GUEST OF HONOUR'S SPEECH
Delivered by Mr Desmond Lee
Senior Minister of State in the Ministry of Home Affairs and Ministry of National Development
23 July 2016
A very good morning to
Mr Choo Chiau Beng, Chairman of the Board of Governors
And Members of the Board,
My Parliamentary mentor, Ms Ho Geok Choo,
Mr Chan Poh Meng, Principal of RI,
Mrs Poh Mun See, Principal of RGS,
Mr Andrew Chua, President of the ORA,
Mr Fabian Yeo, Chairman of the RPA,
Distinguished guests, parents, teachers and fellow Rafflesians.
INTRODUCTION
I’m very excited to be back here in RI.
I graduated more than 20 years ago.
a. But when I occasionally drive by this campus, the old RI campus at Grange Road where I spent the first year of my life in RI, as well as the old RJC campus at Mount Sinai, it sometimes feels like it was just yesterday.
b. This was shattered recently, when I met some RI students in my constituency.
c. And they politely addressed me as ‘Uncle’.
Last night, as I browsed through the seating plan, I was thrilled and excited to see a number of my teachers on the list, including:
a. Mrs Theresa Lai, my form teacher who taught us the laws of Physics
b. Mr Leong Yew Wah, my RJC Student Council teacher
c. Ms Hua Yen Chung, our former VP who would join us for our class camps each year to show support
d. Mr Magendiran, our NPCC teacher, who always looked smart in uniform
e. Mrs Rosie Smith, who brought literature to life for us
f. Mr Lee Tiong Beng, my Sec 1 Maths teacher
g. Mr Edward Ng, who taught us sports and sportsmanship
h. And many others
I must confess: my heart skipped a few beats as I wondered whether I still owed them any assignments from back then.
But jokes aside, our teachers do so much more than teach us Math or Science or Literature.
a. They mold and shape us in our most impressionable years.
b. And impart to us daily lessons about life, about values and about how we regard other people around us.
c. For that, I’m thankful, and deeply grateful.
I wondered what I would speak about this morning.
This being Founder’s Day, I would like to share a less-well known aspect of our school’s founder, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, which I learned from an online article published by RI.
a. We know Raffles as the founder of Singapore: a gifted, charismatic administrator with the East India Company;
b. But not that many of us know that he was also a keen amateur naturalist who was deeply fascinated by the biodiversity of Southeast Asia.
2. His enthusiasm was unsurpassed in his day.
a. He employed zoologists and botanists to study the flora and fauna of the region, and hired assistants at his own expense to collect specimens and document them by painting them.
b. He personally named 11 mammals and 23 birds, and described many other species.
3. More significantly, upon his return to England, he co-founded the London Zoological Society and served as its first president.
a. This, of course, survives to this present day as the London Zoo.
SINGAPORE’S UNIQUE BIODIVERSITY
4. But what place is there in modern, industrialised Singapore for such concerns as these, some might ask.
a. After all, by 1880, only 7% of our original forest remained, with much being replaced by plantation and settlement.
b. In more modern times, our island has become very dense and urban – skyscrappered and covered with buildings and expressways.
c. What is there left to discover that has not already been discovered?
5. It’s true that quite a number of species of plants and animals that used to be common in Singapore are now extinct.
a. Raffles, for example, named the Cream-coloured Giant Squirrel that he found jumping around in all the orchards back in 1822, one year before he founded RI.
b. This massive squirrel went extinct in Singapore sometime in the 1970s.
6. But the deeper truth of the matter is that we are such a biodiversity hotspot that we continue making discoveries and rediscoveries of plants and wildlife right up till today.
a. 30% of the world’s coral biodiversity can be found in Singapore’s waters, and our city-state is home to some 384 species of birds, and 318 species of butterflies – and that’s only for the relatively well-studied animals.
7. And it’s not just fauna.
a. Just last year, two new species of plants – the Hanguana rubinea and Hanguana triangulata – were discovered in the Central Catchment Nature Reserves by researchers from the Singapore Botanic Gardens
b. Both are flowering herbs often confined to the understory of primary forests.
c. They are also endemic to Singapore, meaning they can only be found here and nowhere else.
d. In the last 5 years, over 30 species new to science, ranging from marine life to insects and plants have been published from our own backyard.
8. Our friends from abroad appreciate this too.
a. About 10 years ago, a Belgian entomologist, Patrick Grootaert, came to Singapore and discovered 150 new species of long-legged flies in our mangrove forests.
b. We also have a biodiversity index named after Singapore: the Singapore Index of Cities’ Biodiversity.
9. I share these stories with you because this realisation of just how profound and rich and alive our country is excites me, in much the same way that it captivated our school’s founder.
a. When I was much younger, I would spend the annual school holiday at chalets along Changi, and wander around the rocky shorelines at low-tide fascinated by the rich intertidal marine life, such as starfish, mantis prawns, crabs, anemones and so on.
b. Engagement with the local nature scene has also taught me that we in fact have many more wonderful creatures in our forests, shores and waters – pangolins, colugos, hornbills, leopard cats, freshwater crabs, the atlas moth – that still exist here today.
