It’s sobering to think that while my grandparents battled the infernal fires of World War II, my generation have a very different kind of explosion on their hands.
Our parents bought us the ‘Save the Whale’ T-shirts, signed us up to Club Xummiemu, plonked us in front of the television to the soothing sounds of David Attenborough telling us that we were decimating the only planet that we can inhabit, and booked us into school activities detailing the finer points of ozone layer thinning. Yet even now, many of that generation have done precious little to reverse their great-grandchildren’s fate. No wonder everyone under 35 has anxiety.
The images from the past week have been heartbreaking. An old Greek woman crying out in anguish as her house burns down, a woman dressed in combat gear with a bottle of water in her pocket almost casually looking on as an inferno rages in Turkey. Beaches burning in Catania. Apocalyptic images out of films that almost look computer-generated. And true to our short-sighted selves, we continue to fiddle while the world burns.
It was almost comical to see the climate change naysayers come out last week as if they weren’t living on this smouldering piece of rock like the rest of us. As if they are somehow impervious to heat. I didn’t need the UN secretary-general to say that the IPCC Working Group 1 Report is a code red for humanity. We have known that we have had a problem on our hands for the last few decades. And yet, through all this, we hear barely a bleat from our government.
Now I’m not saying that Malta, given its size, was ever going to be able to make a huge impact on the bigger picture even if we were all to become ultra environmentally conscious, but given the fact that the last notable thing that our Ministry for the Environment, Climate Change and Planning did was send us a packet of seeds, I’m pretty unimpressed.
We need to stop living on this planet as if we have another one to go to; we don’t- Anna Marie Galea
Where are the statements? The pledges for us to do better? The reassessment of our heaving infrastructure? I suppose they all think that it worked for the best that we have considerably fewer trees than we had a few years ago because there’s less chance of them burning.
The summer has been unbearable, and I’m sorry to have to break it to everyone, but soon even the air-conditioning that is being cut off at least once a week by Enemalta because our framework cannot keep up with the demand is not going to be enough.
According to Climate Action Ambassador Simone Borg, if the climate continues to take this trajectory, Malta will become a veritable desert in just a couple of generations. And for all those whose parents didn’t prop them in front of the television to watch scientific documentaries, the more we build and overbuild and the more we continue to chop down trees and fill everything with concrete, the hotter we make our land and the more we accelerate our desertification.
We are in a state of global emergency, and it is the job of the people in power to ensure that we do whatever small bit we can to at the very least slow this process down and give the earth, and ourselves, time to heal. We need to educate people to use resources differently, and that doesn’t start with a packet of seeds that most of us can’t even plant. We need to stop living on this planet as if we have another one to go to; we don’t.