We are not angry enough 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 chapter 1 and a note by the story's author.

When the Big Dry came, Dad refused to move.

I remember we had a family meeting about it early in the summer of ’29 – he and Mum, my brother Tom and I, and Salvatore and Mohammed, two guys who used to help Dad with the olives. 

We were sitting round the big stone table near the old farmhouse at the fields, sheltering under a wide sun umbrella because the vine that we used to rely on for shade had not put out any leaves that year. 

Dad argued that though things were getting tough, we should stay put, right there on the farm. The borehole was still giving us some water, and besides the massive old well, we were digging a new underground reservoir to store it in. He said we’d be able to wait the drought out for a good few years; we could grow a fair bit of food, which meant we wouldn’t need much from the outside. 

That still seemed pretty reasonable at the time. None of us had a better idea.

But we did have a clear, growing sense of things coming to a dangerous head in those years. 

Libya – which was regularly recording 50°C+ temperatures even near the coast now – had completely broken down, and the already fragmented country was again being torn apart by factional and tribal warfare. With no Coast Guard even trying to stop them, migrants were fleeing for Europe in larger numbers than ever before. Many still came from sub-Saharan Africa, but increasingly there were also large numbers of people from all over North Africa and the Middle East too, their countries becoming almost unliveable in the face of seasonal heat waves that seemed to grow longer and fiercer with every passing year. 

The boats had changed too. It was no longer just outsized Zodiac dinghies overflowing with people; now it was fishing vessels, ferries, working ships and barges – anything they could get their hands on. It was like old films of the evacuation of Dunkirk, but hotter and sweatier. 

Most of the migrants did their best to avoid getting stuck in Malta, and usually ended up in Lampedusa, Sicily, or, all too often, drowned somewhere along the way. But you still had 30 or 40 thousand people that ended up on the island in ‘29. Again, that doesn’t sound like much compared to what we've seen since, but it was a lot more than had arrived up to that point, and it led to a great deal of alarm.

Migrants were fleeing for Europe in larger numbers than ever before... Photo: Darrin Zammit Lupi

Once they reached Malta most of the migrants were kept in detention camps, but the terrible conditions there led to frequent riots and escapes. 

At one point there was a group of several hundred who broke out of their camp and roamed around having running battles with the army before being captured, beaten up and locked away again.

Apart from the tension over the migrants, things in the country had been getting more difficult for a while. By 2029 rainfall was down to almost nothing for the 4th year in a row, and the countryside had been drying up fast. We hit 49°C for the first time that summer. Utterly miserable, many old people actually dying of heat stress in their own homes. 

The country was a tinderbox, just waiting for a spark

And there had been other things too, that seem small now with everything else that has happened, but that shook people at the time.

The lampuki and tuna fisheries had completely collapsed; no one was sure whether the fish had died or just changed their migration patterns because of the warming sea. Most of the fishermen, who had been seeing dwindling catches for years, just gave up, but there was a resurgence of fishing with the use of explosives as the last, desperate holdouts tried to hang on to their livelihoods.

Local farmers, too, were in trouble. Crops were failing in the extreme weather conditions. They needed ever more water just to try and keep them alive, and water was becoming ever scarcer and more expensive. Farmers simply couldn’t compete with imports anymore. 

The landscape became even browner than before. The massive old trees in Valley Road withered away and died; no one was completely sure why. They became a depressing sight for everyone that passed them, sad diminished monuments to a better time. 

Water had become a real problem for the whole island. You could even say it’s what caused everything to break down so badly. 

Up to about 2023, nearly half of the island’s water still came from the water table, with people and companies pumping out as much as they wanted without having to pay anything for it. But by ’28 and ’29, some boreholes had begun to dry up or turn salty. 

All of these things fed a growing sense of public panic.

The country was a tinderbox, just waiting for a spark.

Part three of We are not angry enough will appear on Monday, January 24. Click here for a note from the author.