In Malta, politics has compromised the environment for far too long. We live on a small overcrowded island with very little countryside still available. We are slowly gnawing away at what is left and soon our island will look like a photo shot from the sea of the Sliema-St Julian's area. The ecological aspect of our country's environmental policy fares even worse. There is a very deficient approach here generally. Often, the subjective aspect of political compromise is invoked over the objective environmental approach, just for the sake of votes. Unfortunately, one party often plays the other one off for pro-hunting votes and the result is a veritable quagmire which leads nowhere. This shows a proper lack of environmental ethics here. Running with the conservationists and hunting with the hunters! I do not believe that the political party leaders should have publicly pronounced themselves on this issue at all. However, once our ethically insensitive Prime Minister went ahead and did so for his own political mileage, I suppose the important thing is Labour's 10 years in government, it was only inevitable and I daresay logical for the Leader of the Opposition to do the same.
Objectively, we must move away from all this compromise. Environmental protection under a Labour government has suffered intensely over the last two years of their purported stewardship. They have actually thrown out environmental stewardship in favour of votes and seem to strive to relish financial leeway with developers. Our environmental policy is in tatters and non-existent in so far as it is only applied when and how it suits this wishy-washy government. That might give results in the short term. In the long term it is a noose around their neck as the same people they compromise with will inevitably, in the end, turn against them!
The hunting issue should be resolved objectively. Hunters should hunt from September to January. They have five months (and three other months for rabbits). No one is contesting that. Spring should be left for the birds! Why is this? In spring birds nest and renew themselves and their bird populations. In environmental policy the key word is sustainability. Hunting in spring is an unsustainable practice as European law and the Bird Directive itself proclaims. I used to believe that hunters and their organisations would be able to regulate themselves on this issue of attuning themselves to the law and common sense. Today, after several years, I have changed my mind by what I have seen. The opening of a spring season becomes a free for all, a shoot first, ask questions later affair. No bird can fly over the island with impunity and the whole of the population is denied the beauty of God's creation in its awakening. Personally, I believe that times have moved on and shooting living things just for fun is passé. I always say it is easy to destroy life but putting it together again, now that requires real ability! Tradition is not always a good thing when circumstances have changed and we ourselves might need to change with the circumstances. The global and local environment is currently under severe threat. However, I think that I am willing to live with hunters, as long as they observe the law, in autumn and winter.
I still remember a lecture by the much missed professor Peter Serracino Inglott. He had stated that we must move away from the Res Nullius principle in environmental ethics to the Res Comunis principle. In the first, living and non-living things belong, as property, to whoever finds whatever it is. Finders' keepers. In the second, the general environment belongs to man's common heritage. It therefore belongs to everyone and the state acts as arbiter and steward of this common heritage principle. He even mentioned a third progression to Res Comunis Omnium where not even the state is the guarantor of the common heritage principle but everyone is, in this case, through the active membership and activities of NGO organisations. We have hardly budged from the first principle and we are still a long way off from the third!
Time to wake up!
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