In the western world, feng shui was often associated with a concern for the environment: when introduced in the 1960s, feng shui was accompanied by a range of new concepts, such as landscape, environment, nature and ecology, and was infused with western ideology; it was even used as an explicit criticism of a ‘conventional’ European perception of nature. When evaluating such concern, however, several distinctions must be made. First of all, as shown in previous chapters, feng shui was given a new guise when transferred to Euro-American societies, being stripped of much of its original folk-religious content. We should distinguish between what it was and still is in Chinese rural communities and what is has become in the western city and suburban areas, where it mostly has moved indoors and primarily relates to private life, including homes and gardens, or to various other purposes such as running businesses and institutions.

Then there is a distinction in time. During the long haul of Chinese history, feng shui was addressing individual human desires, sometimes extending to entire communities or cities, while nature and environment as such hardly were independent categories of thought and concern. The modern Chinese version looks increasingly similar to its western counterpart, but with the modification that feng shui uses still tend to be broader, including, for instance, burial, ancestor worship, business and links to Chinese religion.