Three Stories about Transformations - Ernest Lee Trinity College, Oxford Video - Broad Street Humanities Review
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Three Stories about Transformations
Three Stories about Transformations
Ernest Lee
Trinity College, Oxford
Video
Link: https://youtu.be/9w_5hRwk89I
(Video: p.1)
(Appendix: pp.2-4)
(Companion Essay: pp.5-15))
1
Three Stories about Transformations
Appendix: Three Stories about Transformations
I have endeavoured to reference every piece of media used in my video essay here. If you
believe I have failed to attribute anything here, please get in touch with me via
ernest_singapore@outlook.com.
(00:39) Nature's Colony: Empire, Nation and Environment in the Singapore Botanic Gardens
THE SINGAPORE CRICKET CLUB AT THE PADANG [Timothy Barnard, NAS]
(00:55) On the trail of Mr Lee’s Trees Lee Kuan Yew planting sapling, 1981 [NAS, Asia One]
(01:44) Speech by Mr Lee Kuan Yew [Something About Singapore]
(02:32) Jalan Kayu Village Chai Chee Food, Market Stalls Chai Chee Kampung [Remember
Singapore, Straits Times]
(03:19) Fort Canning Excavation [Lostnfiledsg]
(03:23) Fort Canning 1880, Fort Canning 1842, Fort Canning 1900 [NAS]
(03:58) British Surrender [Asashi Shimbun, via History.Net]
(04:17) Battlebox [Conde Nast]
(05:43) Pearl’s Bank Apartments [Heartlander Tourist]
(05:50) Pearl’s Bank [Choo Yut Shing, Flickr]
(05:54) Pearl’s Bank Interior [Hubab Hood, Honeycombers]
(06:03) One Pearl Bank Promo [One Pearl Bank]
(07:03) Convict Labour [Liu, G. (1999). Singapore: A Pictorial History 1819–2000, National
Heritage Board]
(07:58, 08:18, 08:38) Pulau Saigon [Mothership Singapore, National Archives of Singapore)
(08:10) Pulau Saigon Map [One Historical Map, Singapore Land Authority, NUS Center For Arts]
(08:34) Pulau Saigon View [Wikimedia Commons, User:Sengkang]
(09:30) European Town Singapore [Lillian Newton photograph collection on Singapore
(Y30311B),” University of Cambridge Digital Library]
(10:13) What's the environmental impact of Cambodia's sand mining? [Al-Jazeera English,
YouTube]
(10:25) Construction of Polder of At Area A and C of Pulau Tekong [DDL Official, YouTube]
(10:34) Singapore Time-Lapse 1984 to 2012 [R3LOAD Network, YouTube]
(10:44) Lion Air JT154 CGK-SIN Approaching Changi Airport Singapore [MySX30, YouTube]
(11:13, 16:27) Lost World, Kalyanee Mam [Emergence Magazine]
2
Three Stories about Transformations
(11:26, 11:50) Singapore Oil&Gas industry [Rajesh Raj TV, YouTube]
(11:31) OCEAN GREATWHITE in Singapore [Brian Hayward, YouTube]
(11:39) A look at Neste's $1.5 billion refinery in Singapore [CNBC International, YouTube]
(11:44) Pulau Bukom Fire [Joel Caunan, YouTube]
(12:05) Why Oil Prices Are Headed Lower [Bloomberg Market and Finance]
(12:14) Shell People Stories Huck Poh high above the gigantic Singapore Refinery [Paolo Black,
YouTube]
(12:20) COVID-19: Inside a migrant worker dormitory in Singapore [CNA Singapore]
(12:33) Minister for Trade and Industry, Mr. Chan Chun Sing, on Singapore International Energy
Week 2018 [Singapore International Energy Week, YouTube]
(12:38) Oil prices could remain volatile: Singapore's Trade and Industry Ministry [CNA
Singapore]
(12:45) Singapore's oil trading, bunkering sectors face slump in demand: Experts [CNA
Singapore]
(12:49) Oil Spill Threatens Pristine Island Paradise of Mauritius [Inside Edition]
