How many more voices must we hear to be able to change course and take immediate action?  Last week Graffitti activists set up camp for five days outside the Planning Authority in response to authorities ‘besieging’ the country with over-development. Skimming through only one issue of The Sunday Times of Malta (March 10), one comes across  outcries, all condemning the pillage of our island due to over-development: ‘The rape of Malta’; ‘What the Turks did not ravage, the developers will’; ‘Save Moynihan House’; ‘We have lost the plot’.

All correspondents are appealing to the relevant authorities to stop ravaging our land. Prof. Joseph Galea, President of the Association of Surgeons of Malta, remarks that “The building frenzy that has seized our country is indolently destroying green spaces and architecturally pleasing and important edifices from foregone periods”. Architect Richard England declares “we are on a pathway to a black hole and it’s not going to change, because construction is a money-making-machine”.   

In an interview, in another issue of this newspaper, the outgoing president of Din L’Art Helwa, Maria Grazia Cassar, asserts that ‘Malta is at make-or-break point’ while in the editorial of The Times of Malta (March 21), it was stated that “an urgent national effort needs to be made to reassess the direction the country is taking in development before the face of the country is ruined beyond recognition”.

Why are all these alarm bells falling on deaf ears? It has been reported in this newspaper (March 24), that Finance Minister Edward Scicluna is under pressure to sign a special permit that would allow a member of Dubai’s ruling family to buy the project to build hundreds of apartments on the site of the former Mistra Village in Xemxija. It has also been reported that senior officials in the Office of the Prime Minister said that such a move is in Malta’s economic interests.

We cannot allow our ‘home’ to be ruined

So this is the reason for our island’s destruction – “economic interests”! When are we going to learn that unless economic growth is guided by social and moral principles it will ruin us in the long term? 

Pope Francis, in his encyclical on the environment and human ecology, titled Laudato Si, queries “What is happening to our common home”? Quoting Blessed Paul VI, he states that “the most astonishing economic growth, unless accompanied by authentic social and moral progress, will definitively turn against man”. 

We are looking at our land as a commodity, ready to be grabbed by the rich and the greedy, rather than as a ‘common home’ where every person, including the poor, is entitled to enjoy and live happily.

Quoting Pope Benedict, the encyclical states that creation is harmed “when we ourselves have the final word, when everything is simply our property and we use it for ourselves alone. The misuse of creation begins when we no longer recognise any higher instance than ourselves, when we see nothing else but ourselves”.  

 As Anne Marie Galea, this paper’s weekly correspondent, rightly remarks, “we need to develop a conscience and a moral compass”.

We are letting economic progress blind our vision. Money seems to be our only goal.  We need to stop and reflect on who we are and where our country is heading to. As the Pontiff warns us, “There can be no renewal with our relationship with nature without a renewal of humanity itself. There can be no ecology without an adequate anthropology”. 

We cannot allow our ‘home’ to be ruined and destroyed by a few developers and speculators in the name of economic progress. If the relevant authorities like the Planning Authority and other government entities are not ready to look at the common good in order to please the few greedy entrepreneurs, then it is we, civil society, who need to protest and take action. 

That is why Pope Francis reminds us that “we should not think that political efforts or the force of law will be sufficient to prevent actions which affect the environment because, when the culture itself is corrupt and objective truths and universally valid principles are no longer upheld, then laws can only be seen as arbitrary impositions or obstacles to be avoided”.

What is needed is a holistic approach to development. Man is not solely an economic being. He is a human person endowed, as well, with social, spiritual and moral capabilities.  When one has a global vision of reality one puts everything in perspective and the common good is always at the forefront of every political and economic decision.

The majority of us are worried and concerned about the destructive consequences of what is termed the ‘economic boom’ or better still the ‘building boom’, because such plundering affects not only the world around us but us who are being ignored and discarded in order to satisfy the selfishness of a few individuals.

As Pope Francis concludes in his encyclical on the environment: “It is a matter of redefining our notion of progress. A technological and economic development which does not leave in its wake a better world and an integrally higher quality of life cannot be considered progress.”

This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece