In a much acclaimed 1968 article, "The Tragedy of the Commons", biologist Garret Hardin argued that any commonly held resource inevitably is degraded or destroyed because the narrow self-interests of individuals tend to outweigh public interests - this could be applied to the Maltese reality with land and the natural heritage as the commonly held resource being degraded in a massive local tradegy.

The agenda for the Development Control Commission (DCC) within MEPA included a staggering 60 cases for June 3 - one can only wonder at the backlog of cases still waiting to be heard.