Practicing U.S. Environmentalism From the Isolation of One's Own Home: Examining the Potential Emotional Consequences of Green Consumerism

This project examines how green consumerism—the purchase and use of products perceived as less harmful to the environment—could lead to unintended harmful emotional consequences. To illustrate this, it introduces the concept of eco-entrapped individuals: a hypothetical group of people with socioeconomic privilege who likely internalize climate change as a personal burden and rigidly rely on green consumerism to provide emotional relief. Rather than green consumerism helping to alleviate emotions like anxiety, shame, guilt, and doubt, I argue that it may intensify them, potentially exacerbated by moral rumination, social withdrawal, and social isolation. To cope with these intensifying emotions, eco-entrapped individuals may continue to rigidly engage in green consumerism, confined in a cycle where every decision could feel inadequate to their high environmental standards and likely cannot fully provide emotional relief. This project hypothesizes how certain mutually reinforcing factors—shown in a diagram I created—can accelerate this cycle, amplifying the perceived individual burden of addressing climate change. I examine how the U.S. residential landscape—often characterized by restrictive single-family zoning and a restricted mix of land use types—may further accelerate these emotional consequences of eco-entrapped individuals, likely limiting consistent opportunities for positive social interactions. By synthesizing a wide range of existing interdisciplinary evidence—including but not limited to scholarship in psychology, ethics, urban studies, and sociology—I explore the potentially severe emotional toll that this group can face when being morally pushed to the edge, offering a new perspective on the unintended consequences of green consumerism. To help ease this cycle, I consider how social capital can lessen its intensity and how modifications to the existing built environment might cultivate it.