How Singapore Is Creating More Land for Itself - The New York Times - 0 views
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Singapore land culture social politics crisis US economy
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One of the island’s most distinctive features, though, remains hidden: the Jurong Rock Caverns, which hold 126 million gallons of crude oil.
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Next year, three new vaults will be ready. Then, if all goes according to plan, there will be six more.
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the Jurong Rock Caverns are less an emblem of the marvels of technology than of the anxiety of a nation.
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I remarked that the phrase “freeing up land” occurs like clockwork in conversations with Singapore’s planners. He laughed.
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But reclaiming land from the ocean has its limits, particularly in an age of a warming planet. Scientists warn that by 2100, sea levels may rise by as much as six feet, and furious storms will pound our coasts.
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People have begun to leave Tuvalu, in the South Pacific; the Marshall Islands; and Nauru, in Micronesia. Five of the lowest Solomon Islands have already vanished.
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how it fends off the ocean will be of deep interest to many other populous and productive cities near the water: New York, Miami, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Guangzhou, all miniature nations of a sort.
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“If global temperatures continue to rise,” a government official said last year, “many parts of Singapore could eventually be submerged.
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Singapore was a tiny nation, and dire fates awaited tiny nations that could not take care of themselves.
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On the first floor of a city museum in the Urban Redevelopment Authority building, a wall is engraved with letters that spell SMALL ISLAND.
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At the spot where the hill was broken down and carted off to build Boat Quay, there now stands One Raffles Place, clad in steel and glass, taller, in all probability, than its rock-and-mud forefather.
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Beach Road, in the island’s belly, at one time had a self-evident name; now it reads like a wry joke, given how much new land separates it from the ocean.
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Lim is able to narrate, practically by himself, a fine-grained history of the island’s reclamation projects.
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Several countries have tired of feeding Singapore’s endless appetite for sand; Indonesia, Malaysia and, most recently, Cambodia have halted exports altogether.
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but it still holds more than 200,000 human remains within its 400 acres, making it one of the largest Chinese graveyards outside China.
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As the ocean grows less shallow, it becomes harder and harder to build the wall, to stabilize the infill, to protect it all from collapse.
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The most miserable truth about this moment of the Anthropocene is the inevitability of it all; even if the whole world switched to solar power and turned vegetarian tomorrow, we cannot remove the carbon we’ve released into the atmosphere.
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Wang urged me to visit the Float at Marina Bay, the world’s largest floating stage, a 107,000-square-foot slice of steel that clings to the lip of Singapore’s esplanade.
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Singapore’s, as the country prepares to terraform itself in search of space. There will be more underground caverns, David Tan told me: a warren of research laboratories within the folds of Kent Ridge, right under the university; perhaps a warehousing facility beneath Jurong Bird Park.
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Singapore already has high-rise factories: towers occupied by dozens of manufacturing units, all sharing amenities like cargo elevators, electricity and truck ramps.
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Singapore has always held elections, but only one party — Lee Kuan Yew’s People’s Action Party — has ever ruled the island, and only three men have ever been prime minister. Opposition parties have never been permitted to be anything more than frail invertebrates, so the P.A.P. can do as it pleases.
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Most of the infill in the reclamations under a coming shipping-container terminal — planned to be the world’s largest — is rock and soil debris from construction projects.
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The two countries bickered over reclamation activities here in 2002; it took three years of negotiations before Singapore could proceed.
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Trapped beyond the inner wall was a low pool of water, yet to be filled in. Around us, the ocean lay idle in the sun, ready to challenge Singapore’s ingenuity with its patient, adamant rise.