If I understand the plot correctly, the root of this mad idea that we will reduce emissions and create clean air within a given period is that we will leave Malta “a better place for our grandchildren”.
(Let’s forget, for a moment, that if the Maltese islands were totally emission-free, even uninhabited, and covered in green forests, it would not make one iota of difference to world climate while China and India keep pumping out smoke: we’re talking, here, about Malta at least contributing its bit.)
Define ‘a better place’.
Our grandchildren (or great-grandchildren) may well look about them and ask: “Is this what they call a better place? Because it is by no means as good as the place they grew up in. And now they are pretending that they tried to leave it better for us?”
They can look to old family photos and see the Maltese islands when they were, perhaps, at their best. Fewer cars, fewer people, less muck. More greenery everywhere, more space generally, no rush.
Far fewer tourists. Fishing and farming were the main industries. Everybody seemed to own a plot of land, somewhere, or a luzzu. Or both.
A few ambitious families went off to Commonwealth countries (or the US), earned a comparative fortune and returned, often to build houses for themselves. The academically inclined went to university here, then off to England (mostly, because they had inherited the language) returning as highly skilled doctors and surgeons, creating a local health system in which we still take pride. Youngsters hitched jobs as stewards on passing cruise liners, learning skills that led to employment in top hotel management all over Europe.
The rest, who had neither the will nor perhaps the opportunity to do anything about their living conditions, seemed content to stay put. There were no cries of poverty but there was plenty of conspicuous thrift.
Are you better off as a result of all this development?- Revel Barker
There were fewer cars, so people walked; there were bars and cafes but no fast food; there was far less obesity. There was not much ‘development’ (it wasn’t even in the vocabulary, in those days): people often built for themselves, with the help of friends: they had skills. Everybody could see the sea, if they wanted to. But then everybody helped everybody else out if there was a problem. It was the nature of the people.
Is that the sort of better world, the better place, that we will be leaving for our grandchildren? Not a bit of it.
Who screwed it all up, then? I’d say it was, and still is, the current generation of parents, who would be the grandparents’ children of this generation.
There are developers, and there is the rest of us; and the tourist industry, and the rest of us.
Are you better off as a result of all this development? Nor am I. Do you benefit from tourism? No; nor do I. But some people benefit from both industries and they run the place. Is it in their interests to make Malta ‘a better place’?
It’s easiest, of course, to blame foreigners for all Malta’s ills. They brought in jobs, which needed more people which (apparently) meant more immigrants; more workers need more homebuilding and then they could afford to buy cars that they need to drive to Gozo – where there are already more vehicles than people – every weekend… they pollute the atmosphere. How dare those non-Maltese come here, with their money and their jobs for the natives? Why don’t they go back where they came from?
And when these investors in our infrastructure have gone… will we be left with a zero-emissions archipelago, anything remotely similar to the one we used to know, all those years ago when it actually was a better place, indeed, one of the best I have ever found, in which to live? Or will it continue as it started, by getting worse every year?
For that, the way we are going, looks like being the grandkids’ actual inheritance.
Revel Barker is a former Fleet Street reporter and a long-term resident of Gozo.