the word for world is forest
the world has already ended; who will sit by your side? and other hot takes on the climate crisis.
This is a very long and intensely personal one. Thoughts have been brewing for years — angry, sad, disappointed, hopeful, joyous, desperate. I hope you enjoy it. These are my own opinons and do not reflect those of others or people I work with.
introduction
There is one singular phrase that repeats over and over in my head whenever I enter a forest – a space outside of the throes and grasp of our lovely capitalist, consumerist climate and country: “The word for world is forest.”.
This is, of course, the title of Ursula K. Le Guin's work that explores themes of colonisation, environmental exploitation, cultural imperialism, and resistance. The story is set on the lush, forest-covered planet Athshe, inhabited by a peaceful, small-statured humanoid species known as the Athsheans, who are deeply connected to their environment and practice a culture centered on dreams and nonviolence. The narrative unfolds when human colonists from Earth, driven by a resource-hungry and imperialistic agenda, begin to exploit Athshe's natural resources and enslave its indigenous population. The Athsheans initially resist passively but are forced into violent resistance when their way of life and survival are severely threatened.
Athshe, which meant the Forest, and the World. So Earth, Terra, meant both the soil and the planet, two meanings and one. But to the Athsheans soil, ground, earth was not that to which the dead return and by which the living live: the substance of their world was not earth, but forest. Terran man was clay, red dust. Athshean man was branch and root. They did not carve figures of themselves in stone, only in wood.
— The Word for World is Forest, Ursula K. Le Guin (emphasis mine)
“a garden city”
It's been a while since I have stepped into MacRitchie. This is the oldest reservoir in Singapore, a primary forest which protects us, in more ways than one, from ourselves. The last time I was here I was 18. It was a hike with a friend, and we got so lost as the night approached I thought we were going to die in there (again, my sense of direction is truly impoverished).
Over the years I have visited most nature reserves and forests in Singapore1, including Dover Forest, Sungei Buloh2, Bukit Timah, Pulau Ubin3, and Coney Island. I remember a time I used to find comfort in walking through the trees, when I’d tell everyone, “There is a strength you get from the world when your bare feet touches the grass, the earth.”. I believed in that with all my heart. I still do. Now I tell my friends, “There is a way the earth smells after it rains, and each city/country has a different smell.”. I would ask them, like a mad person, “How does the city smell after it rains?” when they go overseas. It’s a strange thing, a very niche thing bordering on insanity.
No way was clear, no light unbroken, in the forest. Into wind, water, sunlight, starlight, there always entered leaf and branch, bole and root, the shadowy, the complex. (Ibid.)
Having been privileged enough to walk some forests in the UK (plus my dorm was just outside a cluster of trees, and a large hill, where I’d take astronomy books to read on the grass under a tree all by my lonesome because it will always be a very spiritual experience to learn about our cosmos while being on this comparatively infinitesimally small planet that still contained such wonders), something always struck me as artificial about the way these places were positioned, kept, and visited in Singapore. In a city so obsessed with progress and building new shiny infrastructure, keeping these forests and its wildlife alive seemed very disingenuous. Forced, if you will. Yes, I say this as a Singaporean living in the city that calls itself "the garden city" – probably very unpatriotic of me but then again I am not exactly the epitome of a model citizen. I believe in questioning everything, which is not necessarily, if at all, mutually exclusive with coming to love and cherish it.
Moreover, and now that I truly think about it, Singapore is indeed A Garden City. And what do we do with gardens? We prune them, trim them, make them look nice for a purpose of being either decorative or indicative that we care about nature to some extent. It’s a performative thing, having a garden. Which is not to say it is a horrible thing. I have seen wonderful gardens, and know people who love plants both aquatic and non. Some of my best memories are in my grandmother’s garden. But this term, “A Garden City” or “City in A Garden” should tell you enough about this country’s approach to nature. It is curated, carefully calibrated, serves an economic purpose (ahem tourism), and to that extent, is artificial. Being artifical is not a crime, especially when preservation is a part of these efforts, but the focus of artificially-made green areas that possibly have been built over natural habitats and environments is a tad too ironic for me to stomach with a smile.
