Karen Armstrong tells us that:

The Chinese had assumed
that their resources were inexhaustible, so they had plundered the
countryside and slaughtered its animals with no care for the morrow.
Now they realised that this brutal insouciance could not continue.
Aristocrats were forced to curtail their hunting, which had been their
chief pleasure – almost their raison d’être – and an extensive ritual
reform regulated every detail of their behaviour. Gradually this
religious discipline transformed their mentality, so that a spirit of
moderation and self-control replaced the former wasteful excess. Even
warfare became a courtly game in which it was considered bad taste to
kill too many of the enemy.

It
did not last, alas. In the fourth century BCE, the Chinese had an
industrial revolution, and restraint went out of the window. With
greedy abandon, princes cut down forests, mined mountains, drained
swamps, and their savage internecine wars reduced the great plain to a
desolate wilderness. But religious reformers, such as Confucius and Lao
Tzu, called upon their rulers to conform to the basic laws of
existence, to the way (dao) things ought to be.

The
Chinese knew enough about human selfishness to realise that external
directives alone would not save their society; there had to be a
fundamental change of heart.

So, as I read it, getting people to understand and respect nature is a difficult thing. A good thing, but difficult.

The ubiquity and
persistence of this attitude of committed concern for the well-being of
the earth suggests that it once came naturally to humanity.

Umm, sorry? it’s natural to humanity? Nope, sorry, don’t get that piece of logic.