By Emily (Parent, Earth and Stars Forest School)
Fifteen hectares go. Eight stay.
Eight hectares is not a forest. It’s a garden with animals trapped in it.
A forest is not a collection of trees you can subtract from. Cut it down to a third and you don’t get a smaller forest – you get an edge. Light floods in, the humidity drops, and the species that needed deep shade and damp leaf litter have nowhere left to go. The pangolin that needs to roam, can’t. The stream that fed all of it now runs through a construction site first.
I’ve heard people say it’s not really for hiking. Fair. But we went twice for my kids’ forest school family day, and it is one of the only places I know where you find animals you simply don’t see anywhere else. hadn’t seen them before. My children hadn’t either.
The mushrooms in these photos live on dead wood. The lizard lives in the leaf litter. Neither of them relocates.
When the ground goes, they go.
So my question isn’t whether we build. It’s whether we had to spend this land first.
I understand why Clementi. Three universities, two polytechnics, two SAP schools – of course every parent tries to BTO here. The demand is real and I’m not pretending otherwise. But high demand explains why this site is attractive. It doesn’t explain why it goes before land we’ve already spent.
Because that sequence is already national policy.
Parliament has been told the Government will have taken back more than 400 hectares of golf-course land by 2030, with courses already earmarked for housing. A senior minister has said plainly that to keep providing good homes, we will have to recycle previously developed land.
Recycling spent land first isn’t a fringe demand. It’s the stated plan.
All we’re asking is that Maju actually follow it.
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