(12:51) Deepwater Horizon Trailer [Lionsgate Movies, YouTube]
(12:57) SG Climate Rally [SG Climate Rally]
(13:07) Serangan Orang Minyak (The Oily Man Strikes Again, 1958) [dir. L. Krishnan, h p YouTube]
(13:41) Oil Tankers Collide [AP, YouTube]
(14:08) PM Lee on the water issues between Singapore and Malaysia [TODAYonline, YouTube]
(14:17) Exclusive: Mahathir Mohamad says price of water Malaysia sells to Singapore 'ridiculous'
[CNA Singapore]
(14:34) The Singapore Water Story [govsg, YouTube]
(14:51) Dear Water Sally [Public Utilities Board, YouTube]
(15:01) Exercise Panzer Strike 2017: The Roar of the Leopard [Ministry of Defence Singapore]
(15:05) Republic of Singapore Navy: Aster Missile Firing [MINDEF Singapore]
(15:09) Why We Serve - Our NS Stories: Episode 2 [MINDEF Singapore]
(15:34) NEWater: A Singapore Success Story [PUB Singapore, YouTube]
(15:54) Singapore's Hidden Wildlife [CNA Singapore]
(16:03) Oil Rig Entering Shipyard [Vacancy in Offshore, YouTube]
(16:11) Marina Barrage: A Singapore Success Story [PUB Singapore]
(16:21) 1960s news report: Singapore lays pipes to draw water from Johor [CNA Singapore]
(16:42) More Pollution in Yishun [Reg2903, YouTube]
3Three Stories about Transformations
(16:52) Shifting Sands [Sim Chi Yin, Exactly Foundation]
(17:09) SEA State 6 [Charles Lim]
(18:04) Attap House, Jurong [NAS]
(18:08) Jurong River [NAS]
(18:17) Jurong Aerials, [1], [2], [3], [4] [NAS]
(18:23) Singapore. Village or Kampung in March 1968 - Film 90062 [HuntleyFilmArchives,
YouTube]
(18:28) Kembali Saorang (One Came Back, 1957); a Malay kampung melodrama filmed on west
coast of Singapore (h.p, YouTube)
(19:02) Jurong Factory, Jurong Steel Mill, Jurong Port, Jurong Cement [NAS]
(19:26) Jurong Archipelago (1) (2) Jurong Island [NAS]
(19:33) Rock Cavern, (2) [CNA Singapore, Sato Kogyo]
(19:38) Spyros Disaster, (2), (3), (4) [Navalants, NAS]
(19:58) Jurong Workers [NAS]
(20:09) Street Hawkers [NAS]
(20:13) Hawker Centre [RememberSingapore]
4Three Stories about Transformations
‘Kino-eye’ for the environment?
A companion essay to ‘Three Stories About Transformations’
Ernest Lee
Trinity College, Oxford
Guilt mixed with awe: this strange combination of emotions and realisation hit me as I ambled
through Sri Lanka’s Horton Plains National Park. Words do not do justice to the beauty of its
misty forests, sheer cliffs, and waterfalls. This seemed to be nature at its most sublime, but
standing amidst this paradisical evergreen I wondered why it had taken a school trip to
evoke this sense of wonder. The notion that appreciating nature rested on the exorbitant
privilege of well-funded academic programmes, pollutive air travel, and the fraught
relationship with local communities endemic to perfunctory, round-country school trips
didn’t sit right. Surely it was not that nature was absent even in my tiny, ultra-dense, and
highly-urbanised home country of Singapore? In any case, the park’s claim to beauty was
also a claim to a particular form of conservation, rooted in hermetically sealing its
environment from the contaminating trail of humans. A video essay, which this reflection
accompanies, is my attempt to explore nature in Singapore—its curious absence or half-life
at various moments, the narratives that accompany them, and the deep connections humans
have always had with nature.
