Born into Birdlife… | Mark Sultana

In some respects, BLM’s anniversary it also something of a ‘birthday’ for yourself, personally. Apart from having been a member for so long, and its CEO since 2015… your father, the late Joe Sultana, was among that NGO’s original founders. Surely, you must have seen this organisation ‘coming together’, almost from the very beginning…

One thing I often say, is that I was practically ‘born into Birdlife’. Because even if I was actually born almost 10 years later… I remember council meetings taking place in my living room. I remember having to clear out all my toys, and all my stuff… because ‘dad and his friends’ were going to meet for discussions.

And I recall heated discussions… and ‘happier’ discussions… and I was always eavesdropping. As a child, I was curious:  what were these grown-ups discussing, that seemed so important to them?

Of course, as I got older, I started becoming more interested in the dynamics of the discussion itself. And that is what also prompted me to first go out into nature, and experience it first-hand. Because they were talking about things like the first setting up of the Ghadira Nature Reserve; Salini, Simar… and I wanted to see these places, with my own eyes…

And I did. As a child, I was there when they started excavating the soil at Ghadira… when the first birds started arriving… that was my weekend routine, at the time. So yes, I did see Birdlife, in its initial years.

Having said this, my own active involvement – and especially, my more recent role as CEO – that all came later…

We have similar memories, on that score. I, too, was a young ‘MOS’ member, at roughly  the same time. This also means that we have both seen a truly remarkable change taking place in Malta, since those years. Let’s face it: 30 years ago, people like us were regarded as… fanatics. Almost insane, quite frankly. ‘Weird people who are obsessed with snails and butterflies’…

Yes. And ‘lizards’, too. ‘U int, mohhok fil-gremxul’ is something I’ve been told a lot, in fact…

Precisely. But it has changed, hasn’t it? I remember an interview with your father, for instance, and he talked about his own childhood background… as a trapper, in Gozo… and how people simply ‘couldn’t understand’ how he would change his views. How much of this perception change, would you say, is down to Birdlife’s own educational message, over the past 60 years?

Well: you mentioned my father; but I also have to take my hat off to all the people – including dad; but there many others – who had the foresight, and the vision… and who worked so hard, as volunteers…  to make Birdlife what it is today. I have to send out this message of respect; this appreciation… but then, of course, it transforms into a responsibility for myself, and for my generation. They gave us a 60-year legacy; and now, we have the responsibility of looking forward to the next 60 years.

But yes: education was always one of our major pillars. And the transformation we see today.. it comes from various factors. We know, from science, that ‘experiential learning’ – going into Nature; seeing Nature first-hand, and understanding it through contact – is what will ultimately get our children to feel, and think, and be empathetic towards Nature.

You cannot truly learn about ‘butterflies’, just from a lesson in class. You have to see a butterfly; see a caterpillar; understand the connection that exists between those two things… and then, by extension, you get to understand what ‘pollination’ means, and why that butterfly, and that caterpillar, are also connected to ourselves.

But the biggest lesson that experiential learning teaches us – and I ask people out there, to try this out for themselves: go out into Nature, and ask yourselves… How do you feel? What is state of mind, right now? Do you feel peaceful? Calm? And… why do you feel that way?

It’s because we ourselves are part of Nature. We are human beings; we are living organisms. We are not designed to spend all day in an office; surrounded by artificial light, and artificial sound… we are products of nature; and we have to be in nature… we have to find that balance.

There is, however, another aside to that equation. Public awareness has clearly improved; but has our treatment of nature really changed all that much? Is the damage we are doing today, better or worse than it was 60 years ago?

Well, this is the scary part about Malta: because in some respects, things have certainly improved. If you only look at bird conservation … in the 1960s, there were barely any regulations at all. Things only started moving in the 1980s; and gathered impetus when we were discussing joining the EU. That was when the real changes started happening; because there was suddenly a whole set of European Directives, that we had to conform to…

But at the same time… Nature’s footprint has been decreasing, drastically. And I might add that human beings are increasing drastically, as well. We need to understand, then, that this might have an impact: not just on nature itself; but also, on the wellbeing of our own society.

Because nature is, at the end of the day, an indicator of our own health. We need nature, as much as nature needs us…

So the transformation you are talking about comes from many factors: and one of them could very well be the educational campaigns conducted by Birdlife Malta, and other similar NGOs. But part of it is also down to the loss of Nature itself. Nature is decreasing; and because of that, people are now appreciating it more. For example: I have never seen, at any point before the last five years, so much outcry over the cutting down of a tree.

And rightly so. We need to understand the difference between cutting down an old, established tree… and planting six saplings somewhere else instead. It’s not a mathematical equation. One doesn’t balance out the other. What about the social legacy that the old tree represented, to the communities that used to enjoy it? That ‘old tree’ has a social value, as well as an environmental one. And as more trees are cut down, more people are beginning to see, and feel this…

In fact, one of the things which surprised me most, was actually the [Spring hunting] referendum itself. Even if we lost it, by a mere 2,200 votes…. we lost it against the government. I hate to say it, but if people were to really put their hand on heart, they will admit that the referendum was not lost ‘against the hunting lobby’… it was lost ‘against the government’.

But what we also realised, from that result, was that we have supporters from both political parties; and that, when you focus the decision purely on the environmental aspect – which is what that referendum did: and not even ‘The Environment’ as a whole… but just one, single slice of it – people will want, and vote, to protect it.

