In the beginning, says the Good Book, there was water.

And in any discussion on Malta’s long-term environmental sustainability, there has to be some deep thought and action about water. As this leader will show, even a short excursus on water availability will highlight the problems, difficulties and almost intractable obstacles to enable our country to cope with its fundamental survival issues in the coming years.

As background material we suggest two articles: “Water” by Alfred E Baldacchino that appeared in this paper last week, and “Water, water, everywhere” by Ing. Marco Cremona, which appeared in The Sunday Times of 10 August. There is a whole bibliography for those who want to read more.

Water is essential in our life, as we saw in those dreadful days of the 1980s before the Reverse Osmosis plants were set up. But once we started to get abundant water, no one seems concerned on how we get it, what we pay for it and whether it is sustainable.

The rot goes deeper than that: our country’s geological formation is based on a series of river valleys descending from the highlands to the low-lying estuaries at Burmarrad and Marsa respectively. But intensive farming and the damning of every valley to provide water for the surrounding fields, plus the siltification of the estuaries has led to these river valleys drying up, with serious consequences to our ecology.

As in many other issues, it is the policy decisions that were taken in the 1980s and since then that have mainly affected and continue to affect our present situation.

The truth is, as said earlier, that ever since we found enough water in our taps, have stopped thinking how rare and how wonderful a source water is, especially for Malta with its hot climate.

Sixty per cent of our potable water comes from the RO plants, and this makes the Water Services Corporation Enemalta’s biggest customer, as it uses around 20 per cent of its output just to produce water.

The inner workings of this make for some horrific reading: an average family of three, consuming 90 litres of water per person per day, pays some €3.07 a month for water and €23.69 for electricity.

Potable water in Malta is cheaper than almost every other country in Europe, which get most of their water from streams and rivers whereas, as said, we get 60 per cent of our water from RO plants that use electricity.

Read on to see the absurdity of it all: as a heavy consumer, WSC pays €0.05 for every unit of electricity it uses, whereas the cost to generate electricity is now more like €0.14 per unit. So, at a time of rising oil prices, with no clean or alternative sources of energy in place, electricity is subsiding many times over the real cost of water.

That is why we have all become so wasteful with water. The two correspondents mention the roundabouts with their sprinklers but perhaps these are a better sight than arid plots of soil.

Even more wasteful is the way we have collectively given up the practice of generations and do not enforce the digging of cisterns to collect rainwater that can then be re-used for non-drinking purposes. One cogent reason to prohibit tampering with the Valletta underground is to preserve for posterity the ingenuous systems used by our forefathers and shamefully discontinued by us.

We can see the results of this neglect in the rainy season when our uncollected rainwater floods the streets and flows down to the sea.

Again, almost as a by-product of this wasteful mentality, we have no sewerage bills, since our sewage was dumped at sea for ages, thus polluting our coastline. When Alfred Sant attempted to introduce sewerage bills, all hell broke loose. Now that EU standards force us to treat our sewage before it is dumped at sea, we will have to pay for that as well sooner or later.

But there is nothing that shows up our careless attitude to anything that comes free like the way we look after the groundwater, the huge natural resource that we will see exhausted in our lifetime. First we bled it dry and let it increase its salinity content before the RO times, then anyone and everyone started to dig and extract it for free. There is no control over this, no data regarding boreholes and no rules or enforcement.

In a country as arid as Malta, water should be our most precious and carefully nurtured resource. Instead, we allow it to be plundered, we produce it at a high cost and sell it cheap, and we allow our children to be brought up in the most wasteful of ways. For all their pontificating, our political leaders fight shy of tackling the plundering of our national resource, even though it is by now well-nigh impossible to discover who has installed a borehole in his kitchen or cellar.

This is only one almost minute insight into the impotence of politics in Malta to tackle the real fundamental issues. In the coming weeks, we intend, from time to time, to highlight this in other essential areas, from construction to traffic. If at times we feel our lifestyle is not improving, it could very well be that the people we have elected to govern us either are not sensible to the most fundamental issues relating to our survival or else are too gutless to really tackle them at source.