I have found that the behavioral ecology of bird nest construction for example, identifies considerations that can serve as a set of guidelines for an environmental artist’s conceptual workspace.
Hansell[2000] in his marvelous “Bird Nests and Construction Behaviour” addresses a broad range of nest and nest building considerations including: the social and biological roles of nests and nest building, the interrelationship between technique and materials, nest shape, nest site, nest making materials, energy budgets, tool use and tool making.

Once a workspace has been circumscribed by (e.g. the above) guidelines, we can give free reign to our intuitive, imaginative and experiential impulses to traverse the territory between determinism and probability.
Last year I set up a workspace that incorporated a small subset of some of the constraints identified by Hansell and started to “mess about” in that space.