there and then. It’s nice to see that we can have a good impact on society. 

You’ve just launched a new branch of the MRU. Can you guide us on what sort of work this branch will be doing? 

We saw that the land-based rangers were getting a lot of maritime reports. And for us it’s a little bit problematic because we would be far inland, let’s say, inside Majjistral Park and we might have a report off the coast in Marsaxlokk, for example. So, for us to go there, it will take time. Although we had hundreds of cases for maritime crimes, we only managed to document a few of them. We found that it will be very beneficial that we split the units, one maritime and one land-based, even to get to know the laws and get familiar with them because the fisheries legislation is quite complex. Now, we are dividing it and there will be a unit seeing just for that.  

I follow your Facebook page almost every day. You publish your work all the time and there is appreciation for the work that you do. But you get a lot of criticism when it comes to hunting and trapping. Why do you think this is?  

I think for a long time, we haven’t clearly distinguished between hunters, trappers, and poachers. For me, the line is simple: If you follow the law, you can hunt or trap, but if you don’t, that’s poaching. And poaching harms sustainability, damages biodiversity, and crosses a line that needs to be firmly drawn. Unfortunately, that line doesn’t seem to be clearly defined in Malta. 

The same goes with fishing, the entitlement that ‘the sea is mine I want to take what I want’, but we need to acknowledge that nature is everyone’s and that’s why there are quite harsh guidelines on what we can take from nature.   

From the beginning, our unit has been very clear: We never take legal hunters or trappers to court. You can’t take someone who doesn’t commit a crime to court, we take poachers to court. We have nothing against the trappers and hunters, we speak to them daily, we try to educate them about the work we do. We have many of them who report crimes to us as well. 

You hinted at something earlier about a lack of resources in government entities that do the same job as you. Do you encounter this every day? 

The problem is when they haven’t given enough resources to the police Environmental Protection Unit, which is a very small team. All of them work very hard, they are very dedicated. But with few resources we cannot get hold of them as often as we need to. Sometimes when we know that there are other NGOs reporting to them at the same time we might have to wait until it's our turn whilst we see a poacher running off from a site with illegally shot birds.  

It can be quite frustrating to see because we cannot call the district police because they will refer us to the environmental unit. So that is a big issue for us even at night when a lot of illegalities happen, they don’t have staff. That is something else we have been calling for, that it needs to be 24/7 or at least someone at the district police that would be tasked with environmental crimes at night.