One person’s quest to save Dover Forest

In the middle of Dover Forest East is an aircraft carrier. Or, rather, that’s what some humans call a towering, 20-metre-tall tree that dominates a patch of forest land. There is an enormity and an absurdity to its trunk’s H-shaped formation. Criss-crossing branches of varying thickness create an intricate weave pattern around the trunk. It looks as if two lovers are locked in embrace, each with one foot in the moist, brown-leaf-littered forest floor. Other plants keep their distance, as if in deference to a complex, hybrid, otherworldly mutant.

What exactly is it? The aircraft carrier’s host tree is a durian, probably planted by the kampungers who lived on this land before the government acquired it in the 1970s.

Wrapping itself around the durian is a banyan, Ficus virens, which is endangered in Singapore. To my untrained eye, it appears as if the banyan has crept along the forest floor and worked its way up the durian.

But that’s not how banyans grow. It happens in reverse: top to bottom. Banyans belong to the fig family. Birds often disperse their tiny seeds on branches near the forest’s canopy. When they germinate, their roots grow downwards, in search of nutrients in the forest floor, or in the trunk of the host tree itself. Over time the banyan’s roots might resemble the tree’s trunk. The banyan is effectively strangling—and nourishing itself through—the abandoned durian.

From that union new life blooms. This includes the tiny, glow-in-the-dark mushrooms, Filoboletus manipularis, that drew the attention of The Guardian for a piece on bioluminescence (thereby immortalising Dover Forest).

Meanwhile, in the crevices of the banyan’s strangling roots one finds a far less agreeable species: the Singapore tarantula, Phlogiellus inermis. Each individual’s home is recognisable because of the wispy, white tunnel web covering it.

When he walks Jom around the forest, Chua Chin Tat, Singaporean activist, conservationist and champion of Dover Forest East (and West), asks Weilee Yap, a videographer, and me to move in closer to see if we can spot a tarantula. I jump back. Thankfully—for me—none emerges.

“The four things we mentioned [durian, banyan, mushrooms, tarantula] are just what’s visible at eye level,” Chin Tat says. “On the high branches of this tree, you have a lot of parasitic plants growing on them.”

One is a mistletoe whose flowers provide nectar for butterflies and other insects, and whose leaves feed caterpillars. Squirrels nest in the upper reaches. And when the banyan fruits, he says, its thousands of figs feed many different species of birds.

“You have a whole mini ecosystem coming down and coalescing onto this one individual, so it's like an aircraft carrier.”

The one troubling thing on the aircraft carrier is a small metal plate, bearing the number 829, which has been affixed onto the trunk of the host durian tree. The plate represents a survey, and for most individuals here a way station on their journeys to their graves.

Singapore’s Housing Development Board (HDB) is about to raze Dover Forest East. Though he no longer believes it can be saved, Chin Tat (doverforest.sg) is on a mission to wake Singaporeans from our stupor, to get us to pay more attention to these secondary forests that we are losing.

In Singapore, such studies are published right before development begins. HDB called for a public consultation, inviting Singaporeans to submit feedback on the study.

This jolted Chin Tat and other environmentalists into action. He started exploring the forest in February 2021, “...to see what I can find in the forest, to raise awareness that this is a patch of forest that is worth conserving.”

At the time, Chin Tat was a math teacher in an international school with minimal knowledge of Singapore’s biodiversity. Since then, the autodidact has morphed into a little forest sadhu. As we walk through Dover Forest East, he refers to species by both their common and scientific names, points out the call of the changeable hawk eagle, Nisaetus cirrhatus, and distinguishes the edible (such as betel and pepper leaves) from the poisonous (such as certain berries).

He is often dressed in black boots, faded denim jeans, a long-sleeve shirt, a camo-green ranger’s hat, and a sling bag in which he carries supplies, like repellent, for us urban ignoramuses. Tuck your pants into your socks, spray the repellent all over your shoes (to ward off ants), he regularly reminds us.

Chin Tat has a historical and geographical connection to the forest. He is a fourth-generation member of the Hokkien Chua kampung that used to exist there, the community that probably ate the durians from the aircraft carrier’s host tree.

His late father lived in the kampung, but moved out before Chin Tat was born, ahead of the government acquiring the land. The only remnant of the kampung is the Hokkien clan temple off Jalan Kebaya. Though it still hosts the odd ceremony and opera, its main use today seems to be as a thoroughfare for commuters moving between condominiums and the Dover MRT station.

Chin Tat lives with his wife Masako and hamster Muffin in Ghim Moh, and from their unit he gets a slender view of the forest. When he submitted his extensive feedback to HDB in March 2021, he did so as a local. The forest is his backyard.

On July 29th 2021, HDB invited Chin Tat and a few others for a closed-door session: “I was hoping that this session will be a dialogue, a conversation about whether the forest should be conserved or not. But what we were faced with in the end was a session to give us closure on the matter.”

HDB’s press releases were ready. The very next day, it announced that Dover Forest East would be developed, while Dover Forest West would be set aside for 10 years. Singapore’s mainstream media presented it as a victory for consultation and conservation—the West is being saved!—though environmentalists were more sceptical. Yes, HDB has committed to creating a park in the West, but it may be very small. Most of Dover Forest West, in other words, might also be razed in 10 years time.

Chin Tat now wants “to bring up to the attention of the public and to the authorities that there are these things in Dover Forest West that are worth conserving, which is what we should have done for Dover Forest East 10 years ago.”

He is focusing his efforts on two areas, including raising awareness about the value of secondary forests, and prompting a rethink of how we engage in public consultation.

