Fear of the Forest
A visit to the Clementi Forest
I dug through my closet, looking for the longest pants I own, then I started digging through my socks box for the longest pair of socks. “Mom! Where is that professional water resistance hiking shoe that I bought?” I cried. That was me the night before our Quest field trip to Clemente forest, a wild forest full of poisonous bugs, giant spiders, caterpillars, and leeches that could stick on your skin and suck your blood (at least that’s what I imagined the forest to be). Clemente forest is the last unprotected wild forest left in Singapore, and the government has zoned this area for residential use, which means the government is planning to take down this wild forest and build HDB houses over it in the near future. This decision has caused many conflicts between the people who want to preserve the forest and people who want to develop more housing areas. And Quest is on a mission to figure out a solution to this conflict; therefore, we are taking a trip to this mysterious wild forest and collecting biodiversity data. And since it’s a wild forest, I’m trying my best to protect myself from the “potential dangers”.
My fear of the forest mainly comes from my childhood experience of watching one of my favorite TV documentaries — Running Wild with Bear Grylls. I remember sitting on the couch, watching Bear Grylls on TV around eight years old. Grylls would be left in a forest alone, trying to survive with no food and water. While he was hiking, he would explain every dangerous species he encountered. He would point to a colorful spider the size of a palm and explain to the audience that it could kill you in less than 20 minutes. I remembered him stumbling across a muddy lake, coming out with dozens of leeches sucking his blood on his skin. Though I was very entertained by the documentary, I became terrified of wild forests, and I secretly swore to myself that I would never enter a wild forest where there are many things that could kill me.
8 AM, Monday. After packing everything and suiting up, spraying enough bug spray that the scent could choke me. I met my friends and teachers at the Clementi forest. At the forest entrance, Tom demonstrated how to use the bug net to collect bugs from the bushes. After 30 seconds of sweeping, Tom caught an idiosyncratic bug on the net that I’d never seen before. It is a semi-transparent, ladybug-shaped creature that looks poisonous. Though it’s been 10 years since I last watched the Bear Grylls documentary, I suddenly had flashbacks of him explaining the colorful but poisonous bugs. While my eyes were eager to see what the bug looked like, my mind was telling me to back up, worrying that the bug would jump on me.
I saw the bugs crawling on Tom’s hand, I was going to warn him to shake it off, but he just let it crawl like it was nothing. Then Amari approached the bug, letting the bug crawl into her hands. Maybe the bug wasn’t poisonous, I thought, maybe I was just overthinking.
Clementi forest doesn’t have a clear path for you to hike, so we had to squeeze through the bushes and tall plants, climb over tree trunks, and jump over ditches. I checked my body every minute to see if there were any caterpillars or bugs on it, but to my surprise, I didn’t find any after hiking for around 30 minutes in the forest. “This isn’t the bad forest that I imagined!” I thought to myself. In fact, it’s not at all like the forest I’ve seen in the documentary. This realization made me reflect on why I was so against the idea of visiting a wild forest in the first place, I began to reflect on my positionality and how it could impact my worldview. My positionality of living in a modern city with no access to the wild forests and continuous exposure to documentaries that made the forest look scary have shaped my worldview with a negative view of the wild forest. And such a negative view towards forest was interestingly never originated from me, instead, it’s an idea that’s been injected into me from all those documentaries I’ve watched. Those documentaries became my only source of information and formed my negative bias towards the forest.
So after this trip to Clemente, I was fully aware of my positionality and understood how it impacted me during the trip. It also made me aware of the importance of considering the positionality of different parties when it comes to making decisions about whether to keep the forest. People who favor preserving the forest might have entirely different positionality than those who wish to develop HDBs. People’s positionality could vary a lot based on their past experiences and culture, as mentioned in the article “How Does Your Positionality Bias Your Epistemology” by David Takacs. And since people’s positionality is different, there isn’t a right or wrong answer of whether to keep the forest, because no matter which one to choose, it’s always biased based on their worldview. So it’s crucial to become aware of one’s positionality and try to limit its impact when deciding whether to keep the forest.
After this Clementi trip, I had another very cliche yet powerful takeaway: you should always be brave to try the things you never had the courage to try. I’ve heard this saying countless times, but I never really paid attention. It was not until I walked out of my comfort zone to challenge myself that I realized my original belief was flawed, and the forest is much better than I thought it would be.
If you are still reading this blog, I, from the depths of my heart, hope you can try something that you’ve never tried before because someone else told you that it would be scary. To realize your bounded perspective, be aware of your positionality that shaped your epistemology, and achieve the things you could never imagine before.
