Well, to be honest, we Natives did do our fair share of trying civilization on for size. Look at Cahokia, Chaco Canyon, and so on. We did build cities. The mounds my ancestors built are still standing. The Aztecs built some pretty well-built pyramids also. We had a pretty extensive trade network bringing seashells from California, copper from the Great Lakes area, and many other things including live Macaw parrots up from South America. We had governments and my people had what was basically a pretty large standing army. The Anasazi basically built their civilization around trade and that kind of fell apart on them later when a drought hit and turquoise could no longer buy corn. The basis we had for our kinship with nature had to do with our survival depending on it, as well as certain spiritual traditions and taboos we can't discuss here. Everyone's survival still does, but people can't see it because they really don't know where anything comes from. Everything we have comes from this Earth and the Earth provides it. But people forget that.
A lot of people are conscious of respect for Nature, but consider this. What we call artifacts today is prehistoric litter. Pottery shards, for example. That's the ancient equivalent of a broken bottle. They're over 1000 years old and still there. They're all over the place out here. The difference is that today we're generating more than can be handled. We're filling in canyons with our trash. Valuable material is literally lost to landfills----copper, steel, brass, and so on. Back to those pottery shards, those are from pots that were broken. But what we do today is basically throwing away intact pots. Natives "back in the day" wouldn't have done that. A pot represents a lot of labor and it has value. Today, however, we'll throw away empty coffee cans, glass jars, and so on. Those are items that in certain Third World countries, they'd keep and use over and over until it broke, rusted away, or fell apart. What's more, you'll see these containers all over Nature and along the roads here. You can tell how much "stuff" a country really has by how much "stuff" they throw away; i.e. waste.
Ravens here know that they can fill their bellies at every McDonald's, KFC, and Burger King because people there throw a lot of food away. We throw away tremendous amounts of food because it's cheap and readily available. The House Sparrow and pigeon thrive in cities because they eat what people just drop or throw on the sidewalk. In turn, falcons now take up residence in cities to take advantage of another readily available meal---those pigeons and sparrows. Changes in animal behaviour simply from our habits of wasting food. What does this have to do with Nature? Because food comes from the Earth and wasting it represents wasting a lot of natural resources that went into making it available.
Anyway, rambling, so...