Man and nature do not stand in simple opposition, as an increasingly ‘anthropocenic’
literature asserts: to do so often privileges the agency of man, obscuring how a concern for
nature is inseparable from a concern for human beings. And if this is an epoch of global
change, it is striking that its defining geological change is agentic and actively conscious of
the role it plays.1 In other words, nature must be understood as a domain comprising
“intentionality and meaning”, while sharpening our attention to the human decisions and
narratives surrounding its relationship with nature. Essays, videos, or even art and literature
are only a sliver of what influences these perceptions and discourses around nature. Yet, for
all the cultural impact of ‘petrofiction’—Amitav Ghosh’s term for the literature surrounding
the history, nature of, and imagination surrounding oil—it might be the act of simply walking
through a gleaming, futuristic city centre that more strongly affirms a modernising, un-
ecological teleology of progress and growth.2 While I seek to align my video essay with a
field of more critical literature, the strength of words alone seems to be increasingly
exhausted. What inspires this essay’s form are various thought-provoking works employing
distinctly visual mediums to comment on environment: art exhibitions on the materiality of
Singapore’s landscape, Werner Herzog’s films or the unexpected dramaturgy within David
1
Palsson, Gisli, et al, ‘Reconceptualizing the “Anthropos’.
2
Ghosh, ‘Petrofiction and Petroculture’. The proliferation of the term ‘petrofiction’ largely occurred
outside Ghosh’s own awareness, as the blog post suggests. For a more recent overview see Riddle,
Petrofiction and Political Economy.
5Three Stories about Transformations
Attenborough’s documentaries.3 I also draw on my own experience walking through, around,
or in Singapore itself, attempting to bridge present limits on international mobility (how I’d
love for you to join me on a walk, something video footage palely replicates) with my own
movement within the city.
Returning to Singapore, we can observe that the label of city-state is more than a political
descriptor or shorthand for population size: its city-ness and urbanity is interwoven within
Singaporeans’ own popular images and understandings of the country. Blocky, brightly-
painted public housing blocks nest the everyday Singaporean family, while flashy, glass-
panelled skyscrapers are concrete nodes for abstract flows of finance, knowledge, and
human capital which power a kind of prosperity (rendered today as ‘global competitiveness’).
Iconic pieces of architecture serve as synecdoche for entire swathes of Singapore, as if a
Singaporean spirit could be swaddled in concrete and eco-friendly paint, mathematically
perfected, raised through the stewardship of urban planner, a consortium of real estate
developers, and constructed through poorly-remunerated transient labour.
The heart of representations of Singapore: a view of the Central Business District. Towering
hulks compete for visual attention, squeezing out the blue and green.4
3
For art exhibitions, I have Charles Lim’s SEA State (2016, NTU Center for Contemporary Arts
Singapore), the photography of Sim Chih Yin in mind, and Robert Zhao’s work in mind. Werner
Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness (1992) left a deep impression on me, although its decontextualized
reading of Kuwait does risk abstracting away the significant political violence involved before.
4
All pictures in this essay were taken by the author.
6Three Stories about Transformations
Such materialist visions of Singapore seem to suggest that nature is either fundamentally
incompatible with a distinctly Singaporean mode of progress, or endorses a more ecological-
scientific understanding of nature as something to be carefully controlled and optimised.
There is a fine line between understanding nature as helpless and bearing scars and
atavistically positing a form of nature that transcends human societies, one sacred and
demanding insulation from worldly matters of greed and human vision of transformation.
Both these narratives of nature are of course, illusory. Other histories, other readings are
possible. We should not seek some atavistic return to ‘nature’: environmental scholars like
William Cronon have long been vocal against conjuring up some “mythical wilderness” to
escape history, and the troubles of the modern day.5 These practices escape the
responsibility implied through man’s place in this world. Neither does a notion of “sustainable
growth” seem completely adequate here: sustainable here serves as an adjective, and what
is ultimately to be sustained is, of course, growth. Tinker with production, tighten
regulations, and environmental problems can be averted, it is implied. As I write this essay,
Singapore’s newly-renamed Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment continues to
figure out its path forward— presumably beyond being a Ministry of Environment and Water
Resources. There is time to see how this plays out—but not much.
