This book is rich in detail, its case-studies saying as much about the human quest for a sanitised, modern and liveable city, and the power and reach of the state in the creation of the garden city ideal, as about the non-humans of the title. Timothy P. Barnard’s introductory essay explains how the book is situated within the Anthropocene — and what this means in a Singaporean context — but places the history of non-humans in longer perspective, explaining how Singapore came to its own Anthropocene early on with the environmental change of the nineteenth century stripping much of the indigenous forest — and thus biodiversity — of the island for good. Establishing this long-view early on places the chapters into context, making the connection of species decline with human socio-political circumstances.
The chapters build on this, with a clear theme running throughout each on the changing relationship between humans and the natural world of Singapore as the nation-states’ own political-economic fortunes have altered. All essays focus on the transitional period from colonial rule to independence and beyond, whose shifts are (sometimes dramatically) viewed through the lens of human/non-human relations. Like the human population of Singapore, many of the non-human inhabitants under discussion are also recent newcomers, who have mixed alongside more established residents. Sometimes their stories are surprising, and this book does a service to Singaporean history by revealing the unexpected or unobvious, revealing the global diversity and richness of a non-human history that is frequently forgotten in contemporary Singapore.
Anthony D. Medrano, for example, tells the story of the tilapia, a ubiquitous cichlid found in almost every watery space on, or around, Singapore island. The tilapia is not however indigenous to the island but was introduced only in 1944, as a wartime food. The changing balance of migrant versus indigenous species is raised in other chapters too, whether it is the songbirds of Faizah Zakaria’s contribution that shows how introduced or migrant species have quickly overtaken the habitats of their indigenous cousins or, as Miles Powell showcases, how — in the case of oceanariums and aquariums —non-local species have been imported for their excitement value, rather than for their relevance to the local environment or culture. In all these cases, the popularity of animals has risen and fallen with the times, due to (often linked) changes in state or popular sentiment.
The idea of ‘nature contained’ — part of the title of one of Barnard’s previous collections (Nature contained: Environmental histories of Singapore, edited by Timothy P. Barnard, Singapore, NUS Press, 2014) — is also pertinent here as all essays, whether they relate to the caged songbirds, the imported animals in zoos and aquariums, or the crocodiles and monkeys increasingly contained within dwindling reserves or water catchments, reveal how these animals seem progressively anachronistic and out of place in the modern cityscape. The exception is the mosquito which, as Barnard demonstrates, has thrived in the new concrete environment which sprang up after the 1960s and provides the ideal domesticated breeding-scape for the dengue-carrying aedes mosquito, complicating the ideal of the sanitised city that both Barnard and Nicole Tarulevicz see as having being realised under post-independence Singaporean governance. The eradication of disease-carrying insects has otherwise been a success story in the city-state, synonymous with modernisation. So too has the eradication of animals, whether purposefully through culling campaigns (such as the mynah, discussed by Zakaria, or the macaque of Barnard and Jennifer Yip’s chapter) or inadvertently through habitat loss — fundamentally reshaping the human/non-human relationship.
Today, this relationship is commonly expressed through the keeping of domestic pets, especially dogs, but in the past this association was more complicated with the semi-domestication of wild animals, such as monkeys or birds, or through veneration or uneasy co-living with more dangerous species. As Esmond Chuah Meng Soh explains, the history of crocodiles mirrors the history of the city-state, metamorphosing from feared or mythologised beasts to commodities under the new economic regime of the 1970s, before being pushed to the margins or behind glass in Singapore’s modern, predominantly tertiary economy.
Such chapters remind us too of the emotional response to animals, transforming often in response to NIMBYism as the city increasingly encroached on the edges of the jungle or, conversely, the rise of new conservation and animal rights groups from the 1960s onwards. Whether an escaped animal from a zoo, like Twiggy the escaped panther who — as Choo Ruizhi explains — suffered an ignominious fate at the hands of a hunt and destroy taskforce that far surpassed the panther’s capabilities, or the macaques who were shot by hired hunters and the military, as told by Barnard and Yip, attitudes toward what is acceptable in living with nature have changed significantly over the past 50 or more years.
With some means of dealing with animals or insects surviving as a legacy of the colonial past, from the 1980s Singapore has significantly reinvented the place and treatment of non-humans in the ideal of the Garden City. Although animals (and especially insects) still occasionally complicate the vision of the hypermodern city in nature, non-humans have been moulded to fit this ideal. A few lucky beasts however have been incorporated into the vision (whether indigenous or not, or even created inventions) as tourist attractions and symbols, or as examples of a recently improved biodiversity, with acceptable animals becoming part of a unique urban identity.
While present-day Singapore is lauded for encouraging greater biodiversity than that of 50 of more years earlier, we are also left with something of a gloomy impression of the island-nations’ natural environment in its transition to prioritising human, rather than non-human, needs. The story of the otters is a case-in-point. Attracting a huge amount of attention, they are modern-day media darlings. Yet, their total population is only around 150 and, while smooth-coated otters have a long history in Southeast Asia, these contemporary creatures only arrived in the 1970s, swimming over from Malaysia. They are not descendants of established animals. The histories that these chapters collectively tell, however, explain how — whether for better or for worse — human lives are intimately connected to the non-human world, and maintaining this connection can lead reciprocally to a sustainable, robust and flourishing human experience.
