Reflections | China was a sustainability pioneer, learning early that human exploitation of nature should be synchronised with nature’s cycle

One can be forgiven for wanting to give up saving the world. We try our best to sort out our rubbish, to reuse and recycle, to live a sustainable lifestyle, to stop using plastic straws, and so on, only to be told that individual efforts have a negligible impact on halting environmental degradation. If nations and industries are not willing to do more, then all the things we do as individuals come to naught.

The ancient and precocious Chinese civilisation learned and applied the concept of ecological sustainability at an early stage in human history. The first writings on the subject, and the first state-level bodies whose function was to manage the exploitation of nature’s largesse, date back to more than two-and-a-half millennia ago, during the Zhou dynasty (circa 1046-256BC). They were the products of human experience and wisdom that had been accumulated in the centuries, perhaps even millennia, before.

The philosophical underpinning of the practices and regulations to safeguard sustainability was the idea that nature moved in a cycle, and human exploitation of nature’s bounty had to be synchronised with this cycle. The great philosopher Mengzi (372-289BC), also known in the west as Mencius, is recorded as saying: “If the axes enter the hills and forests only at the proper time, there will be more wood than we can ever use.”

There was a “proper time” to fell trees, and to hunt or trap animals. A middle-level office in the Zhou bureaucracy called the Shan Yu, or supervisor of forestry and hunting, ensured that the people did just that.

During winter, only the trees growing on the southern slopes of the mountains could be cut down, while trees on the northern slopes were reserved for summer felling. There were also laws that forbade hunters from killing the young of wild animals and foragers from collecting the eggs of undomesticated birds.