“Malta, we love Malta…these are the things we’d alter:” - a refrain from the Maltese Calypso, written in the 1970s.

Describing a taxi ride from the airport, at times driving on the wrong side of the road. The ditty goes something like this:

I asked the driver “Can this be true? Does everyone in Malta drive like you?”

He smiled at me and said “We’ve got it made… in Malta everybody drives in the shade!”

More trees are needed to provide shade at bus stops.

Well, not for much longer! Landmark trees on our roadsides are being felled in a rush of road-widening exercises to relieve growing traffic congestion.

The ten-year transport master plan for 2025 leaned towards trees in an urban setting with a number of good observations including this one:

“Streetscapes are of poor quality from an aesthetic point of view and the lack of natural shade from trees exposes pedestrians to extreme temperatures during summer months.”

By the time we had a National Transport Strategy for 2050 in place the tree-friendly tone had dropped off somewhat.

The only reference to trees in the strategy finalised last year was that they might cause poor visibility if badly placed.

Among trees now being tagged for the next chainsaw massacre are the pines growing along the bend of the Xemxija road leading to Selmun.

Not to worry. The Ministry of Transport, Infrastructure and Capital Projects has just the right array of departments under its wing (or shall we say thumb) to activate tree-bombing (as in photo-bombing) of dumpsites.

Landscaping, maintenance, road building, development planning and capital government projects all sit cosily within the MTIP.

An initiative out of this ministry, glazed in the acquiesence of the Planning Authority and the Environment Resources Authority - from whence the public consultation springs - is intended to mollify us.

As a counterweight to all the highway tree persecution, a draft legal notice has been issued for public consultation with deadline for comments closing January 22.

The surprise Christmas present was cryptically labelled:

Action on Illegal Deposit of Material on Land and Illegal Reclamation of Land Regulations, 2017.

The natural land forms of these islands will become unrecognisable just as we no longer recognise our townscapes

Shiny press releases about new regulations on “how to improve the quality of the rural environment” twinkled on and off. Anyone concerned with afforestation or landscape ecology might have missed it.

The proposed legislation adopts a pragmatic approach to dumping in the countryside, coming up with the idea of sticking trees all over it. At first this may seem a good idea. Reading through the proposed legal notice, the green wrapping fades.

Mounds of rubble over three metres high dumped in the countryside which have been deposited there after 1994 and up until 2012 (according to aerial photographs) are to be replaced by indigenous trees under an “executable” enforcement notice.

Even the Grinch who stole Christmas would flinch at this land grab giving authorities the right to enter private land and “execute all the works necessary”.

Will Malta end up looking like a forested egg-carton? The natural land forms of these islands will become unrecognisable just as we no longer recognise our townscapes.

Why not simply see to the removal of the dumped material? Much of it could be stored in empty quarries for possible future use.

The ministries involved appear to be dangling at the end of a long string, attached to the landscaping consortiums which are said to have become too powerful and influential in administrative spheres.

(In previous years we used to hear complaints that the environment ministry had been infiltrated by environmentalists!)

As someone recently wrote: “Big contracts, means big money and kickbacks.” What are the chances that this surrounds major government projects such as the one being rolled out by the MTIP?

The new regulations oblige whoever leases or owns the land to engage an ERA-approved site manager and draw up plans for procurement, ground preparation, uprooting of alien species, planting, up-staking of trees, irrigation, weeding and replacing any trees that may have died shortly after planting.

“The administrative fine imposed upon the contravener in terms of these regulations shall be calculated on the basis of the estimated costs required to maintain the afforested or restored land for the first five years.”

Private land may be expropriated if there is a breach of the legal notice “to ensure that the relative afforested land is suitably maintained and protected from further illegal deposit of material.”

ERA may have played its part in totting up 17 environmental conditions to be applied. But it is clear from the start that resources are sorely lacking for enforcing them.

For landowners who have not been able to carry out the required works within a certain time frame the risks are high:

The landscaping job is taken over, then if they are unable to maintain it – or someone else dumps on their land – their property can be taken away from them altogether, possibly to be gifted by the government on lease to a favoured party.

Let’s hope it doesn’t come to this. Happy New Year!