This is an extraordinarily absorbing book. On starting my first reading I had not thought that there would be much of interest for me. Having read the outputs of, and for a brief time been involved in, Peter Boomgaard's pioneering, wide-ranging and ambitious Leiden-based EDEN project (Ecology, Demography and Economy in Nusantara) from 1993, it seemed that Singapore, as a developed world city, would have little to offer in environmental terms. How could any consideration of the environmental history of this small island state match the achievements of Boomgaard and his team in understanding the complexities of the Indonesian environment and its mutual human and environmental transformations? Well, of course it can't. But what Barnard's edited volume does is provide a fascinating introduction to what were important environmental moments and events not only in the history of Singapore, but also to its influence on the environmental history of other parts of Southeast Asia.
As we might expect, in any consideration of Singapore, due attention is given to the sustained exploitation of nature for the purpose of capitalist development and the insertion of Singapore into a global economic system; the British colonial study, control, classification, and display of the natural world in the interest of furthering scientific understanding, and expressed in museums, research institutions, and learned societies; and the postcolonial construction of Singapore as an integrated and disciplined urban and ‘garden’ space.
I very much liked the editorial device of commencing each chapter with a relevant extract from ‘documents, interviews, and accounts of the events that influenced the chapters’ (p. 5). So, for example, the chapter on Alfred Russel Wallace is prefaced with an excerpt from his The Malay Archipelago; and the chapter on the Raffles Museum is preceded by extracts from The Annual Reports of the Raffles Museum and Library, newspaper accounts, and visitors’ memories.
The volume addresses many issues which have suffered from relative neglect in accounts of Singapore's history or have been influenced by uninformed conceptions of modern Singapore. Tony O'Dempsey examines environmental change in Singapore during the nineteenth century, reminding us that Thomas Stamford Raffles did not start with a clean slate. The island was already home to indigenous fishing communities; but more importantly Chinese Teochew farmers had settled there from the late eighteenth century and begun to cultivate gambier and pepper, which had enormously deleterious effects on the tropical rainforest in that both crops required substantial amounts of timber for processing and their cultivation resulted in soil exhaustion. The importance of this activity should not be understated in transforming the island's environment, and early colonial attempts at addressing the situation resulted in the establishment of a Forestry Department in 1884 to protect and reserve forests, by which time much damage had already been done. Habitat change also led to an upsurge in the number of human and domestic livestock and animal deaths from tiger attacks, a subject addressed in a chapter by Timothy Barnard and Mark Emmanuel.
John van Whye's chapter on Alfred Wallace's sojourn in Singapore reminds us of a neglected episode in Wallace's collecting adventures and the fact that, during his residence there, and though large areas of the island had already succumbed to exploitative commercial agriculture, he found much to collect at Bukit Timah and Pulau Ubin.
No consideration of Singapore's environmental history would be complete without some attention to the Botanic Gardens, recently included on the UNESCO Tentative World Heritage List. The current Director of the Gardens, Nigel Taylor, gives us an obviously informed view of its major developments. Undoubtedly the Gardens are one of the environmental and historic treasures of Singapore from their foundation in 1859 and, as Taylor indicates, they were the result of the development of colonial knowledge and were of regional importance in understanding the flora of the region, for forestry development, economic botany, and plantation agriculture. Another significant national and regional institution was the Raffles Museum (and its superb natural history collection), the precursor to the National Museum, and formally established in 1874. However, unlike the Botanic Gardens which has flourished, Timothy Barnard's chapter reveals that in postcolonial Singapore the natural history collection was under threat and seen as irrelevant to a newly emerging industrialising nation. It has survived, but was removed from the National Museum and relocated to the campus of the National University of Singapore.
Again it is not often realised that Singapore has played a significant role in the illegal trade in wildlife. Fiona Tan addresses this neglected topic with specific reference to the 1930s and the little known development of the animal welfare movement expressed in The Report of the Wild Animals and Wild Birds Committee of 1933. Another neglected topic is that of agricultural development in Singapore addressed in a chapter by Cynthia Chou, documenting a set of activities which was eventually seen to be of marginal importance in a modernising Singapore; farming was phased out from 1984 to be replaced by industrial agro-technology parks in tune with global capitalism.
The volume ends with two chapters which demonstrate the ways in which the Singapore government and Singaporeans envisage the environment and conservation. Goh Hong Yi considers the conservation movement and the work of The Nature Society, and argues that there is a growing environmental consciousness expressed in all kinds of government initiatives since the 1990s. Finally, Timothy Barnard and Corinne Heng examine Singapore's ‘greening’ policy. Indeed, through the destruction of the natural environment, the Singapore government has then created ‘a city in a garden’. Intriguingly, this strategy not only demonstrates a desire to harmonise a highly urbanised society with an artificially created nature, but also serves to symbolise and project an ordered, controlled, and environmentally friendly Singapore to the world.
The volume is important in bringing to our attention a range of relatively neglected and intriguing topics in Singapore's history, and in demonstrating that, in the environmental field, there was much that Singapore contributed to the region and the world.