DIFFICULT CHOICES AND COMPETING NEEDS
10. In fact, Singapore has done more to conserve our natural heritage than a nation our size might be expected to do, though there is always room to do more. a. This is not always easy, especially when you consider the competing needs for land.
b. We do, after all, have to provide homes for our people, and support the economy so people have good jobs.
c. With ingenuity, tenacity and technology, we have and will continue working around our land constraints to make good use of the 719 square kilometres we have.
d. But the constraints are real – sometimes painful trade-offs are inevitable.
e. We learn from them and always endeavor to do better.
11. So despite the challenges, we have protected the four nature reserves which represent our key indigenous ecosystems:
a. The primary lowland forest that you find in Bukit Timah Nature Reserve,
b. The freshwater swamp forest in Central Catchment Nature Reserve,
c. The mangrove forests in Sungei Buloh Wetlands Reserve,
d. And the coastal hill forest in Labrador Nature Reserve are all important to us.
e. We also have 20 nature areas in addition to our nature reserves.
f. These possess significant biodiversity and we will conserve and retain as much as possible.
12. More recently in 2014, my colleagues in NParks also opened the Sisters’ Island Marine Park, our very first marine conservation area.
a. It will conserve our coral reefs and the marine ecosystem that they sustain.
b. It will also be a dedicated site for marine conservation research and allow Singaporeans who visit a chance to learn about our native ecosystems.
13. I would urge you to go to these places if you haven’t yet.
a. Sign up for a guided tour by NParks or local nature groups like the Toddycats.
b. Discover and viscerally feel that interconnectedness that binds us to each other, to other living things, to this earth.
c. By all means go to the Yosemite or the Great Barrier Reef once in your lifetime, but don’t think of Singapore as lacking in biodiversity and nature that’s worth preserving.
d. We are, after all, a City in a Garden - a legacy that our late founding PM, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, also a Rafflesian Alumnus, had left for us.
EVERY SINGAPOREAN; EVERY RAFFLESIAN CAN PLAY A PART
14. There are several Rafflesians who, following in the footsteps of our founder, have fallen deeply and passionately in love with nature, and are doing their bit to help spread the love. a. I would like to give special mention to passionate alumni like Sean Yap from the class of 2010, as well as members of staff like Dr Jeffrey Lee, Dr Abigayle Ng and Mr Tan Sijie from the Raffles Leadership Institute (RLI).
b. Sijie regularly leads groups of staff and students to various nature sites in Singapore.
c. It’s not just alumni or staff - under one of RLI’s electives, the Ecoliteracy Programme, some of your seniors and peers have also been publishing nature-related storybooks reaching out to all Primary Schools and as many as 138 pre-schools.
d. These efforts and people all deserve to be commended and celebrated.
15. In spite of these good efforts, we don’t always succeed in all our conservation efforts.
a. But I believe that every Singaporean can play a part.
b. Conservation is not just for the professionals – all of you can join the variety of citizen science programmes out there that encourage greater community stewardship and ownership of green spaces.
16. One recent example is the Friends of Ubin Network, also known as FUN.
a. Its members come from a wide spectrum of the community, ranging from nature enthusiasts, to historians, students, mountainbikers, and architects.
b. Together, the FUN community contributed many useful ideas and implemented ground-led initiatives at Ubin.
17. Beyond FUN, my colleagues at NParks recently launched the Friends of the Parks initiative.
a. Thus far, it has given the diverse community of park users at Sungei Buloh, Chestnut Nature Park and Our Park Connector network an opportunity to come together to create ground-up activities at our cherished nature spaces.
b. Our green spaces and biodiversity are for Singaporeans and should be activated by Singaporeans too.
18. So Rafflesians – are you equal to this challenge?
a. In the fields of endeavor that you will choose to enter, will you have the wisdom and creativity to first achieve insight yourselves, and then help shift the way that the world thinks?
b. When more Singaporeans become aware of the importance of our natural environment and take part in citizen science, that task of protection and conservation becomes easier and more natural.
19. As the environmentalist Paul Hawken says, “inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity's willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider ”.
a. Think of this as a call to help reshape public consciousness, and make nature that much more central to the way in which we think, to our social, cultural, educational and economic priorities.
CONCLUSION
20. And so we come back to our founder, Sir Stamford Raffles.
a. When he conceived RI, Raffles dreamt of an institution to educate would-be leaders of the land, which would also include a library and a museum to collect and preserve the treasures of the region.
b. This was how our history is linked to that of the National Library and the National Museum – both of them were housed in RI before branching out to take on an independent physical existence.
21. As alumnus Prof Peter Ng puts it, ‘Raffles loved nature; he liked animals.
a. His idea was that there should be a museum to show people what Singapore and Malaysia have; all the wonderful animals and plants that the region has to show off, so that the people are aware of the heritage.”
22. These are our very own Singaporean treasures – and it is no longer a physical museum that we’re talking about – today our country is our living museum and more than that, it is our ark.
a. This Founder’s Day, I urge all of you to let this become part of our Rafflesian consciousness, our Rafflesian spirit.
b. Let us learn to treasure nature, and help Singapore to share in that love as well.
23. Auspicium Melioris Aevi.