Such is the irony of our world today, I suppose. We are sincere in keeping nature alive, but we forget that it never needed us — it has always been us who has needed it.
macritchie
If not for my research job, I probably would not have thought to visit MacRitchie again (I’m so incredibly lucky to be doing research for a job that touches on ecology and culture and that basically interrogates what it means to be a being in this very metamodern world!). We went as a team — with my supervisor, producer, guest professors, some students, and a guide.
As our guide pointed out and described certain flowers, bugs, and certain plants, it occured to me that we would not have realised these little details about the landscape around us if we went wandering in ourselves. One of the professors who came with us taught landscape architecture at a local university. He took one look at a hill and commented to a colleague, “Look how British that is, large spaces, the positioning of the trees, and these benches. It’s very Victorian.”. I smiled to myself and thought, Yes: the things we love and study and put our time in should teach us new ways of looking at the world.
That was what this was. That is the whole point of research, of knowledge, of the pursuit of it. That is what I want for myself too — what’s the point of studying all the ecology in the world when you only know everything in theory but cannot look out your window and be overcome with the sheer immensity of the world before you? What is the point of philosophy if it doesn’t teach you how to be a better person? All the critical theory in the world and papers we read will never save us if we do not allow ourselves to be transformed, fundamentally, by what we learn about it. If we do not develop personal frameworks as a way of synthesising the knowledge we have been so incredibly priviliged to acquire, and the lessons we have been lucky to have learnt from others around us.
Our guide mentioned how he spent mornings from his apartment observing the ways in which mist rose from the trees in this forest we walked in. He was also vegan! Which thrilled me, because I have found it incredibly difficult to be vegan in Singapore due to considerably less options4 (compared to other countries). It is difficult to find someone who has been a vegan for 30 years, and even rarer to find them vegan because of a love for animals. That is my reasoning too. Because I love animals. That’s it. It’s as simple as that, and as complicated as that. In essence, it is my personal ethical stand/practice. (I will probably write a bit more about this in the future if anyone wants to know, but let’s talk about ecology.)
Walking through this forest was like coming home to a part of me I had shelved a while ago. It was learning to love the rain as it poured, the mud underfoot, and the patter of rain on our umbrellas. The sitting under a shelter halfway, realising that human beings have always been at the mercy of the elements. And yet, also the realisation that despite all this, despite most of us knowing how powerless we are to the forces of nature, O! how we abuse it! How we have the audacity to think we can enslave it for our purposes. How we do this in the name of progress, of technological advancement, of necessity. We forget that all that is required of us in this lifetime is to experience the world, to embrace what it gives us, and to give and love it in return.
And now I will tell you my gripe and perspective on the current approach we have to climate change.
the world has already ended; it is a privilege to be by your side (and other hot takes, like really spicy ones)
A fine rain fell without sound on the oak-leaves and on the narrow pathways to the Lodge and the river. Only if you listened intently could you hear the rain, too multitudinous a music for one mind to grasp, a single endless chord played on the entire forest. (Ibid.)
I think about Le Guin’s book a lot when walking through these trees. When saving snails on the pavement from being trampled upon by careless human beings. We have colonised the world. We have used and abused it — stripped it of its abundance, taken what we want and burned the rest; into the earth we have plundered, its Being we have torn asunder.
Of course, we continue to do this today. I use the past tense because the end of the world has already begun. As Timothy Morton writes, “The end of the world has already occurred. We can be uncannily precise about the date on which the world ended. Convenience is not readily associated with historiography, nor indeed with geological time. But in this case, it is uncannily clear. It was April 1784, when James Watt patented the steam engine, an act that commenced the depositing of carbon in Earth’s crust—namely, the inception of humanity as a geophysical force on a planetary scale.”. And it continues to end. We are all just hurtling towards our inevitable demise.
There is much talk today about how we may “save the world”, or “save humanity”. In my opinion, humanity is a species whose shortcomings supercede its strengths, and whose strengths are largely self-serving anyway. A part of me wonders, why the need to save it? Most of the reasons why we want to save the earth is a selfish one — we want a place to live. In the name of self-preservation we have decided we want to colonise Mars and live there because ‘There Is No Planet B’. But wait! We have Mars! Hold up, I think I didn’t get the memo. Oh, so now the entirety of the universe is ours to exploit, is it? It was always ours to marvel at, always ours to study and learn, but never, ever, ours to exploit. Never ours to use for our own means and ends. I could not sit comfortably on the notion of saving the world if it only meant saving ourselves.
