Paper short abstract:

As a green tiger, Singapore's focus on green urbanism has been an undeniable success. Less said is how these complexities are taught, and where ideologies of conservation and futurism collide in climate education; especially in inculcating regimes of care in its citizens for their wild neighbours.

Paper long abstract:

Singapore has – not undeservedly – a reputation as something of a ‘green tiger’ in Southeast Asia. With an increasing focus on green urbanism, the city has grown into what many consider to be a model that many developed states seek to emulate. Less said, however, are the ways in which Singaporeans themselves mediate with the rapid interdigitations between the urban and wild, and how this has in some part become a pedagogical issue. In a city where otters rack up hundreds of thousands in property damage per annum, and the threat of hornbill attacks become a question of when and not if, it has rapidly become the role of government and civilian educators to teach the public on how to coexist with their ‘wild neighbours.’

Yet these dialogics are themselves riddled with complexity, especially in how they embody ideas of both conservation and futurism; of interdigitating man and nature, and keeping the environment safe and segregated. Using a mix of my MPhil fieldwork and autoethnographic data, I aim to present how these come to the fore in the educational practices surrounding multispecies interfaces (Fuentes 2010; Barua 2023), which index particular forms of care that function by – effectively – avoiding nonhuman species. Indeed, when educators encourage fascination and care for the wild and feral, while simultaneously moralising which forms of care are legitimate in a wider ‘green’ regime, one glosses over the multivalent raisons d'etre for why citizens become activists in the first place.