Cloudscape

When you look at the list of countries by income per capita, it becomes apparent that nature is apparently an important factor — though the list varies from year to year, countries such as Norway, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Ireland, Iceland, Danmark and so on have often been among the list. Two other relationships appear to be a history of fossil fuel exploitation and a history of war, both of which indirectly stimulate productivity.
The causality of this relationship is probably dual. On the one hand, richer people may have been more inclined to seek out nature, and the children of wealthy people are generally relatively wealthy themselves. On the other hand, nature may make people happier and thereby more productive.
If the latter is more important than the former, then it is important to recognize this factor in economy; it must be known that nature is important in economy, and therefore there is all the more reason for the two to be in harmony. Environmentalism does not need to hamper economy, but may on the contrary promote it. Everything, including economy, is a question of balance, and so it must be approached in a holistic as well as a more analytic way. Economy that is out of balance will damage the environment, which will damage the well-being of the population, which will damage economy.

This remains, however, a hypothesis.

If for everything one paid, taxes were levied equivalent to the damage to ecology it entailed, and the money of those taxes were used to negate it, then no further damage would be done to ecology at all. This would be similar to VAT, yet serving to a far more important cause. It is ridiculous not to include one's ecological footprint to the price of products or services.
This could also apply to population growth, for instance in crowded countries such as China: rather than fining families which have more than one child, one could simply make life more expensive so as to discourage familial growth. Increasing the price of residential zones would also save space. If there are families who are willing to tighten their belt to have more than one child, they could do so without causing environmental destruction if they paid the price to undo it.
In this way, all weight imposed upon environment would be reduced to zero. Awareness of ecological footprint would no longer be necessary because it would no longer exist at all: for whatever damage one would cause nature, one would pay the same price needed to repair that damage.
Instead, people would come to prefer more ecological means simply because they are less expensive. Thus, taxing ecological footprint would not only reduce the damage of ecologically unfriendly means, but also reduce their use.
This is viable. There are plenty of ways to undo environmental damage, though they aren't always cheap. The only thing that keeps us from doing so, then, is greed. However, the more technologies to restore environment would be used, the more efficient and therefore less expensive they would become, as their increased use would encourage their further development.
It is an absurdly simple notion, but as it would check the mass consumption of our society, it is unlikely to be implemented with a mindset as we have today. We have acquired the attitude that economy is more important than ecology. We have become so estranged from nature that we have come to appreciate hedonism more than nature's sublimity.