Can the ‘develop or conserve’ debate in Singapore be more constructive?

Audrey Tan (0:02)

This is a podcast by The Straits Times. Hi, I'm Audrey Tan, an Assistant News Editor at The Straits Times. This is Green Pulse, and we are back from a sabbatical since May. From October, we will be dropping new episodes four times a month, every Tuesday, and with video too.

Green Pulse is your show, not just about the environment, but how it intersects with society, business and politics. So today, we have my colleague Bhavan Jaipragas, a senior columnist at The Straits Times joining us in the studio. Welcome, Bhavan.

Bhavan Jaipragas (0:32)

Very good to be on the show, Audrey.

Audrey Tan (0:33)

So Bhavan, I know you wouldn't consider yourself a super environment or nature person, but why I wanted to have you on the show today is really to talk about a recent commentary that you did on a really hot button topic that has got the environmental community and beyond buzzing. And that is, of course, about the perennial to develop or conserve debate in Lenska, Singapore.

Bhavan Jaipragas (0:58)

Yes. So I was quite surprised at, in fact, how widely it was discussed. And the reason I wrote it, even though I consider myself a generalist, so I write on all sorts of topics and things that galvanize public opinion. So in this case, what was fascinating to me was the sort of mobilizing that we saw around the cause. You know, Singapore generally is caricatured as, you know, a place where very top-down people are not mobilizing. In this case, the unique thing was the scale of the mobilizing and how it was done online.

And I had some issues with it, and that's where I, that's the reason why I wrote that column.

Audrey Tan (1:47)

Yeah. And I want to expand on some of the topics. I thought you'll be the best person to do it, because, I mean, you know I'm from the environmental space. I'm very familiar with the arguments and the kind of messages put forward by the environmental community. But it will be interesting to have, like, you know, this little debate here about what other people are saying. But before we get into it, we should take a step back here and, you know, try to set some context about what exactly we are talking about. So I think back in July, that was when news first broke that the government will be taking two plots of land in Maju, the Clementi area, and also in the Gillman Barracks, in the Tolok Blangah area. And the forest there, the secondary forest there, will be cleared to make way for new housing developments. So that was the first time we heard about this.

And surprisingly, even to me, there was a lot of mobilization from the ground up. At that point, I was on maternity leave, right, and I was hearing about this. But what did you feel after the announcement was made? And there was so much ground up reaction, talking about, you know, why are we cutting down this forest for housing?

What were your thoughts then? Were you thinking much into it?

Bhavan Jaipragas (2:58)

Initial reaction is something that has happened before, right? I think there was Clementi Forest and then Dole Forest. So over those years, I mean, I had lived overseas during that period, but I always, of course, keep in touch and you see these like bouts of outcry, people pushing back and hoping that there can be some compromise in terms of conservation. I thought that in this case, that was also, it was in that same mold, but I felt in, with Maju and Gillman, the rhetoric, the volume of activism was a bit higher. I don't know whether it's because residents were more involved, there are residential estates around there, for example, Sunset Way. And my kind of assumption, anecdotally, is that, here you have communities that are more erudite.

Maybe they already have very strong community bonds, so they tap on that to push for a cause that they thought was important.

Audrey Tan (4:18)

I agree with you.

This is not new. Every time there's a case of new development coming at the expense of nature areas, there will be some discussion about how much do we need to clear and so on. Even before Maju and Gillman, recently, there was cases of forested plots in Yishun, Tengah Forest, Serangoon River Forest, and we also heard the same discussion from the ground up about do we really need to clear this forest.

Bhavan Jaipragas (4:45)

These are all secondary forests, right?

Audrey Tan (4:47)

Yes, all secondary forests.

We only have like 1% of our land is primary forests and they are safely in our nature reserves. But we will come back to that. Anyway, so we had the July announcement of Maju and Gillman, and then the following month in August, during the National Day Rally, we heard PM Lawrence Wong talk about the need to reclaim some southern islands to create this new western island, right? Envision as a new industrial island, similar to Jurong Island, which will be critical for energy, security, defense and so on. So, then what was your reaction at that point, you know, when you heard that announcement being made, in one of like the most important political speeches of the year?