On this spring day of the new year, busy Hong Kong citizens may not have noticed that insects are awakened by spring thunder (jingzhe), since many critics maintain that Hong Kong city life and a harmonious relationship with nature are incompatible.

Writers and poets, in any language, are more adept than anyone else at expressing abstract concepts such as our "Oneness with Mother Nature", and they have produced a rich diversity of topics that touch upon this broad and ever-fascinating subject, which has engaged the human intellect from the time of Shi Jing, or the Chinese Book of Odes, dating back three millennia.

The Chinese view of nature has left a long and deep flowing inheritance, like a river running below our common perception of nature and all it means to us. We have an old saying in China, which is that Heaven and Man are One.

Long before the pervasive "Green Movement" which influences our policy decision making today, our forebears understood - perhaps even better than we do - the integrity of our species with other species and with the general environment.

Handed down to them by their own predecessors, since the dawn of time, was the absolute imperative of our coexistence in harmony with nature. They knew, as we know, the cost of neglecting that essential balance, which is why pagan tribes, all over the world, offered sacrifice for the renewal of the seasons, and why the emperors of China personally conducted ceremonies to secure and maintain that symbiotic relationship of man and nature. Indeed their very title could be translated as "Emperor through the Mandate of Heaven and in accordance with the movements of the Five Powers."

Those five powers were water, wood, fire, earth and metal, which in themselves were the five elements of nature. In China's ancient Book of Rites we find the following: "In the first month of spring the east wind resolves the cold. Creatures that have been torpid during the winter begin to move. All plants bud and grow. Prohibitions are given against cutting down trees (because wood is the symbol of spring). In this month no warlike operations should be undertaken; such an undertaking is sure to be followed by calamities of heaven (i.e., natural disasters)."

When we look back through the long volumes of our collective history, and remind ourselves how much we valued nature then - and went to such pains to preserve our harmonious relationship with it - it is tempting to speculate "Where did we go wrong?"

Indeed, on this day in spring, we should ask ourselves, "When did we first begin to risk losing that balance with Mother Nature?"

The author is former secretary for home affairs of the Hong Kong SAR government

(HK Edition 03/03/2010 page1)