A good friend of mine told me about the landslides in Bukit Tunku (Kenny Hills) some years ago. In his neighbourhood, everyone is wealthy (at least in terms of the property they own).

The wealthy are able to put some of their ideas into reality, particularly if it involves self-gratification. In this case, some sort of terraced garden with lots of ego planted to boot.

However, in this case, the wealthy neighbour was particularly penny-pinching. He only cared about what the garden would look like from his vantage point. Thus, the safety of his neighbour below was literally "out of sight".

He built a thin retaining wall that effectively acted as a reservoir and pressure from captured rainfall eventually brought the wall down. But it also destroyed half of his neighbour's garden below.

As often happens with wealthy people, a clash of the cheque-books ensued. Some greasing of the palms and of course, a suitable out-of-court settlement reached upon. Case closed. What is the moral of the story?

If you are rich enough, you can get away with building really thin retaining walls, destroy your neighbour's sense of peace and then just pay them for their trouble.

Unfortunately, that is only part of the tale. The real moral is that if you are wealthy and surround yourself with equally wealthy people, you are asking for trouble. They can grease palms and bring down your entire house.

That is exactly what happened to my friend's son, who also had a house in Bukit Tunku. He "had" a house but a landslide soon robbed him of one!

Today, I have another friend living in Bukit Ceylon, or what used to be Bukit Ceylon. Now, only two-thirds of the hill remains. The rest has been literally turned into a construction site. She now lives in fear for her life.

The fact that Ceylon Hill was there before human habitation did not register with these developers. The hill does not recognise the imagined boundaries that we have put over it.

Thus, whatever artificial ‘development’ we pile on top must be cognisant of the geological features of the hill. Carving one-third of it away and thinking that we can use technology to maintain the broken balance is hubris personified.

Unfortunately, not all human beings are endowed with common sense. When my friend discovered that a neighbour had built a retaining wall on the upper terrace of a sloping portion of the hill they both shared, she asked that they do a study and erect the boundary wall whilst strengthening the hill. She even offered to share the cost involved.

Instead, she was told that whatever happened at the bottom part of the sloping hill was her own problem. The wall came up and funnelled rain water down, seeping into the lower end of the slope and sent it crashing. City Hall had to be brought in to put matters right.

If this sounds like a repetition of the earlier incident in Bukit Tunku, it is because nature is impervious to the dreams and silliness of human beings. The real tragedy is that human nature itself is as old as the hills. Wealth, it seems, just amplifies this human ugliness.