But who suffers when forest fires start, when glaciers melt and disappear? Not us, we are not the first ones bearing the brunt of the changing climate’s effects. It’s the animals. It’s the creatures and plants on this earth who have been here longer than many of us have, that are helpless to the destruction that we have brought upon them. It’s them that pay the price first, before we do.
When we think of humanitarian efforts we think of saving humans. Hot take: What if the essence of humanity, what if being humanitarian, also included acknowledging that we need more than human beings to survive? What if we cared enough for the world to understand that it’s all creatures that need to be loved and cared for, and we don’t just leave it to the wildlife experts or ecologists, zoologists, veterinarians, rangers, etc etc, but we understand that saving a snail on the road is just as important as saving a child from oncoming traffic?
What if we are all just a small part of a much bigger world that will honestly go on with or without us? What if, the dominion we have so proudly established for ourselves on this planet, empowers us to use that knowledge, that developed consciousness and brain or what-have-you, to do something for the world? Not to the world. We have done enough to the world. Look where that got us. We have done so much in the name of progress that gradually receded into our undoing. Each tide has an ebb and flow, each wave reaches for the shore and must recede back into the ocean. It’s not like we didn’t see this coming.
reverence > respect + reciprocity > sustainability >>> exploitation
So what do we do? I have thrown us into a pit of despair. I like poetry, but I also like efficiency and effectiveness, and functionality. Despair is not functional. So let me present you: Two Equations!
REVERENCE > RESPECT
RECIPROCITY > SUSTAINABILITY + EXPLOITATION
Kidding. These are not equations. There is no equal sign. I am bad at Math. But they are somewhat syntactical expressions of hierarchy, the likes of which I have concluded after reading countless books on ecology is the only way to fix our relationship with the world. (I am nobody though, not a scholar of ecology of any sort. So take from this what you will. My only hope, dear reader, is that it makes us all kinder Beings to the world around us.)
I have and still do spend hours reading translated Hawai’ian texts and stories. In Hawai'ian there is a phrase – "aloha 'āina", meaning "love of the land". It also describes the relationship we human beings ought to have with our land, one that is rooted in a personal and collective responsibility to nurture, understand, love, and listen to it.
That, I think, is what we lack. The denouncing of our very anthropocentric perspective on nature. Everywhere I look in ecology circles the word “anthropocentric” comes up. It means “regarding humankind as the central or most important element of existence, especially as opposed to God or animals”. Gross. I tire of it. There has to be another way, than thinking humans were the centre of everything. Didn’t Galileo Galilei already tell us that we are not the centre of everything? The man served life imprisonment for spouting heresy: that the planets revolved around the sun, and therefore the earth was not the centre of the universe. Is it still heresy today to say that anthropocentrism is the wrong approach?
We are told to respect the earth. But why not hold it in reverence? Do we dare abuse what we revere? Do we dare disturb the universe then? Reverence demands some kind of worship. It demands action. We cannot be still, we must actively love and adore, through action, that which we revere. We’ve succeeded in doing this with institutionalised religion, what’s stopping us from doing this with the world?5
We are taught the importance of sustainability. But sustainability should never have been the point. Sustaining something usually involves making sure we have enough resources for future use (exploitation). Sustaining something is to keep it alive as much and as well as we can, and nothing more than that. Why not reciprocity?
Reciprocity is a mutual giving and taking. It is everywhere in nature. It is a wisdom Nature inherently knows and a wisdom we seem to lack. It is acknowledging mutualistic systems, which may mean plants offering pollen grains or fruits, and their mutualistic partners offering fertilised ovules or dispersed seeds to carry on their growth. There is also the concept of mutual assistance between members of different species, called mutualism or symbiosis. Cleaner fish clean the mouths of larger fish, which in turn refrain from eating them. It is an understanding of the co-dependency we have not just between us and the natural landscape, but with all things within and between all things.
