If you want to see how our environment is fast degenerating just climb (or drive up to) Salib tal-Gholja in Siggiewi, which gives you a bird’s eye view of practically the entire country, save for the very northern part. There, you get a real sense of how much of our tiny island is built up.
It is just a mess of grey, white, yellow and black. Our skyline is no longer dominated by our many church steeples but by countless tower cranes of all shapes, sizes and colours.
It is also surprising to find that, apart from the blue Freeport cranes, the huge oil rigs that are coming into Marsa for maintenance are also highly visible in the distance. Then, if you look slightly to the left you will see the Portomaso tower, which is, up till now, the most noticeable structure in the St Julian’s/Sliema area. It makes you wonder how the skyline will change again and again over the coming years, when more and more towers are built in that area. Taller towers, by the way, which will dwarf Portomaso. They will stick out like sore thumbs in an environment that is already a concrete jungle.
The Dubai-sation of Malta, a vision that this government apparently holds close to heart, is at our doorstep. But it is not just about the skyscrapers.
Speaking in Zurrieq yesterday Joseph Muscat announced that the former Mtarfa military hospital will be turned into an international school. This, he said, would cater for the growing influx of foreign workers in Malta. We have heard this argument over and over again.
In our blind rush to bring in more foreigners, including the so-called ‘high net worth individuals’ we are destroying what’s left of our countryside and heritage, in order to accommodate international, medical and tourism schools, American universities, sky scrapers, Hard Rock hotels, casinos, shopping malls, the whole shebang.
While this may have a good effect on the economy – the construction sector will surely benefit, and so will the real estate agencies and the land speculators – it is depriving our children of much needed green spaces. The government has pledged to build more green areas (the very idea of ‘building’ a green area sounds contradictory, to say the least) and family parks, but these can never be a substitute for real countryside, trees and flowers. The last remaining truly green areas lie in the north and the south east, but construction is slowly creeping closer and closer.
As a modern Maltese song goes, l-isfar bela l-ahdar (the yellow devoured the green). There will come a time where we will have to take our children abroad to teach them what countryside is, for we will have none left of our own.
The country is becoming a victim of its own success, we are often told … that this is all in the name of progress. But by simply going up to places like Salib tal-Gholja, or Mdina, and gazing down on what our country has become, it is not difficult to realise that the price we are being made to pay for this progress is simply far too high.