Comparing notes over a late lunch, we wondered at the observation that Singapore's nature spots appear frequented most often by people other than nuclear families. On this first day of a long weekend, we saw relaxed gatherings of Indian workers, gaggles of Indonesian youths, boisterous friends on a day out, cheerful couples from China, sporty blondes and brunettes with their offspring in bicycle baskets, slim riders in speedy gear, and weathered rodmen ready for a tackle and a tipple.
It might be a sampling bias, but local clans and their children were few and far between in the crowd of young and restless legs who thronged the village and waded through a minefield of bicycles and vans to seek the island's peripheries. The handful who came within sight offered poles of contrast; palpable fascination and audible eurekas of rediscovery found a counterpoint in whines of "Pa! Why did we have to come to this place!?" Queueing for the bumboat later in the evening, a little girl clutched a plastic bottle that imprisoned two hermit crabs in gong-gong shells. We asked if they realised that the animals would die away from their shore, but her father and brother confidently proclaimed that the crabs would do well. "They need water meh?" was the rhetorical retort of minds probably fed by laughable facts.
Within one generation, a link to the land has been severed and discarded even in memory by a population vastly boosted in affluence but reduced in vision to live by bread alone. Almost daily, the powers serve reminders that this land is desolate and stands solely on the shoulders of stalwart men who must never waver in their daily labour and nocturnal love-making. For many, this mantra has come to mean that there is nothing left to conserve or care for on this red dot that has lost much of its natural heritage but still possesses rainforests and reefs that are within easy reach and richer than many in higher hemispheres. Many are the woods that have fallen. But greater still are those that are lost even in thought to souls in which empty bytes and balance sheets drown out the melody and mystery of green and growing things of which far less is known and much more is to be discovered.
Insulated, as a greater servant of the shore put it, from the greater realities of the earth and water and growing things by cities of steel and concrete, we live in a triple tragedy – not knowing what has and is being lost; not caring that this loss stems from our own apathy; and not pausing to wonder that the ravages we have wrought upon the earth in the name of opportunity costs would ultimately cost us as a species and have already eroded an irreplaceable part of our humanity.
Might the future, on this and other islands, thus lie in the eyes of friends from afar who would cherish and mourn the passing of this isle long before those who call it home awaken to unsung loss?
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