At its heart, this movement sought to give political form to an awareness that predates Buddhism but is at the same time as new as the science of interdisciplinary ecology. It grew out of a flickering awareness that all our relationships are political, and that the crucial political relationships with which we must concern ourselves now have almost nothing to do with the man's relation to man, but with man's relation to the Earth itself. It is our relationship to our planetary environment, which is the most important issue of all. All human structures inevitably rest upon it.

The time has arrived when we must begin to examine the underlying realities of our relationship to all life around us. ... Otherwise, in our lifetimes, we shall suffer the enactment of the saga of Genesis: our expulsion from paradise and the fall of nature itself.

—ROBERT HUNTER, WARRIORS OF THE RAINBOW (1979)