This is a story set in Malta and Europe in the near future. In the form of a letter from a mother to her daughter Maddy, it shows a family trying to navigate the crisis in the region caused by a rapidly warming climate. 

Read a note by the story's author.

Times of Malta is serialising We are not angry enough because, besides being a gripping human story, it touches on a number of important themes that will have an impact on us all in the years to come – climate change, good governance, global inequalities and international refugee flows.

October 14, 2039

Dear Maddy,

Having you was the best thing I’ve ever done, even if it’s pretty clear I didn’t think things through very carefully at the time. What is sure is that you are the best reason I have to get up every morning and try for something better. 

You are four years old now, and I’ve been meaning to write this letter to a future, more grown-up, you ever since you were born. I’ve certainly got enough time on my hands here, so I’ll have a go.

I had to check with the Camp Admin what date it was before I could write it at the top of the page. Dates have little meaning in this place… I let go of them a while ago. 

Today is October 14, 2039. That makes me 30 years old, born in 2009. It’s been ten full years since we left Malta. A lot has happened in that time; I’m putting this down for you so there is an account of it, so that you have an idea of where we, you, came from.

As I write this there’s a wild storm raging outside, with water leaking through the roof of our container and pooling on the floor between the mattresses. We’ve just had a month of scorching hot weather after a long dry summer, with the whole camp rationing water; then, suddenly, a violent storm started yesterday morning, and it hasn’t let up since, with thunder and lightning crashing all about us, and the rain coming down in sheets. 

You are playing with your little plastic animals at the foot of my mattress, and my bare feet are tucked partly underneath you for warmth. It takes more than a little lightning to scare you, but you still look across at me for reassurance whenever there’s a particularly loud crash. 

I smile at you like everything’s fine, but the truth is that the last place I want us to be during an electrical storm is inside a large metal box in the middle of a flooded field. 

*       *       *

I remember my dad talking to me about climate change in the summer of 2021, when I was 12 years old. It was the first really serious conversation I can remember having with him; he was talking to me as if I were an adult, and I was hanging on to every word he said.

Some big UN report had just been issued; Code Red for Humanity was the headline blaring from every TV set, at least for a few hours until the next shiny new story came along and took its place. 

How can you see yourself hurtling towards a cliff edge and not slam on the brakes?

We were on the way to our fields and there was a report about it on the car radio. I hadn’t really been listening, but he seemed to get very worked up about it all.

He switched off the radio and started explaining it to me – how carbon dioxide and other gases we produced were trapping the sun’s heat “like a blanket”, and how the world was getting hotter and hotter; how scientists had been warning us about it for decades, but that we could now actually see it and measure it happening. 

He told me how companies that wanted to go on burning oil and coal spent huge amounts of money to persuade us it wasn’t true; how they made the scientists look as if they were panicking unreasonably by asking us to make changes to the way we live when there was no real cause for alarm; how most people and governments found it easy and convenient to believe them instead of the scientists, because it allowed them all to simply do nothing with an almost clear conscience. 

I was on the edge of the back seat, leaning forwards and looking up at him as he stared into the windscreen. His jaw was tight, his hands gripping the steering wheel so that his knuckles turned, if not white, then maybe a little less brown.

He told me that we were already beginning to see the effects of global warming – wildfires bigger than the whole of Malta in places like Australia, the United States, even Siberia; floods washing away roads and villages in Germany, India, Belgium, China, Turkey; record temperatures in Canada, at the Poles, in the Mediterranean and pretty much everywhere else. 

Malta, together with much of the rest of the Med, was turning steadily into a desert. The very reason we were going to the fields, he said, was to give the olive trees an extra watering – olive trees were brilliant at resisting drought, but things were getting tough even for them, and the drip irrigation system wasn’t coping.

Worst of all, he said, climate change and human activity were causing mass extinction. Birds, animals, fish, insects… they were all dying – “there are a million species in danger of extinction!”

“Will we become extinct too?” I asked him.

I saw him consider the matter carefully. I felt a little jolt of pride that he was taking my question so seriously.

“Probably not for quite a while. But I think we’ll live poorer, more dangerous lives, struggling to keep our systems going in a dying, barren planet.”

His generation had screwed things up for ours, he said. While previous generations had done their fair share of damage, his generation was the first that should really have known better.

He was right about that.

That is the generation that I, we, can never forgive – people who were adults between, say, 2000 and 2025. Unlike the generations before them, they could see what was coming; unlike the ones after them, they were still in time to do something about it. 

But they just let it happen.

How can you see yourself hurtling towards a cliff edge and not slam on the brakes? By the time of that conversation in 2021, it was clear that we were all living way beyond the Earth’s means. Yet, they kept pumping out CO₂ like there was no tomorrow; eating huge quantities of meat and fish despite clear evidence we could no longer afford to do so; driving big, fossil-fuel-guzzling cars, jetting around for weekend breaks, clear cutting forests and so much more.

There was still a chance of fixing things at that point. 

But governments failed to take the necessary action, and companies and ordinary people failed to step in and do their bit. 

They all blew it.

Part two of We are not angry enough will appear on Sunday, January 23. Click here for a note from the author.