It is said that the Yanomami, an indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest, have a counting system that uses only three numbers: one, two, and more than two. Exactly how much of this is an accident of cultural translation, I wouldn’t know. Certainly the Yanomami system has served them well for life in the forest for a very long time.
It is also not as alien as it may seem. Take the idiom to ‘lose count’ of something. It doesn’t mean we were actually counting. Rather, it means that past a certain amount, the number of individual cases or objects becomes irrelevant. What matters is that there are a lot, and probably more than we can comfortably deal with. Not terribly helpful if you happen to work in a bank, but otherwise a way of seeing things that sums up situations rather neatly.
Take the destruction of the environment, both built and unbuilt. It really is not a good time to be an activist or someone who might do something to help change things. That’s because there is so much going on, all over the place and in all manner of ways, that it has become impossible to keep track. To put it differently, Sandro Chetcuti is making so much hay that no one bale particularly matters.
In these circumstances, environmentalists tend to develop certain coping mechanisms. The people at Nature Trust, for example, are no longer particularly active activists. Instead, they have withdrawn to their reserves to concentrate on things like rehabilitating injured wild hedgehogs. Problem is, very soon there will be no wild left to return the rehabilitated hedgehogs to.
I’m not remotely dissing the work of Nature Trust, an organisation I joined when I was 10. On the contrary, I completely understand their predicament. Faced with so much, they have simply stopped counting. I suppose mending hedgehogs offers some respite from a feeling of general impotence.
If I were rich, I’d buy Moviment Graffitti a stack of megaphones and wire cutters. And a tank
There are urban hedgehogs, too, of which Villa St Ignatius in Balluta and the garden of Palazzo Giannin in Għaxaq are two examples. The first is in a sorry state, recently rendered sorrier by a developer who apparently wants to get it out of the way entirely. The second is probably on its last few gasps of carbon dioxide.
In both cases, well-meaning people are trying all they can to rescue what’s left. They include the soon-to-be-misnamed Din l-Art Ħelwa, the FAA, and the tireless architect-scholar Edward Said. Walkabouts have been walked about and lectures held – the strategy, it seems, is to build an argument for preservation based on value. Eminently sensible, in a normal world.
Problem is, given the extent of the madness, it is not entirely clear how much value two individual cases could possibly have. On both historic Sliema houses and old village gardens, we are deep in Yanomami ‘more than two’ territory. Many people find it hard to feel anything at all for Villa St Ignatius and Palazzo Giannin when so much is being lost, and I’m not sure I’m not among them. Too much of a bad thing, shall we say.
Which is why, I think, there was such broad public approval of Moviment Graffitti’s direct action at the Planning Authority board meeting last week. The meeting was about yet another petrol station, but that wasn’t the real sticking point. The Graffitti action had little to do with the specifics of the case and everything to do with environmental destruction generally.
Graffitti were right to disrupt the meeting. They were also right to completely ignore police orders to leave the room, and later to cause considerable trouble outside the PA gates.
The significance of the direct action was not lost on government. Astonishingly, the PA board vote on the day ended in a draw. You have to wonder what happened, given that this was the same board that has consistently voted in favour of one petrol station (and high-rise, and showroom, and so on) after another. The draw effectively postponed the decision to another day, hopefully one when Graffitti won’t be around.
Which they probably won’t, given that the PA has now ‘tightened its security’. There will now be more guards and police around during meetings, and members of the public will have their bags passed through metal detectors and security checks.
The PA offices are not Tel Aviv airport. The new security rules are nothing but an attempt to intimidate protestors. I happen to know many of the Graffitti people, and they are the most peace-loving and law-abiding types imaginable. They do not represent a security threat to the members of the PA board.
What they do represent is a hard-headed refusal to stick to the individual case. Moviment Graffitti have never seemed particularly interested in the species of scientific interest that inhabit ODZ areas, nor are they likely to bother too much about exactly which Grand Master was involved in the making of a scheduled building. They are, however, very interested in getting in the way (quite literally) of a perverse planning process that persists in delivering destruction.
No wonder the Maker of Hay was so upset at what Graffitti did, and that he accused them of putting pressure on the PA board. He’s so right, that, if I were rich, I’d buy Moviment Graffitti a stack of megaphones and wire cutters. And a tank.
mafalzon@hotmail.com