There is a fundamental disparity at the heart of every environmental campaign.
Though conditions in some places are more suitable for campaigning than others, you will find this disparity everywhere.
On one hand, you have the grassroots movements. The beating heart of such movements is made up of environmental experts, citizen volunteers, and anyone else who believes the cause is important.
With the exception of particularly renowned international organisations like Greenpeace, budgets for such campaigns are often far below the ideal.
On the other hand, we have a relatively small number of people who are responsible for the overwhelming majority of the environmental problems we face.
Financial clout in industries with a huge environmental impact tends to be in the hands of a few powerful executives. This clout buys them red carpet access to politicians of every stripe. Ultimately, it is up to those politicians to legislate.
Any environmental campaigner who seeks to make a difference must understand this disparity. Organisations that are dependent on external funding cannot ever hope to achieve a level playing field against the combined power of private sector champions and government machinery. More so when the government’s machinery is clogged with more bribes than you can shake a stick at.
So, the question that follows is inevitable: how does one effectively overcome such bad odds? How does one reverse the course of a country that is besieged by over-development?
On Thursday, the Planning Authority (PA) approved Hili Ventures’ Comino development, one of the most vehemently opposed projects in the country’s history.
Within the same 24 hours, the PA also approved a contentious 15-storey hotel belonging to Carlo Stivala, brother to head of the Malta Developers’ Association (MDA) Michael Stivala (of ‘Malta is more beautiful now than it was 20 years ago’ fame).
In April of last year, after a sprawling grassroots campaign against the DB Group’s towers on the former ITS site, the massive development was also allowed to go ahead.
As things currently stand, the ongoing campaign to pressure the authorities into giving Manoel Island back to the public is also likely to suffer the same fate.
In each of these examples I just mentioned, there was an organised effort to use all the proper channels to correct the planning regime’s trajectory. The beating heart of environmentalism pumped hard, pulling out all the stops to stress the need for urgent reconsideration.
Thousands of people signed dozens of petitions, attended rallies, chanting more slogans and holding more placards than I could ever count.
All of this was a powerful, healthy expression of dissent that I’ve always been inclined towards participating in.
And yet, even the most committed environmental activists in the world must admit that, broadly speaking, we haven’t managed to achieve enough.
In Malta, it’s probably worse than most other countries that pretend to be Western democracies. The correct channels lead nowhere.
You can take a development application all the way to court and win, and even then, the PA will just blatantly ignore the court’s orders as if it were the countryside’s judge, jury, and executioner.
The fact is that, after twelve years of supercharged corruption, the results are disastrous.
The rot doesn’t stop at the PA. It infects the core of other regulators and tribunals involved in the planning regime. The entire process is rigged from start to finish. A couple dozen ministers and parliamentary secretaries own more properties than most persons will ever set foot in throughout their entire lives.
Whose side do you think they’re on?
While I am grateful that there are still so many people who are trying their best to fight within the system and change it, the fact is that being within that system in the first place means you’ve already lost.
Disclaimer: this is not some call to throw in the collective’s towel and give up.
Rather, it is a call to concentrate our forces.
A military tactic that is almost as old as the concept of warfare is ‘the oblique order.’ It refers to the targeted use of the majority of an attacking army’s strength. The Wiki entry adds: “this allows a commander with weaker or equal forces to achieve a local superiority in numbers.”
This concept can be put to use in the eternal standoff between activists and big business.
There is no question that in this case, big business and politics have hoarded most of the firepower to themselves. In this equation, we are the weaker force. The way our objections are studiously ignored by the authorities proves that it is largely useless to appeal to good sense or due process.
Instead, what we should be doing is finding weak spots and applying pressure accordingly. Rather than misusing our very limited resources on big, broad campaigns which are held back by a corrupt process that is skewed against them, we can choose to focus on enlarging the tent.
Real public pressure can only be created by a disciplined group of organisations that moves and breathes like a political party without functioning like one – a chimera of citizen assemblies whose mere word becomes powerful by virtue of its sheer strength in numbers.
That is the kind of force that can dictate what it wants to any government that becomes corrupt enough to forget who’s really in charge. With a concentration of that kind of force, one can hold a general election hostage. A company’s business can be disrupted for weeks on end if enough people can show up to obstruct it.
If we want to stop getting steamrolled by the worst people on the planet, we need to start gathering the best among us to fight back in unison.
Pitching the tent on a battlefield that suits the enemy is just a long-winded way to arrive at one’s own slaughter.