Yeo Meng Tong, the affable director of parks development. In most
nations, the parks departments are small, underfunded and scrappy.
But this country spends 200 million Singapore dollars per year “to
develop scenery,” as Yeo put it. That equals .6 percent of the national
budget, five times the share the National Park Service gets from the
U.S. federal budget. No wonder he was smiling.
Yeo told me he was born in 1963, two years before the former
British colony cleaved from Malaysia. Under the fifty-year leadership
of one ruling party—and mostly one man, the late Prime Minister Lee
Kuan Yew—Singapore grew into the third-most-successful economy
in the world, ranked higher than the United States on GDP per capita,
educational attainment, standard of living and life expectancy. Its
accomplishments are all the more impressive given that the place had
virtually no exportable natural resources, little room to expand, and a
surging population made up of a potentially volatile mix of
ethnicities.
Lee Kuan Yew—or LKY, as he’s fondly known—planted a public
tree in a traffic circle soon after he took office, setting off what would
become a personal obsession. Singapore was soon importing
thousands of trees and hiring small armies of arborists and
horticulturalists. He launched a “garden city” plan that later morphed
into a more ambitious “city in a garden” vision. In his memoir, he
writes: “After independence, I searched for some dramatic way to
distinguish ourselves from other Third World countries. I settled for a
clean and green Singapore. One arm of my strategy was to make
Singapore into an oasis in Southeast Asia. . . .”
As Yeo proudly told me, if you add up the forest preserves, the
pocket parks, undeveloped land and the manicured street trees, half of
Singapore’s 276 square miles is under some sort of green cover. “We
try to create more green in every inch of space we can find,” he said.
The city day-lighted and landscaped its once-utilitarian canals, adding
paths, so it now offers 300 kilometers of green corridors that connect