For Green read greed

This Eco-Gozo idea that is currently on the lips of the under-employed and the unemployable is just a joke, isn't it? A new buzz-word that few people understand and even fewer care about... like Brand Malta.

Insofar as Eco is generally assumed to imply care, concern or protection for the environment, it is another non-starter.

True, when I first came here, Gozo could have been described as environmentally conscious - if it were conscious at all - because nothing ever happened, and nothing was expected to happen. That was part of the attraction of the place. But that was 35 years ago.

It is impossible to judge the environment nowadays, mainly because people's eyes are impaired by the dust of development as totally unnecessary, unwanted, and often uninhabitable buildings are thrown up all over the island. Anybody with a plot of land and the necessary amount in readies can get permission to build.

Statistically, we are roughly at the stage where there is one empty house for every family on the island.

One can understand why this has been happening so extensively in recent years - it is because the Maltese have been hastily trying to dispose of their hoarded and otherwise useless liri in a bid to evade the taxman with the advent of the euro. It also explains why there are suddenly so many gleaming new speedboats - unlicensed and uninsured - arriving in Mġarr every weekend to drive under the bows of the working ferries, churn up the water in the harbour, and tie up wherever they like (and also to drop litter in the pretty bays and pick up anything left on the decks of resident boats that is not actually nailed down).

What we are experiencing, under the guise of ecology, is probably a typographical error. The word is not Green, but Greed.