Perhaps my video essay appears too subdued or plaintive at times. Is such a form of
inquiry at odds with the discourse of crisis and emergency? A tone of emergency, if not
alarm, is crucial in pushing for various reforms and reconfigurations, but there are different
ways to sustain understandings of human entanglement with the environment. I’ve
approached this video essay not only from the perspective of a conservationist, but as
someone thinking about deep histories of the wider environment. What is built and what is
natural is less clear when considering the longue durée of wider sociopolitical, economic,
and identity-building processes. Yet, I am cautious not to introduce false equivalence, given
the immense pace of this development. While the Colony of Singapore added three square
kilometers of reclaimed land in 146 years, post-independence Singapore expanded the
mainland by 138 square kilometers in the first three decades of rule, amounting to at least
one-sixth of its landmass today.6 Increasingly the bulldozers seem to belong to the wrong
side of history, but there are no quick fixes to be found solely in ‘greener’ architecture, or
the preservation of pockets of space in the absence of more fundamental ecological shifts.
Singapore’s own political economy and tangible existence continues to be enmeshed with
deeply extractive, highly ambitious projects subordinating natural resources, environments
and spaces to that of growth.
Meaning
I was seized by various images of Clementi Forest that went viral last December: drone
footage of its misty, expansive greenery shot by nature enthusiast Jonathan Teo upheaved
5
Cronon, William, Wilderness.
6
Powell, Lost Coast.
7Three Stories about Transformations
my understanding of natural spaces.7 The land seems otherworldly, an effect aided by the
wide-angle lens and the drone operator’s decision to trace a small stream twisting and
winding through the shrubbery. Only occasionally do other human beings show up, and
when they appear, they are tiny, and awed by nature too. This footage is a powerful visual
and affective argument to conserve the forest in a way that other well-crafted, technical
arguments to conserve areas of nature in Singapore have not been. There is little impetus
to conserve when people cannot visualize what is at stake. Conceptualising a wider human
condition, a wider epoch, is not a task uniquely suited to words.
The significance of nature and the environment, and what relationship it shares with
humans—in my case, Singaporeans—is of course contested. Homo sapiens dwell within the
environment; however, existing regimes surrounding management, access, and even
exploitation of the environment are often justified through language that naturalises the
status quo. An imperative to develop the land is ‘pragmatic’, within an irresistible need to
make room for new forms of growth or human habitation. It is one thing for an early post-
independence government to destroy forests in a rural region of Singapore—the swampland
of Jurong has no political constituents, it might have been sincerely believed. Or another to
insist that “the dead have to make way for the living”, a line of argument repeated ad
nauseum whenever cemeteries are exhumed for housing and transport developments –
whether ‘development’ in this instance was a false dichotomy still seems an open question.8
In these cases, what visuality alongside a deeper historical consideration can provide is the
opportunity to give hitherto-unquantifiable factors their due consideration, to offer a sense
of what is truly irreplaceable, to help grasp the complexity and fragility of ecologies.
More significantly, diminishing the significance of man’s relationship with nature made
possible the erasure of Singapore’s own troubled relationship with its indigenous
communities, or even the existence of these communities. The Orang Laut (lit. ‘Sea People'),
who inhabited various islands off Singapore’s southern coast, prior to being moved to the
Singaporean mainland by the 1990s, were one of the few discrete, indigenous, and nomadic
communities, their culture and society intimately intertwined with living at the sea. Islands
like Pulau Semakau or Pulau Seking, of course, are not untouched natural spaces, but spaces
of deep environmental knowledge and ways of being.9 The unilateral 1983 decision by
Singapore’s Jurong Town Corporation to acquire Pulau Seking, and a plan 10 years later to
transform Pulau Semakau into a landfill complex represent a technocratic antithesis to
indigenous values. Fishing was at best an informal activity unlogged in GDP calculations,
and their islands mattered only within a utilitarian calculus for land-waste, oil-refining, or
cargo-processing. What I regret not reproducing in my video essay are the stories of the
7
Teo, Clementi Forest.
8
Au-Yong, ‘Tengah Air Base’; Han, ‘Land-starved’; Berger, ‘Make Way’. It was also well-known that
the campus of my old secondary school in the neighbourhood of Bishan, and the training school for
my basic military training in on offshore Pulau Tekong, were built on cemeteries.
9
Fu, Dumpster Diving.
8Three Stories about Transformations
Orang Laut, but the very inaccessibility of these islands (geographically and legally) mirrors
their gradual, unpublicised assimilation into an undifferentiated, totalising ‘modernity’.10
Pulau Ubin, one of Singapore’s few remaining accessible islands, is an odd symbol itself.
