The View May Change, but the Roots Remain
By Sunil Amrith ’97, UWCSEA Dover
20th May 2025
As Dover Campus prepares for the move to our future campus in Tengah in 2032, many of us find ourselves holding on to the spaces, people, and moments that have shaped this community. When Sunil Amrith ’97 returned to Dover Campus with his family in December, he shared a personal and thoughtful perspective on what it means to move, to belong, and to remember—one inspired by his experience as both a historian and an alumnus. Sunil reminds us that while buildings may change, the heart of UWCSEA lives in its people, in the connections we make, and in the stories we carry with us.
When I returned to Singapore for the first time after the pandemic border closures, I went for a walk in the Botanic Gardens. I stopped to visit a tree that I’ve known for most of my life. It is the banyan that stands by the edge of the lake. Over the years, its aerial roots have thrust downward to form the tangled pillars that make it feel monumental—I used to imagine a secret palace hidden within.
In the 1980s, when the banyan was a backdrop to my childhood outings to the gardens, it had already been standing at that spot for more than a century. The first known photograph we have of the tree is from 1877, and by then it was already tall.
For me, the tree represented a sense of rootedness after my longest-ever absence from home; but the banyan, too, is a migrant. Known as the Burmese Banyan, its origins as well as its name are mysterious. It is a relatively rare species of fig, scattered across Southeast Asia but not documented in Burma. It took root in a period when a cluster of streets in the growing port city of Singapore acquired the names of Burmese places—Rangoon, Moulmein, and Mergui roads, as they are still called today. The names all date from a moment of rapid change in Southeast Asian history when labels of origin—for people as well as for plants—were often creative fiction.
The Burmese Banyan is a lonely tree. Its fruits are rarely fertilised, because they depend on a species of specialist pollinator wasp that did not migrate with the tree. It is, in a sense, marooned and out of place. Yet it has become a place of sustenance for countless birds and insects, and an important site of human memory—including my own.
Plants and animals everywhere are on the move. Fleeing unaccustomed heat and unseasonal rain, many species are moving poleward and to higher elevations. Many find their avenues of escape blocked by roads, settlements and mines.
Land-based species confront a bewildering mismatch between sunlight and temperature, muddling the clues they rely on for survival. In many forests around the world, the balance of tree species is shifting towards those better adapted to warmer climates. But this process, known to ecologists as ‘thermophilisation,’ is advancing much more slowly than the climate is warming. Whole forests find themselves in a new and unfamiliar world.
And so do we all. Social psychologists have observed the emergence of ‘ecological grief’ in communities around the world. People mourn the loss, and anticipate the future loss, of familiar landscapes and cherished animals. They mourn the erosion of hard-won local knowledge that can no longer account for weird weather, changing light and missing migratory birds. They mourn the breaking of bonds that forge human and more-than-human communities. A member of the Inuit of Nunatsiavut, in Labrador, Canada, put it this way—“Inuit are people of the sea ice. And if there is no more sea ice, how can we be people of the sea ice?”
Given how vertiginously Singapore has changed since UWCSEA was founded in 1970, the city-state and its residents are well adapted to a coming world of uncertainty. There is, in Singapore, a sense of never quite standing on solid ground. Singapore’s famed economic and political stability is, paradoxically, built on the impermanence of its landscape, which has been reshaped in an unending process of reclamation.
Sunil Amrith ’97 on the Dover Campus’ iconic rooftop.
For me, the tree represented a sense of rootedness after my longest-ever absence from home; but the banyan, too, is a migrant.
Perhaps as a result, Singapore’s residents cling less tightly to land and landscape, which in so many other parts of the world constitute an essential source of identity. In the 1980s, Singapore began exhuming cemeteries, which took up too much valuable real estate. Since 1998, the government has imposed a strict 15-year time limit on all graves, after which the remains have to be relocated. There are many sources of belonging that people in Singapore feel—cultural, political, emotional—but attachment to the soil, to the places where ancestors are buried, is rarely among them.
Many of us feel a sense of loss knowing that the Dover Campus has entered the final decade of its life. It feels like so many of the places we value, places infused with our memories, are disappearing. But it is in many ways a luxury to have several years, and ample resources, to plan for the move. Tengah is an opportunity for UWCSEA to live up to its mission by building a campus that is truly sustainable, and adapted to a warming world. Those of us with privilege have an enormous responsibility to be less profligate with how much we extract from the ecosystems that sustain us: my UWCSEA education taught me that lesson in the 1990s, and it is even more true today.
In the meantime, like people around the world, we can begin to imagine ways to preserve the memory and the spirit of places that no longer exist. And we can remember the lesson of the Burmese Banyan—that an accidental visitor can end up taking root and sustaining a whole community.
Sunil Amrith, UWCSEA ’97, is a Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Yale University and Director of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. His work focuses on the histories and environmental challenges of Southeast Asia and the Global South. In The Burning Earth (Penguin Press, UK, Singapore, and Commonwealth; W.W. Norton, North America), Sunil explores the urgent global impact of climate change. He credits his UWCSEA education—especially his IB English literature class with Andrew Flory and his involvement with Global Concerns, including a 1995–1996 Service project in Cambodia—as transformative experiences that shaped his career.