Some might instinctively place a premium on primary forests—think bits of Bukit Timah Nature Reserve or MacRitchie—though there is an urgent need for Singaporeans to focus on the rich secondary forests on the verge of destruction.

They are often called “exotic-dominated secondary forests”, though Chin Tat prefers the term “novel secondary forests”. He believes they are, to some degree, the result of globalisation and climate change.

“The assemblage of plants that you get in this new type of forest is different from our primary forests. ‘Novel secondary forest’ sort of hints that this is the new type of forest that we will be seeing in this age. So this is the age of the Anthropocene, climate crisis. So with this kind of new conditions, you get new forests as well...animals seem to take to this area well…maybe there is a reason why you have this assemblage of trees, maybe more scholarly attention should be paid to forests like this.”

Conservationists everywhere are wary of invasive exotics, which can lead to local biodiversity loss. In Dover Forest these include the albizia, Falcataria falcata, a tree that can grow to 40m, and the African tulip, Spathodea campanulata, whose delightful orange flowers are strewn across the banks of a forest creek. Above the soothing sounds of the running water, Chin Tat shares a more moderate, nuanced view of such invasive exotics.

“When you have land that is cleared, the trees come and they grow back. But the problem with this is that when the trees grow back, it is those trees that are specially adapted to abandoned land. They have poor soil. And you know, some exotic species just grow faster than our native species.”

Consider the albizia, which is native to the Moluccas, New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands. It has a poor reputation in Singapore because of its soft wood and shallow root system, which means branches break off easily and entire trunks are prone to collapse, posing a threat to those around.

But when branches break off they leave behind holes in the trunk: “These tree holes are prime real estate for a lot of bird species.” These include the oriental pied hornbill, Anthracoceros albirostris and the long tailed parakeet, Psittacula longicauda. So too the Asian honey bee, Apis cerana. The changeable hawk eagle, meanwhile, likes to build its eyrie on albizias because they are tall and airy— and thus offer jittery parents a good vantage point.

How should Singaporeans value all of this? “Pragmatic” developmentalists tend to scoff at the perceived naïveté of environmentalists like Chin Tat. If only they could set aside their emotions and focus on the big picture, so it goes, they’ll realise that Singapore’s continued growth and success require ever more construction.

Perhaps to pre-empt this, Chin Tat, the former math teacher, is equipped with a range of facts, numbers and calculations at his fingertips. He proposed alternative developmental sites to HDB. So too, in parliament, did Christopher de Souza and Rachel Ong, MPs of the area. Chin Tat has also suggested raising the density of developments, including the imminent one in Dover Forest East, so as to minimise their footprint, and corresponding forest destruction.

None of these suggestions convinced HDB, and it’s not clear to him why.

Part of the bigger problem, Chin Tat says, is the disjoint in expectations between HDB and the public as to the actual purpose of the consultation. Though HDB is “genuinely interested in getting feedback from the public”, he says that it does so because it wants to mitigate damage as much as possible—not because it might reconsider the development itself. That’s a foregone conclusion.

People like him, by contrast, go into the engagement with “the possibility to conserve the forests” foremost in their minds.

“HDB should have done something to dispel this illusion from the minds of the people who they invite to the engagement session.”

Chin Tat compares the relationship between government agencies and members of the public to that between parent and child: “The toddler can say what he or she wants, the kindly parent will be patient, listening to every single word, but in the end, it is the parent’s decision. That decision might have already been made. And it will never change.”

Yet he also believes the onus is on ordinary Singaporeans to get involved, to get passionate about these areas, well ahead of the development curve.

If one observes the way events unfolded with Dover Forest East, there is a troubling parallel with Bukit Brown. Only after developmental plans were announced did many Singaporeans cultivate an interest in and sense of belonging to them.

Essentially, if Singapore’s land-use decision-making flow (see below: Current) could somehow be reversed (Proposed), it could lead to greater equity between groups and generations.

In contemporary public policy discourse, some suggest replacing “public engagement/consultation” with “public deliberation” and “citizen co-creation”. The sense is that the former still alludes to a passive citizenry, while the latter (“deliberation” and “co-creation”) points to a genuine recalibrating of the relationship between citizens and our chosen representatives, one in which a future is truly created together.

It sounds lofty and inspiring. Yet even as Singaporeans cheer activists like Chin Tat, as they slowly prod society forward, many will feel a little cynicism about it all. A ruling party that has long governed with top-down brashness is unlikely to suddenly entertain notions of co-creation.

After all, the government won’t even disclose its population targets. Singaporeans still don’t know for whom we’re building all these flats.

(HDB and URA do not publish any population targets that their respective plans are based on. In its response to Jom, URA pointed us to a parliamentary statement by Indranee Rajah, minister, in which she states that the government "does not have a population target". HDB did not respond to our request for comment.)

What, then, of the ecosystem-supporting banyan-durian? What of the delicate, finger-sized, glow-in-the-dark mushrooms? What of that little tarantula too shy to greet Chin Tat, Weilee and me?

Well, perhaps we should feel some satisfaction that they’ve all been recorded in some ledger in some study in some office.

Rather than aircraft carrier, maybe it’s better to just call it “Specimen #829”, in keeping with our technocratic method of reducing every being to a number and equation that fits into some grand model of economic efficiency.

In a few days, Singapore will eliminate Specimen #829. And we will all move on.

Get involved. Follow Chua Chin Tat’s work at doverforest.sg.

Watch Jom's video (our first) on this story.

Sudhir Vadaketh is Jom’s editor-in-chief.

Additional research by Jean Hew, Jom's head of research.

Letters in response to this piece can be sent to sudhir@jom.media. All will be considered for publication on our “Letters to the editor” page.