Rural charm, underdeveloped island, touristic attraction?
The folly of an ‘anthropocentric’ thinking is to overly privilege homo sapien, for not all
humans and forms of human life are judged equal—as I have just discussed. Another shift,
perhaps of equal importance, has occurred over time. Theorists like Michel Foucault and
Wendy Brown have long noted the spread of neoliberal rationality, an “inventive,
constructivist, modernizing force” that seeks to capture various spheres of human life within
the logic of the market, competition, and entrepreneurship.11 Neoliberalism takes man to be
homo economicus not just within economic categories, but to be the key actor in the
commodification of everything.12 Simultaneously, an increasing logic of abstraction
undergirds the many tangible transformations of landscape, environment, and nature:
production gives way to finance, space-use is increasingly dictated by notions of ‘property’
and ‘real estate’, while devices of commodity contracts or aggregated growth figures diffuse
away responsibility to the environment, responsibility even to mankind. Even the camera
lens is more attuned to the concrete and anthropological granularities of life than this
slippery over-abstraction.
10
Scott, Seeing Like a State.
11
Davies, Neoliberalism.
12
While the idea of ‘homo economicus’ dates back to the interwar years, it is well-discussed in
Brown, Undoing the Demos and Turner, Neo-Liberal Ideology.
9Three Stories about Transformations
Another question of representation arises when the subjects do not just belong to the
past, but have never been recorded. These histories have been erased and obscured,
sometimes deliberately, as is the case for now-illegal Cambodian sand exports, other times
simply through the process of forgetting which long cycles of development and
redevelopment entail. In these shadow economies, or processes of engineering naturalised
over time, who will speak? Thousands of tons of sand, millions of litres of oil gushing through
pipelines: who can speak? The future of environments, it seems, depends on ecological
consciousness, but also historical identity, and a form of witnessing. ‘Green-washing’
appears remarkably easy if nature is understood as a tabula rasa, rather than a complex
ecosystem that man has always tried to shape or silence within significant constraints. Even
“[t]he history of water”, Sunil S. Amrith writes, “shows that nature has never truly been
conquered”. It is a site of struggle, deeply linked to histories of “restless development”. 13
Here and everywhere, nature and the environment is a space, a transit, a promise, for human
and non-human life.
Method
There has been plenty of exciting theoretical work surrounding urban space and nature. I do
not wish to caricature the role of critical theory or aesthetics, which are irreplaceable in
providing new frameworks with which to think about the environment. Art and theory are
not separate from research or thinking, within this wider awareness that aesthetics and
politics are linked through their “distribution of the sensible”.14 What is self-evidently
accepted as reasonable, plausible, and doable—in this instance, humanity’s place in the
wider environment—can quickly be revealed to be arbitrary. Sensory perception and
aesthetic impression all facilitate this.
In one sense, a video essay might be understood as a text of mere academic persuasions,
its claims benefitting by way of near-constant illustrations in sight and sound. Still, visuality
does not always have to be subservient to argument or even authorial design. In the work
of Paris-based, Singaporean photographer Melisa Teo, trees offer company and solitude,
and inhabit a city unnatural, even hostile to them. Light is constitutive of our understanding
of a tree-filled nature, assigned an agentic status: the camera becomes a “transmitter and
translator of light’s message” in her highly intuitive, impressionistic expression.15 Another
Singaporean photographer, Sim Chi Yin, practices a photography that is investigative, yet
discomforting in documenting the inputs of development concealed from the public eye.16
Drone photography or telephoto lenses produce images of mounds of sand, conveyed on
barges equally gigantic. Human figures are largely absent in both their works:
unrecognisable, virtually assimilated into a psychic, light-based dialectic with trees for Teo,
unsuited to post-industrial, post-human atmosphere that these landscapes are dominated
13
Amrith, Unruly Waters.
14
Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics.
15
Teo, Les Arbres de Paris.
16
Sim, Shifting Sands.
10Three Stories about Transformations
by. More broadly, artistic interpretations and visions for nature also echo the “literary
aspects of geography”, between a state (acting as author), the text (the environment), and
the reader (its citizens): narratives and landscape are both constructed.17 To ignore a
specifically authorial intent, whether at the level of development, aesthetic, or academic
statement, or even the everyday narratives constructed around the environment, seems
greatly inadequate.
