Amid Singaporeans’ renewed interest in nature comes an exhibition that documents the change in the environment on the island over the past 400 years. RSIS Associate Professor Farish Noor, who specialises in history at Nanyang Technological University and was consulted for the exhibition, said: “While not necessarily malevolent, the Europeans, in expanding their frontiers of knowledge, colonised everything they touched. “They (at the time) created the South-east Asia that we now know, and today we have come to this point of climate crisis. We need a more humane modernity, one that sees ourselves not just as protectors of nature but as part of the natural world.”