Lesson #1 for the frogs

Frogs of the well, please gather around me. 

Today I will share a short story about the fallacy of the over-dependency on methodology over common sense.

A few years back, WWF published a Living Planet Report (2010) and named Singapore as the highest per capita in carbon emission in Asia-Pacific. Singapore has been accustomed to being number one for the right reasons but do not generally take it too kindly when it is found in at the wrong end. Thus, on March 2012, Singapore’s National Climate Change Secretariat (NCCS) hit out against WWF's President, Yolada Kakabadse's earlier statement declaring Singapore as "...maybe one of the best examples of what we should not do."

NCCS's rubbished Kakabadse's comment by declaring it "seriously misrepresents the situation." The two parties then laid out their methodologies of emission count and found great misalignment between their respective frameworks. With that, the Singapore government closed the chapter with the usual what we did was right, what they did was wrong mantra.

In theory, nobody could fault the Singapore Government's attempt to flip real life problems into imaginary ones. In reality, theories have limitations. Frogs will quote you another example which was as clear as the sky. Well, not that current hazy skyline though:

What we have here are two publications from the same publisher on two different dates, three months apart to be exact. In the first publication on 20 December 2012, it was reported that Singaporeans were the unhappiest people in the world. Before the end of the first quarter of the following year, a new report stated Singaporeans were probably the happiest people in Asia. Is there any logic that may explain how the unhappiest people in world can become the happiest people in Asia in just three months? Did every household receive a unicorn as a present from their government? Did Singapore experience a gold dust shower islandwide instead of River Ang Bao for three days three nights during the Chinese New Year? Can Singaporeans ever be happier than Bruneians for a start, with all their oil in their backyards. With that of course yet again, the Singapore Government decided that Singaporeans are happy people, yes even with a hazy smog greeting us every morning these days.

This, my fellow frogs in the well, is a classic example of how common sense was buried under a pile of neurotic reasoning. The worst way of solving a problem is denial. Any attempt to throw a dart towards the board is still better than chucking it straight into the bin. Having said that, we the frogs in the well will be fair frogs. Given the state of things going on in Singapore these days, we have to accept that environmental issues will have to be filed at the bottom of the pile. Until perhaps we realise too many frogs are dying too soon.

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A Little Spark

As a young boy, I used to dream of having my own tree house as my play pen. I would then build my own windmill some distance away from my tree house when I grow up. The next addition would be a little hydro-powered generator at a little dam I will install across the river nearby. Ah, how innocent and naive a child could be, when his mind was given the freedom to roam wild.

Born and breed Singaporean in the late 1970s, I watched Singapore’s rapid emergence into modernity from the sidelines. When I was a small boy, I played on the streets of the developing country. By the time I was a grown man and made my first step into the working world, Singapore was already known as a first world nation, a fully developed country.

Before I knew it, the environment that my friends and I grew up to cherish became the distant past. Our happy memories were forever buried in the concrete jungle that shroud the island, with hardly any surviving artifacts of reminisce. Without a doubt, modernization was a key for our country’s survival. With our chronic lack of space, there was little choice but to sacrifice sentimental subjects for important ones such as businesses. Sadly, as years went by, I found myself alienating from these ideals.

Some time later in life, I left the sunny shores of Singapore to Australia for work. Currently I am living in the metropolitan region of my state. It isn't anything like the kind of living environment that I dreamed of as a boy. But here, I dare to dream. I dare to take action to make a dream a reality.

This is my dream. This is my story.

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