When the last square inch has been developed…

You’ve probably seen the quote a million times: usually attributed to something like an ‘Ancient Cree proverb’. It starts with ‘when the last tree has been felled’, and ends with ‘you will realise you cannot eat money’. 

Personally, I was long under the impression that it was a quote by Chief Seattle, who said a lot of similar things in his celebrated (and disputed) letter to US President Franklin Pierce. 

But it turns out to be neither a Chief Seattle quote, nor an ancient Cree proverb. (In fact it couldn’t have been the latter, for the simple reason that ancient Native Americans had no real concept of ‘money’ until the White Man brought it with him).

Inevitably, the truth turns out to be more interesting than the fiction. The saying has been traced to a collection of essays published in 1972, entitled “Who is the Chairman of This Meeting?” A chapter called “Conversations with North American Indians” quotes an Abenaki Native American from Ontario as saying: “Canada, the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.”

All things told, it remains a stunning little quote, fully deserving of its ‘ancient proverb’ status. Lifted out of context, there is an immediate universality in the general message. And yet, I find the significance within its original context to be much more relevant. This sentiment was not expressed by some distant ancestor of today’s Native Americans… to whom the entire monetary system (still less banking), as well as the very concept of ‘land ownership’ as a form of wealth, was utterly alien.

No, it was expressed by an inhabitant of a modern, fully industrialised 20th century country. And this proves that you don’t have to be a hunter-gatherer, living in some idyllic, primal and undeveloped society, to be appalled and outraged at the ‘depletion economy’. All you need is a rudimentary grasp of mathematics: even a small child can comprehend that if you constantly subtract from something without ever replenishing it, that ‘something’ will eventually disappear.

And yet, the entire developed world – with all its governments, corporations, industries, banks, etc. – seems to have difficulties understanding this basic calculation. We all tend to agree with the ‘last tree’ proverb in general terms; yet at the same time we all prop up a system which is designed to do precisely what that North American Indian had warned us about in 1972. 

And our planet is now well within sight of some of the ‘targets’ in that prophecy. The ‘last fish’ may well be fished from the sea within our own lifetimes… to be fattened and sold for an absurd price on the Japanese market. I’d be surprised if there are still any rivers left in the world that haven’t been polluted. And there are entire cities like Beijing where it has now become necessary to wear a face mask to breathe.

But that’s the big bad world; and as such, we can only watch and wring our hands in despair. Malta, on the other hand, is our immediate environment. And we are not entirely powerless to make a difference here. 

Malta is a small enough country, one would think, to exercise some kind of damage-limitation control. And it is certainly tiny enough for its limited land to be prized above all other resources… especially considering that Malta doesn’t have any other natural resources to speak of, besides its territory and the surrounding sea.

Yet just look: 45 years after the ‘last tree’ warning, here we are busily chopping down trees wherever we can… consigning ever-larger plots of unspoilt land to be developed… over-exploiting our marine resources, until our greed literally overflows onto our beaches in the (entirely appropriate) form of a thick, oozy disgusting slime… 

It is as though we are all eagerly anticipating the day when what little we once had is gone forever; and all we’d be left with is the wealth in our bank accounts, which can’t actually buy any of it back.

Two recent examples have graphically epitomised the self-devouring way Malta’s own ‘depletion economy’ works. The first was the recent attempt by the local community to reclaim the foreshore of Manoel Island, which had been illegally sealed off by the property’s developers. The second was an application to develop 50,000 square metres of agricultural land in Madliena – the size of seven football pitches – into blocks of flats. 

Both are the result of successive governments’ land policies… and both are rooted in that same greed that will eventually gobble up every last square inch of the entire country.

Let’s take them in reverse order. I’ll keep the Madliena part brief: the proposal itself is still at application stage; and for all we know it might be eventually rejected. But that is small comfort, as the real issue is not the individual development project itself… it is that such a large extent of supposedly ‘protected’ arable land was included in the development zones at all.

This flies directly in the face of an existing government policy to ‘protect’ agricultural land. In so doing, it also underscores the precise level of ‘protection’ anything can expect to receive from Malta’s authorities and public institutions. No sooner does the government’s policy to ‘protect’ the environment clash with its other policy of ‘being business-friendly at all costs’… ‘protection’ is the first thing that goes flying out of the window.

Madliena merely confirms this general pattern. Project the same pattern into the future, and… well, who can guarantee that what little remains of ‘ODZ’ land will remain ‘ODZ’ indefinitely? It won’t. It can’t, with the current economic mindset in place. Metre by metre, acre by acre, hectare by hectare… it will all be lost to unrelenting development in the end.

And what will we have gained? How much richer will we all be, when the last square inch has been developed? 

The Manoel Island saga points towards an answer. As we all know, some 30% of it was leased out to a private consortium (Midi) in 2000, to be redeveloped into a tourist village with apartments, hotels, a casino, etc. Sixteen years later, none of that has materialised… and the Midi consortium has now blocked access to considerably more than the 30% it has legal title to: including the foreshore, which was never part of the original contract to begin with.

Former environment minister Francis Zammit Dimech, who led the concession negotiations in the 1990s, now tells us that public access to the foreshore was a “key issue” during the talks.

“The government insisted on public rights to the foreshore, which necessarily implies access,” he said. “This was a major issue at the time and everyone at the negotiating table was highly conscious of it.”

Clearly, then, Midi is in breach of its concession conditions. It had no right to block access to the foreshore; yet not only did it do so very aggressively… with bigger gates and loud threats of legal action… but it even enlisted the police to prevent a voluntary clean-up planned for last Saturday.

This naturally raises the question of why the police would aid and abet the unlawful annexation of part of Malta’s territory by a private conglomerate. The protestors had full right of access to the Manoel Island foreshore, and this was denied to them. Yet instead of helping them reclaim what is ultimately theirs by right... the police actually helped the developers secure their ill-gotten gains, at the expense of the general public it is supposed to serve.

But that’s just a minor detail in the wider scheme of things. The real question is: why did we cede Manoel Island to the land-gobbling machine in the first place? Why privatise the only remaining open space in what has become an intolerably over-developed part of Malta… when the only thing this will achieve is the permanent loss of a public recreational space, so that a few bank accounts can get wealthier?

Leaving aside all other environmental, ethical and legal considerations… it doesn’t make economic sense. The wealth this kind of project generates is depletive in the long run. Sooner or later we will run out of land to develop, and the celebrated ‘wheel of the economy’ will be left without a dynamo. What will happen then? 

I somehow doubt that the developers who’ve done so well out of all this will all end up trying to eat their money. My hunch is that when they’ve ruined the last square inch of this country, to make themselves richer and everyone else poorer… they’ll use that wealth to just move elsewhere, and start the process again in a virgin, unspoilt territory.

That, by the way, is the only part of the Native American quote I find debatable. When the last tree is felled, the last fish is fished, and every other last resource has been depleted… there won’t be any money left, either.