The mobilisation against the building of a new university at Żonqor Point is fundamentally encouraging. Apart from the justified plea against further destruction of the countryside, any protest which reminds the Muscat government that not everyone is awestruck by its illusions of omnipotence cannot but be positively assessed.
Obviously, attempts to hijack the initiative by the Nationalist Party, the presence of certain Labour MPs motivated by the front bench they lost rather than anything else and the participation of members of a religious order which has suddenly become very vocal and concrete on issues it previously ignored or addressed only by vague platitudes, managed to somehow spoil the atmosphere.
Yet, the refusal by the administration to consider any site apart from Żonqor as well as the dubious labelling of the project as a ‘university for the South’ (I never thought of Tal-Qroqq as a university for the North) needed to be resisted. And thankfully they were.
Still, as with most environment-related initiatives, the campaign is by and large dominated by a bourgeois ethos which, ultimately, buttresses the very establishment that created the problem.
The rampant construction going on is generating exploitation and dependence not well-being
Attempts were made to involve local farmers. Still, the impression I have is that many who took part in the initiatives were middle class. Regarding people in the lower echelons of society, excluding those who parrot their party line, the impression I have is that they are generally uninterested even if they and their children will suffer mostly from further depletion of the countryside.
The fault for such lack of response may not be entirely theirs. Many who have the environment at heart come from the middle classes, retain the ethos and outlook of this class and, despite some wannabe hippies, manage to appeal and are able to dialogue and communicate primarily with people from their own socio-cultural background.
The most militant among them might splutter rhetoric about fighting the establishment and even emancipation of the wretched of the earth. Yet, the poor and proletariat most seem comfortable with are the romantic ones found in literature. Real working class people with their prejudices and limits tend to put off most militants.
No wonder, then, that environment-related issues are formulated in abstract and non-concrete terms. Take the basic orientation of the construction debate. This is primarily presented by most (exceptions obviously exist) in terms of a fundamentally-moralistic duality: to build – bad; not to build – good.
This is taken as a kind of axiom from which sterile injunctions and mantras (the environment belongs to all of us and that kind of stuff) follow.
Very few attempt to place the debate within a wider context where land and construction have been viewed as the only investment that will not lose value and that is likely to yield substantial returns at some time in the future.
Moreover, since the 1990s, with the gradual ebbing of manufacturing, construction has become the labour-intensive industry par excellence.
Rightly or wrongly, the belief is widespread across all sectors of society, including the poorest ones, that real estate generates wealth and prosperity and, hence, the more we build, the more prosperity and wealth will be generated.
Few in the environment lobby are willing to take the time and trouble to establish communication lines with those who take this for granted and have little time or leisure to buy tree-hugging rhetoric.
Were a serious attempt to be made at concretely debunking the myth that construction generates wealth and everyone benefits from this, a good exercise would be pointing to the contradictions that riddle the dominant discourse in relation to construction and the benefits it supposedly brings.
Take a case in point related to construction in general rather than the Żonqor saga. It was recently announced that the price of property, particularly apartments, went drastically up (by more than 10 per cent). I expected environmentalists to fall over each other in highlighting the glaring contradiction between an ever-increasing supply of dwellings, a constant demand and the increase in the price of property. The situation should have been the opposite had the fables we hear about the virtues of free market any semblance to reality. Yet, few seemed to notice this.
Nor do many environmentalists consider that, despite the increase in the number of dwellings, the size and quality of houses that working people afford is constantly deteriorating.
This is coupled with the other absurd fact that many will become owners of their house when they will have to start seriously thinking about moving to another sort of home.
Pointing to these and other aspects would show that, for the majority, the construction industry is a Leviathan that exists for the sake of the few rather than a benign cow everyone can milk.
If the environmental lobby manages to successfully communicate to those who are the ultimate victims of the whole set-up that the rampant construction going on is generating exploitation and dependence rather than well-being, getting across the moral mantras will become easier and more politically fertile.