We are given options to buy “green” products, encouraged to exercise our consumer choices responsibly, to participate as citizens in recycling programs, to constantly consider whether our individual actions are green. This becomes a certain kind of environmental moralism that privileges those in the middle and upper classes who can afford to buy organic food or pay for carbon offsets, those secular indulgences, and thereby fit the picture of a respectable and conscientious green individual. It is clear that this capitalist response to the environmental crisis is not enough to stave off the worst effects of climate change and offers us no way of thinking differently in order to avoid perpetuating destructive ways of living. The political and social response to the environmental crisis is doomed if it perpetuates a thinking based on individual responsibility and corporatist-individual action.
Anthony Paul Smith, Philosophy and Ecosystem: Towards a Transcendental Ecology
Anthony Paul Smith, Philosophy and Ecosystem: Towards a Transcendental Ecology