This is my proposition, then: Reverence for the world, which demands more from us than Respect. Reciprocity, instead of Sustainability.
epilogue
But loving the world will break you6. Because it is vast and infinite and tremendously wise. It will teach you that there is more to life than you and your experience of it – there is empathy, compassion, humility – ways to care for the land and its creatures, communities and people who love you. And in a society that teaches us to put ourselves and our ego first, I am learning that that will break everything you know about how to exist in this world as a human being.
To experience the world is to listen to it and what it teaches you. To listen to the way the grass tingles as you step barefoot on the earth, to the smell of the aftermath of a downpour, to how rain smells different in every country over the world, to soak in the quiet of a sunrise over the bustle of a city, to notice the snails on the pavement home, or the way the sea continuously flips from a certain shade of dark blue to a light teal with every incoming wave that laps against the edge of a breakwater. to appreciate the little things. but love goes beyond appreciation – it demands protection too, care, and nurturing. It requires listening.
So I am learning that to love the world requires a surrender of Self, since listening requires a forgetting of Self and surrender ego to hold space for another. to stop talking in order to listen. To stop walking in order to observe. loving this world because of what it can do for us is not loving it at all. It's not about experiencing the world on your terms or what it can do for us. We are so small and insignificant, and lack wisdom to terrifying degrees. I am learning that our world has to be experienced on its terms. It's not about trampling through the forest, saying "I have experienced the forest" leaving a path of destruction in our wake, but about removing our shoes and stepping onto the earth while occasionally cutting and bruising your feet on rocks along the way, and meeting this world where wants to meet us.
“The world is always new,” said Coro Mena, “however old its roots.”.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest, Ursula K. Le Guin
The forest itself teaches us this. It teaches us quietude, attention. It teaches us to love it, since love is excess attention. It demands nothing of us except care, and that we take only what we need, and then return that love. It is not difficult to give unto someone or something once we love it. We do that with our friends and loved ones all the time. We give to them because we want to, because it is easy. Loving something is easy. The act of loving makes us better people.
The forest is home to creatures who understand reciprocity and reverence on levels that we never might. Still, it is our responsibility to try. The act of loving the earth, in reverence and reciprocity, is the only thing that will save us from ourselves. And more importantly, teach us that we are not the only living beings worth saving. That it doesn’t need us, but we need it. That the world is precious not because it is our only home, or because there is no other planet for us, but because what it means to be human is to know our place in an infinite network of beings, to acknowledge our limited perspectives, to mourn them, and then to strive to do better. Not for ourselves, but for all creatures, great and small.
After all, animals and the forests have been so much wiser and gentler than we are. Within, they have created a world so much kinder and more tender than our own. We fail to see that so much of the time. We have so much more to learn.
And thus, the word for world is forest.
To be very candid, I used to request a hike as a first date when I was uhh more active on dating apps (not anymore! it really affects how we view other people! i wrote more about my qualms with dating apps here!). Anyway, my logic was: 1) If we can stand each other for 5 hours doing an activity that is not entirely incredibly comfortable, and 2) we can find enough to talk about excitedly whilst on this walk, then it’s not too bad of an indicator of the levels of connection we may have and want to develop. Now, I would be happy to have friends with whom I can wander with — in forests and in life. Friendship is magic, etc etc.
I went to Sungei Buloh to celebrate Halloween once. It will always be one of my favourite memories of Halloween in my lifetime.
Camping in Pulau Ubin was very fun. A wild boar approached our tent halfway through the night. I have no sense of danger so erm… I was mostly quite excited, I think. At the time, the stars at night were so incredibly bright. I could actually see and make out constellations in the night sky while in Singapore! This could never happen on the main island where our light pollution is just as bad as our noise pollution.
Vegetarianism is more common, due to a percentage of the population being pracitsing Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, and Taoists here.
In another post I might write about my studies in Animism (it was a very, very deep rabbithole, a trench I have made into a home), and how all ecology is spiritual. It has to be.
This whole thing is adapted from an Instagram post I put up a few years back. I think I did it in despair, after having visited a nature reserve, realising how much about this world was worth loving, and how much we failed to see. How must I failed to see and to love, for so many years.