Funny what three letters can do. To use the Archbishop’s language, to build at Żonqor is to rape pristine land. (Freud would have a field day, but never mind.) But what if Żonqor weren’t an ODZ site? Would we then be looking at a case of uplifting and consensual lovemaking? Is it the presence of a pristine victim that makes rape what it is? Or would a not-so-virginal one do just as well?
I happen to know the Żonqor area very well indeed. Reuben Buttigieg, president of the Marsascala Shop Owners Association, said last Thursday that no one ever goes there, and that the sea at Żonqor is too dangerous for swimming. He is an idiot and I’d advise him to stick to his shop. I walk there once or twice a week in winter and swim there regularly in summer.
It’s a splendid spot, and the people who dreamed up this latest madness should be lined up against a wall at dawn. Still, I would like to argue that the fuss over ODZ is misplaced and counterproductive.
There are many reasons why it makes sense to take designations seriously and stick to them. First, to not do so effectively devalues the thousands of properties that derive a good chunk of their worth from their location next to ODZ areas.
Take views. I know someone who paid serious money for a flat that had what the estate agent described as ‘guaranteed’ views over what used to be called a ‘green area’. Only the guarantee turned out to be highly unguaranteed, and he quickly found himself staring at a very green and very extensive area of roof membrane.
The point is that in order for location (in this sense the value of open countryside) to mean anything and command a premium, it must have some form of durability. No one will pay extra for a room with a view if that view is likely to be gone the next morning.
The second reason why ODZ and such designations mean anything is that presumably they are based on solid and sustained procedures of evaluation. It’s fair to assume that places are described as ODZ for reasons that do not include too much free time down at Mepa, and it follows that the designation should carry some weight.
Third, to backtrack on designations effectively undermines the legitimacy of the whole idea and the institutions running it. It encourages things like land speculation and drip-feeds a sense of instability into two of the most important types of relations that exist: that between citizens and their institutions, and that between people and the environment they inhabit.
It’s a splendid spot and the people who dreamed up this latest madness should be lined up against a wall at dawn
On the former, fickle designations bring about a kind of civic schizophrenia. On the one hand, citizens pay zealous homage to notions like ODZ, and by inference to the institutions that produce them (Mepa, in most cases). On the other, they find themselves doubting their value. Put simply, a designation like ODZ comes simultaneously to mean a great deal, and nothing at all.
With respect to the relation between people and their environment, the value of certain things depends in large measure on their ability to transcend the immediate and root themselves in the longue durée.
The point of a tree is also that it isn’t here one day and gone the next, and that a field of poppies is special also because it holds the promise of many more poppy fields in future springs. To upset that sense of rootedness-in-time is to meddle with one of the things that lend life a semblance of meaning.
For these and other reasons, nothing – and that includes schools and hospitals – should trump ODZ. The argument that schools and hospitals are for the public good doesn’t hold, simply because open land too is also very much for the public good. You don’t work for one public good by destroying another.
Also for these very reasons, there is a problem with designations like ODZ. To say that a patch of land should be left alone ‘because it is ODZ’ is rather like saying that Michelangelo’s David is worth preserving because of its importance in the history of art. It’s called missing the point.
The value of Żonqor is not in its official designation, or in the reams of scientific studies that went towards it. Rather, it’s in the lie of the land, the fantastic ruggedness of the coast, the neatness of the terraced fields that turn yellow in winter and red in spring, the many types of fishes that inhabit the first few metres of sea, the butterflies, the birds, and so on.
Good intentions notwithstanding, it is not a good idea to use ODZ as a battle cry for the protection of the environment. That’s because, paradoxically, the term empties places of the things that make them beautiful – the very things that presumably made them ODZ in the first place.
If this sounds like so much pedantry, I’ve good reason to think it isn’t. Put simply, no one will ever feel any real attachment to a place on account of its designation. ODZ, Natura 2000, MPAs, and such, are really just technical terms. People may argue over them politically (and there is nothing wrong about that), but they will never truly relate to a place just because Mepa has rendered it sacred. Acronyms and emotion do not make a happy marriage.
Should we then dismantle the whole designations business? Of course not. It can and sometimes does work where it properly belongs, that is, in the technical and official world of planning and scientific evaluations.
Outside that world, David will not be truly safe unless we look past the expert data and relate to his beauty. ODZ or no ODZ, Żonqor should be left well alone.
mafalzon@hotmail.com