What?!? Man-made Nature?

When I saw it on TV, I almost fell off my chair.

A floating wetland will be created on Punggol Reservoir while along the edge of Serangoon Reservoir, the Lorong Halus Wetland will become Singapore’s first constructed wetland. See http://www.pub.gov.sg/info_center/press_release.aspx for more details.

All these while, we have been destroying our natural wetlands, and now, we are going to have man-made ones???

This is just so ironical, though I do understand that they need to have a constructed wetland over the former landfill to discharge the waste water etc.

But for one thing, cat tails and reeds just sound ultra fake to me. Seems like they are going to have some pseudo marsh to me.

But I guess beggars can't be choosy... At least I'm glad that they are going to convert the old Lorong Halus Landfill to wetlands, even though I suspect that is probably because they couldn't find any other uses for the former landfill. You can't exactly build houses over it, since it takes time for the landfill to stablise, and also for the waste water and materials to be discharged.

In any case, any additional green land in Singapore is good news to me, be it natural or fake. And I certainly hope that after they have created the pseudo marsh, they will leave it alone for a while, so that nature will take over and hopefully the Lorong Halus Wetland will be a truly natural wetland after a few years.

Maybe in time to come, we will start seeing the wild things we have seen in our other nature places turning up in Lorong Halus? I certainly hope so :)