The concept of terrain vague, as theorized by Ignasi de Sola-Morales (d. 2001), both
fascinates me and informs my overall argument.18 Blurry, ambiguous, and yes, liminal (the
resurgence of the term elsewhere implies an interest in these interstitial areas) sites of
paused development, overgrown areas, or unkempt lots all serve as “counter-spaces”, per
Patrick Barron.19 If terrains vague describe “containers of a fragmented shared history”,
where imperfect memory-making and alternatives to commodified, privatized, and
controlled urban spaces can be explored, Singapore seems like an unlikely place to do so.
Spaces which are appropriated seem to have order quickly restored to them, and as my
essay implies, ‘wasteland’, ‘wilderness’, or ‘emptiness’ are often pounced upon as vessels for
capital and development. However, the significance of these spaces are mutable, and even
controlled environments display some contradictions—the logic (perhaps euphemisms) of
mixed-use development, acquisition, or regeneration in Singapore often give rise to a
boggling hodgepodge of lots that unsettle how we feel in the city, and question how city
life, nature, and the environment is organized and controlled.
A crumbling ornamental wall near the disused Kallang airport. Might a mansion once have
stood here?
17
Jamieson, Sand in my infinity pool. My discussion of Sim and Jamieson draw heavily from Novak,
‘To Build a City-State’.
18
Barron and Mariani, Terrain Vague.
19
Ibid: 1.
11Three Stories about Transformations
Nonetheless, I am aware that in highly developmental, capitalist states like Singapore,
intervening in debates about human activity surrounding the environment might require
more grounded references to real spaces and places—even a Faustian submission to its
technocratic, administrative ways of ‘seeing’. Various organisations actively participate in
processes of community consultation or advocacy, well-versed in the jargon and
frameworks appealing to bureaucracies. These have been successful at times, even if their
issues and visions may not have penetrated a general Singaporean consciousness.20 If there
is one word missing thus far, it is that of justice.
The normative and the descriptive need not clash in any account of nature or the
environment, as influential works like Naomi Klein’s Capitalism vs. The Climate suggest—
even the quietly urgent narration of David Attenborough across his documentaries implies
this. Rachel Carson’s clear-sighted writing on environmental degradation is scientifically
detailed, but its most vivid moments are found in warnings of imminent danger: “The road
we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we
progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster”.21 Does collage cease to be argument?
There is always a strong temptation to let images speak for themselves, especially when an
approximately fifteen-minute video only permits so many words. Yet, assembling images
without providing them context seems to reproduce their very ahistoricity and
unrootedness, offering little difference from a passing glance at a quietly-significant building
or the silence of reclaimed land beneath the feet of leisurely beachgoers. I have in mind
Jacques Rancière’s reminder that “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be
said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak”.22 What can prosaic,
if brief interventions offer?
At worst, collage-like works might be supplementary to these wider, deeply
transformative projects. Nonetheless, claims surrounding justice are deep challenges to
existing paradigms of land use, development, or access, and confronting the status quo also
requires shifting intuition and sympathies. Even the most economistic accounts of climate
change policy suggest that current inaction stems from undervaluing the costs of the future,
alongside what obligations current generations have to the next.23 Out of sight, out of mind?
To instead anchor the visuals of the environment and the concealed histories and
relationships in familiar sights is a strong reminder of what our actual lives are tethered to.
Even Australia’s apocalyptic bushfires, or the melting ice caps might appear distant in a way
water flowing from my tap, or the ground in the city, cannot be. So, what can short vignettes
offer? I intend for this video essay, for all its breadth, to serve as a small intervention.
Recalling the late Mark Fisher:
20
Goh, Nature Society, 245–76.
21
Carson,Silent Spring.
22
Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics.
23
See Weisbach and Sunstein, ‘Climate Change’, 433; Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time.
