It just makes sense that the best and surest way to circumvent ecological destruction is not to participate in damaging behavior in the first place. It would be far less costly, wasteful, and painful to implement technologies that hardly pollute at all instead. Environmentalists today also seem to agree that in order to significantly change people's behavior from one of ecological antagonism to one of ecological harmony, we need to transform the way that people think. Highway clean-ups, enforced recycling, or pollution regulation may move society a step in the right direction, however such measures will ultimately not solve our ecological problems. We would progress even further if we were to change the way people think, not just the way the act.
Environmentalists generally advocate a more ecological and wholistic vision of the world.
It is time to extend our scientific understanding of the interrelatedness of ecology and all of the earth's systems to ourselves. We need to see that our human institutions of government, economics, art, literature, every single aspect of our lives is deeply and integrally connected with the dirt and worms, with the birds and atmosphere, the oceans and sea animals, the entire planet and the universe in which it spins. Humans are not separate from the fluctuation of the seasons, from the circling of the nitrogen and carbon cycles or from the food webs that sustain all the plant, animal and insect life on this planet. As a species, however, we live as though we are separate. We think and feel and believe that humans are outside of those processes.