They will probably pooh-pooh the whole thing, but if I were the government I would be worried about last Sunday’s pro-trees protest in Attard.

Apart from festa band marches, nothing but nothing would attract people to go out on the streets at mid-day in this searing heat. So the fact that upwards of 1,000 people gathered at the protest, some even tying themselves to trees earmarked to be uprooted is a significant event.

There was anger, we read, in the crowd – real, unfeigned anger.

The government, on its part, contributed handsomely with stories of the culling of trees following each other and in the most varied of places: the Attard road to Rabat, then the Santa Lucija roundabout and the cemetery hill. To this, various private developers contributed with their own tree-culling initiatives. Suddenly, it seemed as if a war on trees had been declared on the already bare island.

There was a time when Malta was wooded but then trees were cut down to such an extent that only Buskett remained as the remnant of the primeval wood. This is not the only case: most Greek islands were similarly wooded thousands of years ago, but they have been rendered treeless by a variety of factors to become the bare islands they are today.

We have had some efforts at afforestation, like the one at Salini near the Kennedy Memorial, which is a pleasure to see. And we have had at least two other efforts at afforestation that I know of – one in Comino announced last winter and one facing Ta’ Pinu in Gozo. I invite you to go and see what has been happening. Had these efforts succeeded, they would have made valid arguments to disprove that the government is on a tree-destroying rampage. But no such argument surfaced, simply because the two projects have been allowed to lapse. Instead, the government came up with all sorts of numbers to prove that, for the trees that will be destroyed, others will just be relocated and new ones put in: a rather forlorn argument.

I still think the Central Link project is a good idea, as I said in the TMI leader quoted by Ian Borg on his Facebook page, and I also know for a fact that people who were in high places and who kept silent during the entire saga have now come out of the woodwork because the project will turn their silent cul-de-sac into a two- or three-lane highway. But that must not mean that Infrastructure Malta has been given any kind of green light to go overboard. We have seen the completion of the Tal-Balal road – during the construction of which all sorts of controversies erupted – and we are immersed in the vast project next to the cemetery. It is only when this is finished that we will be able to judge whether it was the right thing to do or whether it just kicks the traffic can down the road.

Strong on its massive majority at the recent European Parliament and local council elections, the party in government might dismiss the thousand or so protesters at Attard. It would be foolish to do so. There was real anger at Attard and this was not the usual Nationalist protest, although there were indeed Nationalists there. The anger was real and it was not faked. People were genuinely concerned that the loss of a single tree was an unmitigated disaster that takes long years to put right again. The government cannot allow itself to be perceived as an anti-nature party.

As it is, its credentials have already been dented by having allowed construction to explode all over the island. Putting the two together (and also remembering the party’s relaxation of the hunting laws) puts this administration on a collision course with the young environmentalist spirits who are on the increase.

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