All Will Come Again Into Its Strength
By: Leonard Yip
Tags: Clementi Forest, Anthropocene, Environment, Conservation, Singapore

The Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch for the unprecedented age in which we live. In stratigraphy, epochs can be identified and defined by the mark they leave in the earth’s geological record: glacial deposits from the Pleistocene’s great ice ages, for example, or the fossils of species that flourished in the climate stability of the Holocene.

The idea that we are living in a new age, with extensive and often catastrophic environmental changes of its own, has grown in prominence over the last decade. The impact of mankind’s activity has become a major geological force, defining this epoch by the work of our hands: Anthropocene, the age of human beings. Because it is a measure of what our activity will leave behind, the Anthropocene is also largely a history of extensive scarring — toxic chemicals from oil well blowouts scorched into the soil, microplastics settling in great dunes on the deepest ocean floors; the vast tracts of natural forest cleared out for the farming of monocultures. It is an age whose changes take the shape of damage and loss.

Traces of the Anthropocene relentlessly dog our journey through the woodlands and out onto the Green Corridor. The forest cuts abruptly at an iron fence, through whose gaps we emerge into a gravel-strewn clearing. Around us lie strips of plastic construction tape, and yawning cross-sections of disused piping. We walk past plastic bottles, discarded surgical masks, and more corrugated fencing, cutting off portions of the woods from entry. They tell of what this forest’s eventual death might look like, and, like little omens, portend a wider extinction event yet to come.

As we head south along the Corridor, Sara speaks of her grandmother’s death. She had written about their relationship shortly before her passing, a recollection winding gently between homeland and heart, remembering their lives by the east coast before land reclamation shifted the shoreline entirely. Grandma told me about how she used to take walks with Grandpa to the beach, and how the salty smell of the sea would waft mischievously through the house in the evening, Sara wrote. Now, between her house and the sea lie tar roads, bustling hawker centres, markets, malls.

After her grandmother’s death, she tells us, the loss was felt as an unmooring. This was the only word she could find that would say something for the speechless grief of the months. Through this word, the loss of her grandmother and their neighbourhood settled together into the same ground of longing — a ship losing its anchor, a sea unfixed from its coastland, and the land itself lost to modern development, harrowing the shape of memory.

Sara is not the only one to have felt the deaths of person and place as such keenly similar wounds. Listening to his dying father intone childhood streets that no longer exist, Boey Kim Cheng wrote of how it was as if he was piecing together the alleys, / the streets and neighbourhood / of his body, reassembling / the ruined city / of his vanished self. By writing dying flesh as ruined place, Boey speaks of how tightly-woven a land can be to relationship and personhood. It echoes as a warning of how greatly the disruptions of the Anthropocene could unmoor us all. The landscapes we live within provide comfort, solace and familiarity, and their features form the contour of the ways in which we have loved and lost one another.

This is a hurt that turns reciprocal. Where losing a person can be bound up with losing a place, the death of a place can also feel like the death of a person. The poet Leong Liew Geok memorialises this in her record of a beloved albizia’s felling, as she figures the violence done to it with the shock of abduction, then murder. Vanished without smoke, the tree outside her window is shot from one spot…a triple execution. In her poem, she grieves for it as if it were human, and grieves the fact that we so often do not. If trees could yell in decibels / drown the drone of saws / in final screeching falls / we might be less careless / to cut and carry so efficiently. Fallen albizia branches mark the path down the Green Corridor, amputated from their trunks, and Leong’s poem shades the way with a foreboding potency.

Not all of the Anthropocene’s terrains, however, provoke only devastation and despair. As we follow the bitumen track down towards Holland Road, the landscape on either side falls away under a fierce flush of sunlight. The pathway we stand on ridgelines between each end, and the view to which it opens up is maybe one of the most beautiful things I have seen in this country.

To our left, a river courses down its channel, a deep gouge of concrete built to guard the grounds from the storm surge of other canals flowing from the city. It takes its water from Sumatran squalls bursting those banks, such that the source of this river is not soil, but sky. Once, the channel was a long line of unbroken water, cutting through Old Holland Road and the southern edge of the Clementi Forest, emptying itself out into mangrove swamps at the mouth of the Pandan Reservoir. Known as the Bukit Timah First Diversion Canal, it was widened three years ago, and the other side of the channel was infilled with topsoil and transformed into a grassy gully. Past spilling creepers and granite weirs, the water flows now from open air into a cavernous hollow going under the earth, over which the Clementi Forest roots itself again in clay and stormwater.

This is one of my favourite places to run to, and I think the same can be said of the many people that I often pass by here — families, walking groups, photographers and cyclists. I’ve seen runners stop mid-stride along the track, needing more than a few moments to take in the lushness of everything around them. Egrets and whimbrels overwinter in the mini-deltas growing around the river, and in the gully, people descending to explore it tramp desire paths into the soil.

So much of this, however, remains a complicated space. It was to feed this channel that Sam’s stream and other forest habitats were concretised and torn apart, razed to make way for roads, rivers and houses. Yet at the same time, I am cognizant of how these are the same paths and dwellings which have brought others and myself into closer contact with the storm of life still seething at the forest’s heart. By the banks and at the edge of the woods, natural and human worlds are colliding into each other, and all of this becomes a kind of common ground — people of all colours and creeds, returning to the land, falling slowly in love with it.

For some long moments, the five of us stand in the bright morning’s gilding and look out. In spite of the wider forest’s imminent loss, and in defiance of the year’s compounded griefs, a poem from Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Book of Pilgrimage blazes itself in my mind:

All will come again into its strength:

the fields undivided, and the waters undammed,

the trees towering and the walls built low.

And in the valleys, people as strong

and varied as the land.