They’re not tigers, you know

You can tell something’s seriously wrong with your media landscape when a small army of commentators – spearheaded by anthropology lecturer Mark Anthony Falzon, with anthropology exhibit Daphne Caruana Galizia muscling into the fray – makes it a point to devalue Dwejra in order to trivialise damage caused by a subcontractor working on a film set.

Oh, and before proceeding any further: the emphasis in the above paragraph is on the devaluation of Dwejra – not on the trivialisation of the damage itself. Personally I’m not at all sure what to make of claims that an entire eco-system was wiped out. But nor am I ready to dismiss these concerns out of hand. Alfred E. Baldacchino is after all a conservation biologist and an expert in Maltese biodiversity; and if he says the damage was serious, I for one am inclined to believe him. But that’s just me, and I happen to remotely share an interest in conservation biology (so my opinion clearly doesn’t count).

Others will naturally see things differently. To a building contractor who views ‘natural habitats’ as things to tear up and redevelop, the loss of a few tiny ecosystems here and there is probably not to going to matter too much. Still less will it matter to a PR consultant whose clients include building contractors, and whose job it is to justify whatever their clients do. Truth be told, we can debate the point endlessly, but in the absence of any objective gauge by which the severity of the damage could be measured, it would quite frankly be a waste of breath. The only conclusion possible is that the damage is as serious as one’s own internal bias makes it – no more and no less.

Now let’s move onto what seems to have become a national sport in this country: defecating on Dwejra. Exactly why two prominent columnists would feel the need to collectively crap upon such a tiny corner of Gozo is at best a mystery... although in Daphne’s case it may also mark a tiny improvement (after all, she normally craps upon the whole island indiscriminately: beaches, people, customs, dialects, the lot).

Whatever the reason, it seems there is a certain amount of pleasure to be gained from actively rubbishing all environmentalist concerns. Some do this by pooh-poohing the genuine distress expressed by others at any given environmental disaster; others enjoy rubbing environmentalists’ noses in the fact that theirs is only a tiny minority that never manages to tilt the balance of public opinion in its favour.

Daphne very kindly illustrated this second technique last Thursday, by exulting in the fact that “nobody cares” about Dwejra (something she can assert with great authority, having been unanimously elected to speak on absolutely everybody’s behalf). And on his part, Mark Anthony Falzon gave us a classic example of devaluation through ridicule: implicit in his headline, ‘Teacup catastrophes’.

Falzon’s argument rests on two basic premises: one, that there is no need to fuss over the present situation because Dwejra is a dump anyway; and two, that the damage itself is exaggerated, because it only concerns what he describes as ‘micro-organisms and endemic plants’... and in any case there are other more bountiful parts of the coastline than Dwejra to fret about.

The first, I am sorry to say, is a textbook ‘circular argument’. If Dwejra has become a dump, it is precisely because of the ruinous consequences of a whole series of tatty and unprofessional decisions like the one Falzon himself now seeks to trivialise. Defend this latest one, and you may as well defend all the others, too. Not only that, but the attitude veers dangerously close to that of a property owner who allows his scheduled property to simply rot, in order to justify its subsequent demolition for redevelopment purposes. In both cases, earlier damage is used to legitimise (or at best to minimise) further damage, in what even a small child would instantly recognise as a vicious circle.

Onto the second premise, and the implication here is considerably more sinister. “The solemn talk of ‘ecological disaster’, ‘unique species’, and ‘heritage of humankind’ doesn’t help,” Falzon wrote last Sunday. “It makes it sound like a white tiger was there having tea with a panda when the bulldozers moved in and sent the whole thing crashing onto a dodo’s nest.”

Oh, yes, very droll. And quite revealing of the author’s internal biases, too. For a little further down the same article, Falzon goes on to write about ‘totemic’ species (I think he meant ‘iconic’, but never mind) such as the dolphin – which, he claims, has “come to represent the fortunes of the sea specifically, and of the planet’s ecology generally.”

