Salvino Busuttil writes:
A memorial service was held in London last Wednesday to celebrate the life and works of Zena Daysh, founder of the Commonwealth Human Ecology Council, who passed away two weeks ago at the age of 97.
An indefatigable New Zealander, her main public work had originally revolved around labour relations and working conditions in primary and secondary industries. Convening the Commonwealth Committee on Preventive Medicine, she managed to transform it into a committee on nutrition in the Commonwealth. In 1960, she argued that a Commonwealth Council embracing several disciplines and interests related to humanity’s life on this planet could benefit through a holistic approach, synergising inputs from associated entities. Thus was born the Commonwealth Human Ecology Council (CHEC) of which I had the privilege of being a co-founder.
Four years later, she was in Malta persuading the Maltese government to initiate a case-study of nutrition, which eventually developed into a full-scale survey of human ecology in Malta. The ensuing report was the keynote contribution to the First Commonwealth Conference on Development and Human Ecology held in Malta in 1970. Twenty-two years before the 1992 UN Conference on Development and Environment, that report, produced by the Malta Human Environment Council (which I had the honour of chairing) provided a framework for economic planning and growth in a setting of sustainable development.
Zena was an environmentalist before it became fashionable to be so and a dedicated fighter for human ecology in a world which then spurned such esoteric concerns.
She inspired our small Maltese group – Frederick Fenech, Louis Saliba, and the late Alfred Grech and Anthony Scicluna Spiteri, among others – to pave the way for a serious national reflection on our environmental needs and priorities.
Through her unstinting crusade for worldwide action to promote sustainable development, Zena ensured that Malta would have an important role at the UN Conference on the Environment held in Stockholm in 1972. Somehow, she had managed to persuade Dom Mintoff, then our Prime Minister, to send a five-man delegation to Stockholm. Mr Mintoff phoned me (I was then running the Economics Department at the University of Malta) to ask me to lead the delegation. “I have no idea what environment means but the Chinese are going and I want you to be as nice as possible to them. And, by the way, please so inform soonest Zena Daysh as otherwise I will find her again at the Castille door tomorrow...!”
A lingering memory is that of “lunching” with her at her small and sparsely furnished maisonette in Summer Street, St Paul’s Bay. Living on a small income, Zena offered me a tin of sardines, which with some tasty local olive oil and slices of Maltese bread had nonetheless the aura of a banquet, her enthusiastic verve, brimming with brighter tomorrows, inspiring her lively conversation.
Whether in Valletta or in Stockholm, or London or Nairobi, Zena had the ineffable gift of getting straight to leaders, be they Presidents or Secretary-Generals, and, without further ado, lecturing them on pressing environmental needs. Every visit to Malta, for example, would inevitably mean an often unannounced call on the President or the Prime Minister. George Borg Olivier, Prime Minister, called me once in1969 to say he was listening to a very attractive lady expounding environmental concerns. Of course, Zena got the support she wanted.
Over the years, Zena and I became great friends sharing progress and frustration in the pursuit of global environmental issues. When, in 1977, I was appointed director of Unesco’s Division of Human Settlements and the Socio-cultural Environment, I was able to rope in Zena as adviser on a number of areas of interest to CHEC, including training for administrators and planners of human settlements, on the Declaration on the Rights of Future Generations to their Environment and on the document on Responsibilities towards Future Generations.
Frail when I last saw her at the University of Manchester (my Alma Mater) a couple of years ago, she still had her endearing sparkle in her eyes, expressing the depths of an altruistic soul contentedly contemplating creation.
Her dream will live on.