The Marsascala local council is against it. The eNGOs are against it. The Opposition is against it. And the residents and many members of the public are against it too.

But a yacht marina in the south is needed because, you know, more people are buying pleasure boats. At least that’s what Minister Ian ‘Go Big or Go Home’ Borg said.

Quizzed about Transport Malta’s controversial plan to develop Marsascala Bay into a yacht marina, the transport minister said this week that the plans are at a very early stage, and that the government is “open to discussion.” But we all know how open the government can be when something as big as this is in the works … when someone is set to gain from such a project.

While Borg said that the government will listen, he also tried to justify the idea behind a yacht marina, in what was a very clear hint that the project will indeed go ahead.

Borg told us that since more Maltese are buying boats – a not-so-subtle jibe that there is more money in people’s pockets – we need to look at developing an area where these vessels can be berthed. He gave three options, but immediately shot down two of them (stopping the registration of boats, and building more boat yards), leaving only the third – developing a marina – as a viable course of action.

While Borg’s comments went viral (this was our most read story of the week), they were hardly surprising. We say this because Borg stuck to his usual mentality: if it’s getting bigger, just make more space for it.

It is the same mentality his ministry, and indeed the government uses when it comes to road building, for example. People are buying more cars, so the obvious option is to sacrifice rural land to widen our roads. Simple, is it not?

Instead of investing in a mass transport system and discouraging the use of private cars, we always opt to make our roads bigger, a short-term fix until we need to widen them again, and again.

Borg’s ministry has adopted this same attitude for Comino. Instead of listening to the eNGOs who have been warning that the idyllic Blue Lagoon has reached its saturation point and have called for a limit to be imposed on the number of visitors, Transport Malta went the other way and built bigger jetties to accommodate the ever-increasing number of tourist boats berthing in the area.

It is the same concept used in planning. How do the authorities deal with a population that is increasing due to the influx of foreign workers and passport buyers? They permit the construction of skyscrapers, even though we still do not have a masterplan for tall buildings.

We are sacrificing the country at the altar of consumption, money and greed and we do not even realise that it is already too late. We have destroyed our countryside, our green spaces and – to rub salt into the wound – have now started selling off our shore and sea.

We have already seen it happening with the development of jetties and pontoons for harbour and Gozo ferries. Now we are turning our guns on Marsascala too.

We are often told that efforts are being made to make the country greener, but what we are seeing is more concrete and steel. Puny efforts have been made to make our new ‘highways’ look prettier with plants, but in the grand scheme of things, this country is no greener now than it was in 2013.

We have seen nothing but environmental degradation all across the country. The few trees we have are being uprooted, and we are always given the excuse that they are being planted somewhere else. The latest case in point is what happened at the Msida skatepark, where the few trees that dotted the highly congested and polluted roundabout have now been chopped off. Infrastructure Malta said this time that it had no other option, because the irrigation system was leaking down into the tunnels below. But here lies the problem: there is always some excuse to remove the green and replace it with grey.

There is another argument to be made. Are we really thinking long-term when developing these destructive projects? Experts will tell you that the current boom in boat-buying will reverse itself once people realise just how expensive it is to maintain a yacht or cabin cruiser. So are we building yacht marinas that will be half-empty a few years down the line?

The same goes for the road-building projects. The government says it will invest in a mass transit system once its ambitious 7-year/€700m project is complete. So does this not mean that we are spending millions, at the cost of the environment, for wide roads that should no longer be required in the years to come?

Instead of ‘Go Big or Go Home’, shouldn’t we ‘Go Small and Smart’?