Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1354201
10 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 21 MARCH 2021 OPINION Raphael Vassallo Even cavemen understood 'sustainability' better than us THERE is something disquiet- ingly ironic about that new (and increasingly irritating) political buzzword, 'sustainability'. In the last two weeks alone, I have heard it applied to anything from tourism, to agriculture and fisheries, to the construction industry, to economic growth, to energy policy… and – given that the Spring season has just been given the go-ahead, as usu- al – also to hunting and trapping (more of which in a sec). But before asking ourselves just how 'sustainable' any of those things really are… just consider, for a moment, how deeply that word has penetrated our collec- tive psyche. There is even a 'Malta Sus- tainability Forum' going on at the moment – spearheaded by the President of the Republic, no less – which aims to "raise awareness on the topic of sus- tainability with the aim to em- power citizens in making con- scious decisions towards a more sustainable life." So the irony, I suppose, is two- fold: on one hand… well, we don't exactly have an awful lot to show for all this new-found 'awareness' of our, do we? This week, for instance, I interviewed a local tourism consultant, who pointed out that: "we've been talking about sustainability, in tourism, for more than 50 years. What has been achieved, in practice, in all this time? Very little..." Much the same could be said for all those other areas to which the word is so liberally applied… but never actually acted upon. How 'sustainable' is it to con- stantly expand the existing road networks (and issue more per- mits for petrol stations, etc.)… at a time when we're actually sup- posed to be doing the opposite: by phasing out the internal com- bustion engine altogether? And where's all the forethought and planning, when it comes to liberally dishing out ever more development permits – for ev- er-larger, ever-greedier devel- opment projects – in a country where land is already scarce enough as it is; and when the En- vironment (and Sustainability) Minister himself admits that: "it is important that these processes are done in an environmentally responsible way, towards a more sustainable building and con- struction industry"? So it seems that, the more con- scious we become of the need for sustainability… the less sus- tainable our practices turn out to be. And the results, I am sor- ry to say, are now visible almost everywhere you look. But the second irony is slightly more perplexing. Listening to politicians bandying that word about today – with all the ex- citement of a toddler, suddenly discovering the faculty of speech for the first time – anyone would think that 'sustainability' was it- self some kind of new-fangled, recently discovered innovation. It is as though the idea of sim- ply 'planning ahead for the fu- ture' – because that, when all is said and done, is all this magi- cal buzz-word really boils down to – was too ground-breaking a concept to have ever occurred to humanity, at any point in histo- ry, before the present… And yet, the very opposite is true. Some of the oldest evi- dence we even have, for anything that can be described as 'human culture and intellectual develop- ment', revolves precisely around the same the concept of sustain- ability…. and it also seems they understood that word a lot bet- ter than we do today. Early Palaeolithic cave paint- ings, for instance – drawn by hu- mans as long ago as 30,000BC – reveal a fundamentally dualistic approach towards nature: many depict animals in the process of being hunted (some, such as the Trois Freres murals in France, with arrows and spears still pro- truding from their bodies)… but many others focus on the femi- nine animal form: often with ex- aggerated sexual features, and – like the 'Mother Sow' image, still visible on a monolith at Tarxien Temples; or, for that matter, the typical 'Fat Lady' effigies from the same period – suckling their young. And from these (admittedly sketchy) glimpses, anthropol- ogists have theorised that hu- manity's earliest experiments with religion must have been channelled into two, mutually interwoven superstitions: one, a belief that ritualistic practices (in this case, depicting the de- sired outcome on a cave-wall) could somehow guarantee the success of the hunt itself; and two, the emergence of a fertility cult, to encourage reproduction and proliferation of the animals they actually hunted… As the Larousse Encylopae- dia of Mythology puts it: 'Since hunting of necessity required the existence of game it is nat- ural [allow me to repeat that for emphasis: NATURAL] that Paleolithic man, in order that game should be plentiful, also practiced fertility magic…' And as the same source goes on to imply: this dualistic vision – torn, as it is, between the Cre- ative and Destructive forces of nature – went on to underpin al- most all the subsequent religions and belief systems humanity has ever come up with since. It is the blueprint for Gods and Monsters; Heaven and Hell; the eternal struggle between Good and Evil… in a nutshell, the ba- sic building blocks of every civ- ilization that has ever existed: including our own. And yet… well, just look at us today, all these millennia later. Just compare our own approach to what is, ultimately, the same old issue – 'hunting' – and tell me how much more 'sustainable' one is than the other. As I mentioned earlier, the Or- nis Committee – acting on the recommendation of the Wild Birds Regulatory Unit (which statutorily exists "to oversee and drive the implementation of Government policy in relation to SUSTAINABLE [my emphasis] hunting) – has just recommend- ed the opening of the spring hunting season for 2021. Let us, for a moment, ignore the specific context in which this decision was taken – i.e., during the COVID-19 pandemic: when all 20 or so of Administrative Enforcement Officers have been diverted to cope with the crisis… and also after the fiasco that was last year's spring hunting season: which, for the same reason, re- sulted in the worst massacres of birdlife witnessed in recent years. Even without those extenuat- ing circumstances, the decision to allow any hunting to take place at all, during the breeding season, is itself a dictionary-defi- nition of the word 'unsustain- able': for reasons even a Pal- aeolithic caveman would have instinctively understood (and even explained to us directly, through the cave art he left be- hind). Like other examples of unsus- tainable practices, it only de- pletes the natural replenishment of a supply that is needed for the future continuation of the activity concerned. And in this particular case, the effects of this depletion can even be quantified: descriptions of Spring migration patterns, observed by Maltese ornithologists in the early 20 the century, dwarf the occasional flocks of such birds as quail and turtle dove we witness today. And in the last 30 years alone, the number of resident breed- ing species has declined to a mere handful: the Barn Owl, the Kestrel, the Peregrine Falcon, the Jackdaw, the Pallid Swift… all now numbering among the casualties. There can, I fear, be no two ways about it: our hunting pol- icies are demonstrably unsus- tainable… and they are also in direct breach of a European Wild Birds Directive that – pre- cisely for reasons of sustainabili- ty – prohibits hunting and trap- ping in Spring. Yet those same policies have been aggressively defended, not just by the current administra- tion; but by every Maltese gov- ernment for… as long as I can remember, to be honest. Up until today, it is still Malta's of-