Week Eight Part Two: Time Travel

Supertree Grove, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore

If you ever want to time travel, go straight from a rural village in Borneo to Downtown Singapore. That should do the trick. I needed to restart my visa, so I headed from Borneo’s wild jungle to Singapore’s urban one for the weekend.  

The city-state is feels like the future-but not the burned, dried, dead future we see in movies like Wall-E. It's what the future could look like if we listened to those movies and started making positive environmental change.

I had something of an itinerary planned, but once I saw Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay, I ditched those plans and spent most of my day there. The Gardens are made up of a several-acre park that features giant photovoltaic towers that look like trees, where metal meets the Earth. They have two huge botanical gardens, called the Cloud Forest and the Flower Dome. Walking through the Flower Dome looks like the Hogwarts campus in the Garden of Eden. It has plants from all over the world and statues of mythical creatures seamlessly immersed in the man-made forest.  The Cloud Forest feels like you’re several miles up a mountain, complete with a multi-story waterfall.

alice in wonderland figurine in gardens by the bay

The last part of this exhibit takes you through a sustainability museum. A soundtrack of young kids plays in the background. They ask questions like “Is there more past, or more future?” and “How many trees do you have to cut down for a forest to stop being a forest?”  The final room shows a film called “+5˚ C” which shows what will happen to our planet if we don't find ways to sustain our world with cleaner energy.

Maybe I was brainwashed by living in Hawaii, where my school taught “Take Care of the Land” along with Respect and Honesty as values kids should live by. Maybe Seattle brainwashed me, when the kid I babysat couldn't wait for his day to be on “The Green Team,” the group of kids who got to stand by the rubbish bins after lunch and make sure everyone sorts their trash correctly. But living in Indonesia for two months, where trashcans are loose suggestions and clouds of burning waste, exhaust, and who knows what else pollute the air, has further highlighted the global need for sustainable living.

cloud forest at gardens by the bay

Seeing a city like Singapore gave me hope for a world where kids would get just as excited about going to a world attraction that showcases something natural and self-sustaining, as they would to visit the man-made, gas guzzling consumerism of Disneyland. It gave me hope for a world that doesn't leave tiny robots in mountains of trash and humans too fat to walk in spaceships because we destroyed our planet. It gave me hope for a world where people are motivated to make positive change for the environment. I just hope more people will jump on that bandwagon.