co-opted, self-congratulatory: our new environmental movement?

writing this on impulse because the wave and flurry of emotions from last week has still not escaped me. i think this is the second post on a similar ish topic i've done; the first can be viewed here: https://tereseteoh.wixsite.com/website/single-post/when-the-planet-is-cheapened-to-a-sustainability-game

three years ago, my dream was to see singapore’s environmental movement grow. three years later, the environmental scene has evolved tremendously: more people are going to COP and know about the UNFCCC, more people are getting invited to consultations, and more activities are being organised than ever before.

but i still can’t give a confident ‘yes’ if asked whether singapore’s environmental movement has truly grown. if we should take all the abovementioned examples as prima facie indications of growth, then i fear that we have opted for superficiality over authenticity.

but isn't that an impossible ask -- if the ideal bar is so high, what actually counts as environmental activism then? who makes up singapore’s environmental civil society? and lastly, has it grown or shrunk?

of course, these are all very personal questions whose answers are amorphous. but the difficulty of answering it mustn’t be an excuse to postpone or ignore them, because doing away with reflections leads to advocacy that is self-serving, short-term, blind and altogether ineffective. but fancy, artisanal questions of one's 'theory of change' could be equally hard to grasp and risk yielding equally fanciful answers. hence, i thought to boil it down to three:

1. what is a success for the environmental movement? do we also include government-initiated consultations and engagements, or self-initiated panels and presentations as part of that list?

2. where do we get our information from and how do we build our community? does one spend more time on networking with professionals or more time understanding the environmental issue at the ground level?

3. what do we want the environmental movement to actually accomplish in the future? are we satisfied with mere awareness-raising, or do we actually seek something bigger?

with these questions, i think it'll be clearer on which part of the advocacy spectrum we each lie. maybe it's harsh to say this, but i don't think that some of them should count as activism nor as civil society...

there’s a whole long list of projects that our environmental civil society has yet to explore in-depth: metal mining and the truth about electric vehicles, nuclear power, carbon markets. presently, general perspectives on these topics are saturated with the opinion of policymakers, with little critique from civil society groups. there’s so much more to climb on the mountain, but it feels that some have already given up and are going back down to where breathing is easier. i can’t blame them, because i’m not in their circumstances and in any place to say what someone should do in this hazards zone. but it does sadden me, sometimes vast like an ocean and sometimes tiny like a teardrop, that an increasing number are privileged to be in the room, watching the screen and knowing at exactly what time the mountain will fall... and yet still keep quiet because it’s not convenient and not polite to speak.