I am convinced that Nature has a lot of support, in this country. But the problem with Nature is that… you need more than ‘half’, or even ‘three-quarters’, of the country to protect it. Because if a tree is protected, it might be enjoyed and appreciated by the entire country… but it only takes one person, to chop a tree down.

The referendum may have been ‘lost against government’, as you put it… but it was still lost, regardless of the margin. This suggests that there it will take more than ‘education’ to win this battle; there also has to be an element of advocacy, and lobbying. How much do you  see the hunting issue to be a political – rather than environmental – problem?

I see it primarily as an enforcement issue, myself. This is, in fact, what the advocacy side of Birdlife is all about. We are lobbying to have stricter enforcement… better regulations… and both those things are ultimately political objectives. They require a culture change, from top to bottom, that says: ‘You know what? We need to be serious about this. Nature is something that needs to be protected.’

And unfortunately, this is something that hasn’t really changed much in the last 30 years. If you had to draw a graph, of how enforcement was carried out in the 1960s, all the way to today… it wouldn’t be a straight line, going up or down. It would be very ‘curvy’. And you will notice an unmistakable correlation with general elections. Invariably, enforcement goes down in the year of an election. And you don’t have to be a genius to understand why, either.

But what saddened me the most is the fact that the present Labour government has now created a ‘division’, within the administration of the law. From having one regulatory authority responsible for biodiversity in general – MEPA, ERA, call it what you will – the government, for political reasons, removed ‘hunting’ (and even then: only hunting… not the rest of what goes into ‘conservation of wild birds’ – and entrusted it to the ‘Wild Birds regulatory Unit’.

That, in my opinion, was a mistake. The intention there was not to ‘safeguard birds’… but to help the hunting lobby. Nothing more, nothing less…

Hang on: you’re describing it as a ‘mistake’ – and I see what you mean – but it was done deliberately. And from a purely political perspective, it might also be an ‘astute move’. It’s no use seeing things from an environmental perspective, if the people you’re arguing with don’t share that perspective themselves. What political argument would you use to convince those people?

But this is a political argument, too. I believe that Nature should be considered as one of those political pillars, that both parties should agree upon. I don’t see this just as an environmental statement, myself – though that is what I am, and that is what my own perspective is.

And yet, I do see your point. The reality today, is that we have a hunting lobby which is trying to convince the political parties, that they can win them, or lose them, an election. And we have politicians who – by their actions, and decisions – clearly don’t realise that people, today, care much more about the environment than ever before.

So they keep giving the hunters all these concessions – like handing Mizieb and L-Ahrax over to the FKNK, for instance. But… the people were angry at that. It wasn’t just ‘Nationalists’ or ‘Labourites’ who were angry. It was across the board… including Labour Party politicians, up to a certain level.  There were people within the Labour government itself, who were saying that ‘this does not make sense’.

And people are right to be angry, because – regardless how much they themselves may care about birds – they can see that it’s a travesty. That government is caving into one lobby group, because of its political strength, and abdicating its own responsibility to protect the environment…

At the risk of a devil’s advocate question: it’s not just the hunters who have ‘political strength’. Birdlife, too, has risen from a humble little NGO – meeting in your dad’s living room – to what is effectively a large, multi-national organisation. Hunters question your access to EU funding, among other things. So… would you agree that the ‘David and Goliath’ scenario we were once used to, isn’t really as imbalanced as it once was?

It is quite easy to answer that, really. First of all, we managed to grow – and it’s true: we did grow – because of the vision, and the foresight, of the people who founded Birdlife Malta in 1962. Those people understood, at one point, that… ‘we need to have a base; we can’t keep meeting in a living room anymore’. Then, they understood that they needed to employ people… to start tapping into financial sources… to strengthen our scientific backbone, by applying for EU Life Project funding, and so on.

That’s how we grew. And if we receive government funding, it is always in exchange for a service provision. So if we’re managing nature reserves… it’s because we give 6,000 schoolchildren free educational visits; because we make sure that all the reporting that needs to be done, and sent to the EU, is done free of charge.

I also understand that it is easier to approach a private company for funding to ‘save a bird’… than to kill one. So of course, if I and [FKNK President] Lukas Micallef were to both go to the same company – unless it was owned by hunters, of course – my chances of attracting a donation, will be higher than his. Why? Because we don’t have an egoistical pastime. It’s not even a pastime… it’s an obligation we feel we have to society. We want to protect nature…

But they have a card in their pockets – or a ‘person in their bag’ - that we don’t have. And that person is a politician: a person with power. And we fought against that ‘Goliath’… because I have to say, I still think they’re the Goliath, myself. And we nearly toppled this Goliath over, in the referendum…

All the same, I don’t think the analogy between resources can really be done. Mainly, because there is a difference between an NGO which focuses only on its own members’ demands – in this case, killing or trapping birds - and an organisation which doesn’t even need to have any members at all…

… because everyone will benefit from the work that we do. The government will benefit; the people who love nature will benefit… and so will the people who don’t care about nature at all: whether they realise it or not. Because if we’re fighting against the pollution caused by cruise-liners, for instance: who’s going to benefit from that? Only the nature lovers? No: everyone will benefit from that… especially, the people who live in the harbour area.

This is why you can’t really compare an NGO like Birdlife Malta – or Nature Trust, Din L-Art helwa, or so many others that do similar work – with something that is only called an ‘NGO’, because there is a ‘Voluntary Organisations Act’ that agrees to list it as one.

In reality, they are member-only clubs. Nobody who is not a member of a hunting organisation, is ever going to really benefit from one…