The association promotes nudism and nude recreation in appropriate settings and lobbies various levels of government in the interest of its affiliates and of nudist recreation.
The countryside was posited as a romantic alternative to urban living, and some naturists even promoted what they saw as the healthful benefits of nudism.
Naturism promoted an ecological worldview, small ecovillages, and most prominently nudism as a way to avoid the artificiality of the industrial mass society of modernity.