Eco awareness: The cheap Story Progression substitute?

I don't think I fully agree with that. All of this eco stuff to me just just sounds like busy work. It seems like the player will have to be constantly monitoring the world (s) to make sure they don't got back to being dirty and if they let up for one moment everything will be screwed up. It doesn't sound fun at all, nor do I think it' could be a substitute for "progression" because it just fluctuates between two states of clean vs polluted based on what the player does. But that's just how I feel based on what I've seen so far.