The Ecological Perspective 37 Client Environment 2.1 Clients’ interactions with the environment their transactions with their social and physical environments. Because this discussion is likely to occur early in their field practicum, students may not yet have firsthand experience with clients, but they should be able to answer this question generally, based upon their agency’s mission, purpose, and clientele. This discussion should illuminate for students how failures to meet the survival and adaptive needs of clients arise from a lack of fit between their environments and themselves. 4. If most students in the class do not yet have field assignments, ask them to discuss the relevance of the concepts of habitat and niche in their own lives in order to grasp the importance of the concepts in clients’ lives.