12Three Stories about Transformations
“The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked
the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing
can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.”24
Making
To think of natural and environmental spaces, resources, substances, and symbols on
multiple levels runs the risk that reflections become a mishmash of concepts. Within my
video essay, I have tried to incorporate non-traditional approaches and diverse
perspectives, whether they be about the unintended consequences of human design,
inequality, or caution us about impending conflict. At times, nature and the environment
seem a pale shade in historical or urban writing, owing to the spectre of environmental
determinism. There is far more room for human agency than what poorer, but popular, books
like Jared Diamond’s suggest. Yet, how to pick up the pieces, how to move forward, proves
difficult, and it is these difficulties that provide windows of opportunity for conversation. I
also wonder if my own video essay depicts the environment within the same dynamic of
power now understood to be problematic when discussing other societies, other groups—
that of victimhood. There is a fine line between understanding nature as helpless, bearing
scars; or to posit a form of nature that transcends human societies, sacred and demanding
insulation from worldly matters of greed and human vision of transformation. Both these
narratives of nature are of course, illusory. Interpreting nature and its relationship to human
beings is an immensely personal process, albeit situated in wider social currents.
Recent developments in environmental discourse and action, both academic and popular,
affirm this idea that other forms of living, other relationships with nature are possible. In a
state often averse to mass, spontaneous political movements, Singapore’s first-ever Climate
Rally on the 21st of September, 2019, was a powerful expression and articulation of various
eco-anxieties, visions of justice, and alternative futures. Its 1,700 attendees may pale in
comparison to the size of similar events around the world, but it was standing amongst
various strangers in a small city park that provided a sense of hope. Phrases like
“environmental justice” or “future obligations” rang out, while a collective, dramaturgical die-
in evoked the stakes of inaction. There was talk of collapse, but also of transition and energy
revolutions, the rhythm to these discourse equal parts unfamiliar but tantalising. Here was a
repudiation of a glacial, inadequate pace for environmental policy and practice in Singapore,
in favour of vocalising explicit, yet informed criticism. Few other movements as pointed have
sustained this critical mass, in an already-critical point of inflexion in history. A recent
collection of essays, Eating Chilli Crab in the Anthropocene, was not the product of well-
established climate scientists or longstanding theorists, but students and recent graduates
of Singapore’s only liberal arts college—which maintains strong environmental and urban
studies programmes trumping what Oxford, for all its academic and theoretical rigour, offers.
Discursive environments also matter.
24
Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 86-7.
13Three Stories about Transformations
The process of producing the essay’s visuals has been rewarding and eye-opening, even
as it has been tiring at times. Serendipity produces footage, in the form of sand-barges
appearing on the horizon or when curious park-goers that stop and chat, pointing me to new
vantage points. My own understanding of being in nature, walking through the parks,
reservoirs, beaches, and bathing in the strange symbiosis and tension between the built and
natural environment informs this essay. It is, of course, subjective like all readings of nature,
whether descriptive or prescriptive. Walking itself serves as a methodology, a form of
thinking “in the presence of others” rooted in the “unpredictability of opening ourselves to
possibility” amidst moments of resistance, realization and serendipity.25 It is deeply sensory
and experiential, emphasising a more embodied form of knowledge linking the mind, body,
and environment together at a rhythm of each space to be investigated. Much has been
made of a turn to “affect theory” in various critical studies to theorise subjectivity and inter-
body flows, or the “queer theory” that unsettles norms and draws attention to the
“hierarchies of humanness” constituting and regulating norms.26 I have become more
attuned to the immense privilege of ubiquitous access to cameras, where their increasing
affordability (or presence in our pockets) facilitate recording and observing differences over
time, or helping to assemble a narrative and counter-narrative. Various snapshots, with all
their immediacy, also ground these projects in a distinct time and space, while offering
unexpected insights of their own.
Environmental histories and video essays uncover hidden, obscured experiences, offer
new frames of thinking about the environment that might be better suited to the scale of the
environmental crisis and increasing sense of displacement from these tensions. Yet, this
environmental witnessing is ultimately anchored in the various things already in plain sight:
streets and parks already in use, the buildings constantly being erected for one purpose or
another, the bevy of natural organisms we come into contact with in daily life. We are not,
and have never been, separate.
25
Instone and Taylor, ‘Thinking about inheritance’.
26
On affect theory see Hemmings, Invoking Affect. On queer theory see Giffney and Hird, Queering
the Non/Human.
14Three Stories about Transformations
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