Surprisingly, it didn’t occur to him that the exact same point can be made for both tiger and panda (I won’t comment about the dodo, other than to say it was a cheap shot) as both these magnificent animals have similarly transcended themselves to become icons of all that is critically endangered. Not only are they both very rare, with only a smattering of specimens left in the wild; but they are also beautiful, famous and eternally fashionable... in fact, they represent the ‘X-Factor’ of threatened wildlife: celebrity standard-bearers for all cases in which the threat of extinction is both genuine and serious.

It goes without saying (and in fact Falzon didn’t say it, though the implication is writ large throughout his article) that by proximity, any threat concerning creatures other than pandas and tigers cannot conceivably be treated with the same degree of seriousness. This in turn explains why ‘tigers’ and ‘pandas’ are such automatic choices, not only when it comes to emblemising conservation issues (the World Wildlife Fund’s official logo is, in fact, a giant panda), but also when it comes to exposing to ridicule any environmental concerns involving less exotic and iconic animals... animals such as Dwejra’s two humble species of endemic woodlouse, which I have never seen myself, but shall assume are nowhere near as impressive as either Pantera tigris or Ailuropoda melanoleuca.    

I don’t know about you, but I find it sad that we have now come to devalue our own endemic biodiversity on the grounds that it is not quite as sexy as “tigers and pandas”. But more than sad, it is also supremely ignorant, because the threat of extinction facing some of Malta’s unique species is actually more serious than that facing either tiger or panda.

The reason is not at all difficult to grasp, provided you have a basic understanding of how animal populations are actually calculated. When conservationists talk about extinction threats to tigers, they invariably refer to the populations of tigers in the wild. These figures do not take into account the several thousand specimens of all tiger species currently held in captivity throughout the world: in zoos, circuses and as household pets... at least one of which, a Bengaltiger, is lurking somewhere in Mosta even as I write.  

So if a tiger species disappears from its native habitat, it can (at prohibitive expense, granted, and not without enormous difficulty) be gradually reintroduced into the wild. At a stretch the same could be said for the giant panda, though the difficulties here are greater: pandas are notoriously uncooperative when it comes to breeding in captivity, and there are fewer of them in zoos than tigers.

But by no stretch of the imagination can anything remotely similar be said for Dwejra’s endemic woodlice. These have no celebrity X-factor of their own, and are therefore ignored by zoos and exotic animal collectors. So if they are ever wiped out by some great future act of thoughtless irresponsibility (or indeed, if they already have been wiped out by that layer of crushed hardstone aggregate), well, that will be the end of them... forever.  OK, I imagine people like Falzon won’t lose too much sleep over it – after all, they’re woodlice, not ‘tigers and pandas’. And as far as Daphne is concerned, ‘nobody cares’ about the whole of Dwejra, let alone a couple of nondescript insect-like crustaceans that call the place home.

I may be a minority on this one, but speaking entirely for myself, I think it would be a crying shame to lose an endemic species of woodlouse... even one I’ve never actually seen.  And yes, Falzon can accuse me of ‘sermonising’ all he likes, and challenge me to declare that I have never accidentally wiped out any endemic species by firing up a barbecue on a beach. But I somehow suspect that all this posturing is really a defence mechanism to deflect attention from an even more glaring flaw in his argument – so glaring, in fact, that I am surprised he didn’t see it himself.

Weed out all the cleverness and the smug comparisons, and... what is Falzon telling us, exactly? That it’s acceptable to make one ghastly blunder after another, because (let’s face it) we’ve already made so many blunders in the past that a few more won’t make any difference?  That we shouldn’t expect any better, because ‘this is Malta’ – and in any case, it’s OK because no ‘tigers or pandas’ were harmed in the making of that particular production?

Um... yes, actually. That does sum up his entire argument rather neatly. Meanwhile, this may come as a surprise to people like Falzon, but some of us are actually getting tired of our apparent inability to ever climb out of the rut of amateurism in everything we do. Some of us argue that it is perfectly possible to use Dwejra as a film location (nothing at all wrong with that, by the way – in fact, the resulting publicity can do a world of good, even to the woodlice) without actually wrecking the place in the process.

Is that too much to ask? An unreasonable demand? Beyond our collective capabilities as a nation? I don’t think so myself... but then again, I’m probably in a minority on this one, too.