What Even Is the Clementi Forest?
How active learning can make us better citizens
“I hope everyone has put on their mosquito repellent”
Oops…
But it was already too late. If I tried to apply mosquito repellent here, I ran the risk of harming the wildlife around me, because, in spite of my not wanting to be bitten by bugs, I did not want to kill them. My long sleeve shirt did little to protect me, and spots on my body would flame up with irritation for the next few days.
I find this not so dissimilar to the reef-safe coral sunscreen I brought on the trip to Bali, I hadn’t wanted to leave chemicals that would harm the nature around me and for that, as I had that time actually remembered to bring it, I spent about double what normal sunscreen would have cost.
In both scenarios, to my own inconvenience, I put the needs of nature before my own comfort.
The Quest advisors had brought my cohort to the Clementi Forest, one of the small areas in Singapore where nature ran rampant, in order to do a couple of things, as an interdisciplinary class often does. First, we were getting our hands dirty in some land surveying and research methods, continuing our practice of linear and grid transects from our time at Bali. Second, and perhaps more pertinently, we were there to help answer the question posed to us: “What should we do with the Clementi Forest?”.
“What should we do with the Clementi Forest?”
Clementi Forest, we were told, was unprotected and zoned for residential construction. Trees and vines faded and morphed into cement blocks with clotheslines, and many of us opposed the thought of the forest going away. But the issue was bigger than us — not just in that a forest is bigger than a measly group of 12 high school students — but also because that was a change that would surely affect everyone. Surely everyone had some opinion on what should be done. Or at least so we thought.
A group of tired students suddenly emerged from behind a bus stop. Holding nets and string while trudging along, we awkwardly made our way to the campus of the Singapore Institute of Management (SIM). Once in SIM, we practiced our interviewing skills, ambushing unsuspecting college students and recording (with permission) our interviews with them. We asked about their thoughts on Clementi, what to do with it, and conservation as a whole.
This is where things got unexpected.
Coming from the United States and always engrossed in all the drama that happens there, I was always used to people having something to say. Regardless of whether they were outspoken or not — it always seemed like someone had their own opinion on what should be done for just about everything. Yet as we went from student to student — college students mind you, notorious in America for being outspoken against society — we all got the same blank stare when we told them about Clementi Forest, and variations of the same response:
“Well, I am not so sure. But if the government says it should go, then I think it should go. Singapore island is only so big, people need places to live, cannot live in the jungle.”
It should be clarified that not every student had this response, but the quantity baffled us. More importantly, it forced us to consider: Who were we, foreigner high school students, to decide what happens to an insignificant forest in Singapore?
Why did we care? Was it because we came from a rich family who didn’t have to care about housing? Was it because we’re westerners who cared too much about conservation and not enough about those who could use the housing? Was it because we’re dumb high schoolers who don’t understand the harsh realities of the world?
Not so much dawning on us as it was crashing down on us, the realization that we were simply different people on a far more fundamental, worldviews level than the college students changed us — changed me. With all my activism and Conservation and Resource Studies work, I had lost sight of an entire population of people. It’s not that I was necessarily wrong, but rather a newfound understanding that in my selflessness to push for the conservation of nature and to fight against global warming, I was being selfish towards those who needed the housing, almost directly dragging them down in my own pursuit of my self-righteous goals.
