The ecological crisis will precipitate a death-rebirth confrontation that will shatter our psychospiritual isolation, both individually and societally, and bring forward an awakening of common ground within us.

The movement advocates a holistic philosophy that takes non-human life as an intrinsic value and seeks a better quality of life grounded by values rather than goods. This holism is particularly sympathetic to Asian and pantheistic wisdom traditions such as Daoism, Buddhism and Native American religions.

Putting Native Americans back in the picture meant radically redefining what nature means and what the human place in it might be (another undoing of a dichotomy, the nature–culture divide, with profound implications for the environmental movement, which has not yet altogether come to terms with this revision of meaning).