I believe a lot in people who are practical in their approach and can combine their academic knowledge with practical efforts to improve the collective life of our nation. To my mind, a man or woman should be judged by what he or she does and the quality of the end result depends much on the academic preparation of the person concerned.

The people behind the driving wheel of the environmental NGO Nature Trust (NT) fall squarely within my perception as practical activists who have a solid academic and knowledge-based background behind them. Their exponents are the first to provide ideas and promote debate. However they also work on the ground and try to lead by way of example in the difficult world of the practical.

This does not mean that I have always fully agreed with their ideas or with their proposals. It means that, to my mind, the people at NT are people whose proposals should be given weight and consideration.

That is why I have read with huge interest their recent press statement wherein they urged local councils to be environmentally pro-active. In its statement, NT encouraged candidates for local councils to voice themselves more strongly in favour of the natural environment and in favour of a more sustainable use of resources. I cannot but agree wholeheartedly with this statement.

What brought me to write this contribution was the part of the NT statement wherein the NGO stated that it is only in isolated cases that local councils have worked consistently hard in favour of environmental issues. To this end, NT said, the NT itself is in the process of preparing a memorandum on local councils for discussion.

I believe that NT has touched a very important and critical point which merits some reflection. Have local councils managed to be pro-active in terms of environmental issues or have they just been merely re-active to what other parties sought to enforce in their

locality?

Since my election to the Marsascala local council three years ago, I have tried to push my local council to make a step ahead in this sense. My efforts found immediate support by my fellow colleagues in the council.

To this end, for instance, my idea of having a specific councillor responsible for the natural environment in terms of environmental pro-activeness found full consensus and I was given this responsibility.

My very first initiative as the “green councillor” in my locality was the commemoration of Earth Day in the Marsascala primary school with the help of NT itself. The activity was simple in itself but nonetheless very important and schoolchildren still show me pictures of that activity to this very day when I happen to visit their home in my habitual family visits in the locality.

The first initiative had a very positive outcome. The second initiative, that of contributing fully in the WasteServ-led plans in terms of waste separation in my locality, was equally important. However, I felt that a “green councillor” should do much more than that and, like a prisoner captivated behind bars, I felt the suffocation of the “limitedness” of local legislation in the field of responsibilities at local council level.

In the era of “subsidiarity” and “local governance” I felt that local councils should be given that something extra in the field of environmentalism.

My sense of suffocation increased as soon as my locality and the local council were literally engulfed in the twin controversies of the recycling plant and fish-farms applications. Both in my capacity as a lawyer and as a councillor I immediately realised that even in cases where the central government is pushing forward an application which will contribute to a degeneration of the environment of my locality, the local council’s powers are conspicuous by their absence.

Our development planning law grants no power at all to local councils – not even some remote idea of co-decision – despite their being an entity which represents the wide interest of the community. I would expect our legislation to grant local councils at least the right of a representative who would be able to scrutinise the relevant documentation and subsequently vote in the hearings made by the Mepa Board in cases concerning development in the respective jurisdiction, or a system wherein the local council in question could at least ask for a re-assessment of the application in question according to pre-determined criteria.

Of course, being proactive in the field of environmentalism does not start and end with development applications. However, it has a lot to do with the need of having a “green” heart while drawing up ideas of development and the need of stressing that all development proposals should be in conformity with the golden principle of sustainability.

To this end, while stressing my respect for the people behind NT, I urge these same people that in their drawing up of a memorandum on environmental pro-activism and local council they delve into the issue of whether local development planning legislation should be amended in a way as to provide elbow room to local governments’ proactivity in environmental matters.

Dr Bonnici is a Labour candidate for the Marsascala local council election