In the days preceding World Environment Day on June 5, both Taiwan and mainland China turned their backs on the spirit of the day by marking the completion of two major construction projects. With SARS now in retreat, the June 1 TV news was plastered with images of excited people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. In the mainland, the hubbub surrounded the start of the filling of the reservoir behind the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. Nothing-not the million-plus people forcibly relocated, the thousands of years of history that will be submerged, nor the destruction of natural habitats-could stand in the way of the anticipation and excitement most people felt at the completion of this epochal project.

In Taiwan, the news was the final drill-through of the Mt. Snow Tunnel on the Taipei-Ilan Freeway after 12 years of work. The tunnel project, called the world's most demanding, was completed using the world's largest tunnel boring machines. When completed, the freeway will cut travel time between Taipei and Ilan to 40 minutes, and enthusiasts herald it as an even greater engineering feat than the three highways that already cross the massive mountain ranges separating Taiwan's east and west coasts.

While the objectives, scale, and impact of the two projects differ, both raise issues related to water. So too does World Environment Day, which has "Water-Two Billion People Are Dying for It!" as this year's theme in an effort to promote water rights as a basic human right and to demand that the nations of the world pay more attention to water resources.

The Three Gorges Dam will generate electricity to meet the needs of China's booming economy. However, some question whether the dam will be able to fulfill its other objectives-to supply water and control flooding. The headwaters of the Yangtze have been drying up in recent years, with declining water quality and increasing soil erosion. Adventurers and survey teams that have negotiated the river agree that desiccation and desertification have worsened-over the last decade, there has been a 20% increase in the Yangtze region's desert areas. Grasslands have become sandy plains and dunes have swallowed the once-verdant lands of the headwaters.

At nearly 13 kilometers, the Mt. Snow Tunnel is the world's third-longest tunnel. Although the technology used in its construction is light-years ahead of that used 50 years ago for the Central Cross-Island Highway, the project is also more challenging and has suffered many setbacks, in part because no one questioned its route. Original plans called for work to wrap up in 1998, but the route was poorly prospected and the fractured geology of the Mt. Snow range made the digging exceptionally arduous. The project experienced delay after delay, including 36 floods, 25 cave-ins, and the destruction of a NT$1 billion tunnel boring machine. The tunnel has been accused of preventing underground water reaching the nearby Feitsui Reservoir, and a report by Academia Sinica researcher Wu Chu-tsung states that continuous development in the upper reaches of the Peishi Creek, including major projects like the freeway, have seriously affected the reservoir's water quality.

Humans depend on water, soil and air for survival. Today, the degradation of these three basic elements of life threatens our existence and quality of life. While connected to issues of survival and development, the Three Gorges Dam and the Taipei-Ilan Freeway are also emblematic of a flawed, short-sighted view of basic economic development that exists on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.

Economic development does not take place in a vacuum, a system unto itself. We cannot segregate it from the environment without sacrificing genuinely long-term development. Just as production and consumption exist not in a circular relationship, but in a linear one of ingestion and expulsion that begins in waste and ends in pollution, the endless exploitation of nature will not cause the Earth's water and soil to disappear, but will irrevocably degrade their quality. Therefore, if we are to have sustainable development, we must look to the future. We must ensure that our water, soil, and air remain safe. This should be the most basic consideration of an economic development policy. Sadly, politicians have never been much concerned with the future. As a mainland scholar put it: "This old Earth of ours has never yet seen rational, comprehensive economic development. Yet, in recent times, we have become infected with the growth contagion. We believe economic development is a panacea that will cure us of poverty, unemployment, debt, fiscal deficits, pollution, and social ills."

In this vein, had a route been selected for the Taipei-Ilan Freeway with lower environmental and social costs, surely people would have accepted slightly longer travel times. With the tunnel passing through such a sensitive area, were the reservoir authorities consulted about its construction? Did the environmental impact assessment examine the implications for northern Taiwan's water resources? Surely these are things that should have been considered.

Criticism of the project has been written off as technological pessimism. But in fact, critics of the project are not deriding the science or the technology, but are arguing for a reduction in the negative consequences of such projects. Those who build public works should take this responsibility upon themselves, but they do not. Then again, the engineers are not the ones making the final decisions.

The Three Gorges Dam and Taipei-Ilan Freeway show how little regard human beings have for the concept of sustainable development. At the same time, these two massive projects also say something about Chinese culture.

Studies of Eastern and Western thought generally agree that in the post-Enlightenment West, Nature has been viewed as an "other"-an object in opposition to and conflict with the subjective human, to be conquered, managed, developed, exploited and improved. However, within traditional Chinese thought, there is no conflict between humanity and nature. Instead, it finds unity between nature and humanity expressed in everyday life, and states that all material things have life, and that even non-sentient life is possessed of a Buddha-nature. There is a connection to the Earth, a sense of a return to Nature, a magnanimity and deep feeling for the Earth that arises from observing the passing of the seasons. This way of thinking has encouraged Chinese culture's unparalleled incorporation of gardening, landscapes and nature into its arts. When Taiwan's Mt. Snow Range, which took 20 million years to be born, and China's Three Gorges, which are so majestic and so rich in history, are so cavalierly defaced for construction projects, perhaps all we can say is that people today have a completely different view of nature.

But isn't it strange that as the West is slowly absorbing the East's traditional view of the natural world and moving beyond its oppositional view of Nature, the modern East can now find its traditional nature-oriented culture only in books?