‘We are burning’

I thought this brief essay by Maltese journalist Anna Maria Galea in the 'Times of Malta,' which was featured last Sunday, August 15, entitled ‘We are burning,’ hits the nail on the head on the present situation with global warming. I share with you the salient points:

It’s sobering to think that while my grandparents battled the infernal fires of World War II, my generation have a very different kind of explosion on their hands. Our parents bought us the ‘Save the Whale’ T-shirts, plonk­ed us in front of the television to the soothing sounds of David Attenborough telling us that we were decimating the only planet that we can inhabit, and booked us into school activities detailing the finer points of ozone layer thinning. Yet even now, many of that generation have done precious little to reverse their great-grandchildren’s fate. No wonder everyone under 35 has anxiety. The images from the past few weeks have been heart-breaking. An old Greek woman crying out in anguish as her house burns down, a woman dressed in combat gear with a bottle of water in her pocket almost casually looking on as an inferno rages in Turkey. Beaches burning in Catania. Fires in Oregon and California. Floods and destruction in Germany. Rain fell in parts of Greenland for the first time in history! Apocalyptic images out of films that almost look computer-generated. And true to our short-sighted selves, we continue to fiddle while the world burns. Just like Nero did when Rome was burning.

It was almost comical to see the climate change naysayers come out last week as if they weren’t living on this smouldering piece of rock like the rest of us. As if they are somehow impervious to heat. I didn’t need the UN secretary-gene­ral to say that the IPCC Working Group 1 Report is a code red for humanity. Now I’m not saying that Malta, given its size, was ever going to be able to make a huge impact on the bigger picture even if we were all to become ultra environmentally conscious. If the climate continues to take this trajectory, Malta will become a veritable desert in just a couple of generations. And for all those whose parents didn’t prop them in front of the television to watch scientific docu­mentaries, the more we build and overbuild and the more we continue to chop down trees and fill everything with concrete, the hotter we make our land and the more we acce­lerate our desertification.

We are in a state of global emergency, and it is the job of the people in power to ensure that we do whatever small bit we can to at the very least slow this process down and give the earth, and ourselves, time to heal. We need to educate people to use resources differently. We need to stop living on this planet as if we have another one to go to; we don’t.