The formal window closed on 6 August. Thank you to everyone who wrote in the final hours, to those who wrote for the first time in their lives, and to the many who have never set foot in Maju and submitted anyway.
The Minister of State has said engagement will continue past the deadline, and that agencies’ responses to the feedback will be published. We are holding on to both. The plans, we were told, are not final.
But in the days since the forms closed, two questions have grown louder rather than quieter. Neither is really about fifteen hectares. Both are about the kind of country we are becoming.
The first: where was MSE?
On 7 August, Minister Grace Fu shared her thoughts publicly, explaining that her ministry does not hold a mandate over land use planning and zoning — that this sits with MND, which weighs biodiversity among many trade-offs, and that ministries take collective responsibility once Cabinet decides. In Parliament she had put it plainly: anyone hoping for a public disagreement between ministers would be disappointed.
We take the point seriously. A government that speaks with one voice is not a flaw in our system; it is part of why this country works. And a minister choosing to write directly to the public, rather than let the matter rest at the despatch box, is not nothing.
The response, though, has been sustained — a large volume of comments, the most-liked running past 1,800. Read as a whole, and setting aside the sharper edges, much of it makes the same distinction, and it is worth stating carefully:
Very few people are asking MSE to take over MND’s role. What they are asking is whether MSE advocated — what environmental concerns it raised internally, what alternatives it pressed for, and what it argued before the decision was settled. The mandate question answers who decides. It does not answer what was said on the forest’s behalf while it was still being decided.
That distinction matters more than it might seem. If a ministry for sustainability and the environment holds no mandate over the fate of a forest, then the question of who spoke for the forest becomes more pressing, not less.
So the request stands, respectfully. In the year designated for climate adaptation, were the heat, stormwater and resilience consequences of removing the canopy proposed for clearance across both sites formally assessed? By whom, at what stage, and does that assessment exist in a form the public can read?
A ministry can speak with one voice and still show its working. Transparency about that advocacy would do more for public trust than any restatement of who holds which mandate.
A word about the temperature
Some of what has been written this week has been sharp — about tone, about whether the questions in the House were met or deflected, about whether consultation is real. Frustration is information, and it would be dishonest to pretend it isn’t there.
But it is not our register, and it should not become it. We have got this far by being accurate, courteous and patient, and by questioning a choice rather than the people who made it. The public servants planning this island are not our opponents. Let us keep asking better questions than we are angry.
The second: what are we building for?
This is the harder one, and it deserves honesty on both sides.
The Government’s answer is coherent. Today’s buyers were born decades ago, when birth rates were higher. Households are smaller. More singles form their own homes. More seniors live alone or with a spouse. Fewer babies, more households — both can be true at once.
So we do not dispute that homes are needed. We never have.
But if the demand is driven largely by a cohort already born, then it is a wave with a crest and a far side. And the thing about a wave is that it passes. A fifty-year-old forest, once cleared, does not come back.
The evidence offered for urgency was that the recent launches at Clementi Emerald and Belilios Rise were each oversubscribed by over four times. That figure has been questioned from many directions this week, and the questions are fair ones. Applications record interest, not need — some apply to test their chances, some decline the flat when offered. Desirable land will be oversubscribed almost anywhere you place it; that alone cannot be what decides which land is cleared. And the stated reason for building here is proximity to parents, yet oversubscription counts applicants, not applicants with parents nearby. Two different numbers are being asked to do the same work.
Which is why one request keeps returning, still unanswered: publish the projections. The population and household-formation figures driving these sites. How much reflects Singaporeans already born, and how much reflects planned population growth. What yield each site is meant to deliver. What the comparison looked like when renewing the ageing estates was weighed against clearing a fifty-year-old forest — if it was weighed at all.
There is one more point worth making plainly. This land was zoned in 1980. In 1980, no one had documented what now lives there. We have since recorded 286 plant species and 113 animal species at Sunset Way, including two Critically Endangered animals — the Sunda pangolin and the straw-headed bulbul — in an assessment whose biodiversity impact range still reaches Major Negative even after every proposed mitigation is applied. A zoning line drawn before the evidence existed should be able to be re-examined once the evidence arrives. That is not indecision. That is what evidence is for.
None of this is an accusation. It is a request to see the arithmetic — because a decision this irreversible should be one we can all follow, not one we are asked to trust.
And then there was this morning
The forest was full.
Familiar faces, and many I had never seen before — people arriving for the first time, stepping in slowly over the roots, the way you enter a place that asks to be listened to rather than looked at.
The weather was generous. But it was the energy that stayed with me.
Not one child walking with their eyes on a screen. They came prepared instead: containers held ready for beetles, torchlights angled into pockets of waterlogged ground to see what might be living down there. Hands in the grass. Heads tilted for birdsong. Everyone watching the leaves for the smallest shiver, in case it turned out to be alive.
Everyone was present. That alone is a beautiful thing.
And all along the trail, strangers passing strangers. Morning. Happy National Day. Said easily, the way you speak to someone who happens, for a moment, to be thinking about the same thing you are.
Sixty-one years on
Perhaps what truly galvanises a country was never its ranking in this or that. Rankings are how a nation is measured. They are not how it is held together.
What holds us together is people, and what people experience in common. And those experiences are shaped — always, quietly — by the places we choose to keep. A generation that grows up crouching over beetles in wet ground will understand something about this island that no curriculum can deliver. A generation that never has the chance will not miss it, because you cannot miss what you have never known. That is the part that should worry us most.
There is a related worry in the comment threads this week, and it is not really about a forest either. It is the fear that participation is decorative — that we are invited to speak once the answer is written. We do not believe that, or we would not still be writing. But trust is easier to keep than to rebuild, and this is the moment where it is decided.
Today we celebrate how far we have come, and we should. It has been an extraordinary sixty-one years, built by people who made hard choices with far less than we have.
A birthday is also a good day to ask the other question, gently: where are we heading, and is this how we collectively want things to be? Not whether we should build — we should — but what we are willing to spend to build it, and whether we would make the same choice if we had to explain it to the children who were in the forest this morning.
Direction matters more than speed
The window has closed, but the conversation has not. Write to your MP. Email HDB and MND. Ask for the projections. Ask for MSE’s assessment. Ask for the comparison against renewing what is already built.
And if you have not yet walked it — go. Bring someone. It is a beautiful out there.
🌳 For the forest,
The Save Maju Forest petition
IG: @savemajuforest
Majulah Singapura