Green Distractions? The Personalization of Environmental Protection

• In Event: Political Organizations Online and in Print

Abstract

When did the personal responsibility frame enter environmental politics? Many Americans take a range of voluntary actions—such as recycling waste, buying “green” products, and limiting meat consumption—in the hope of reducing their “carbon footprints.” Environmental advocacy organizations have long promoted this behavior through their communications—encouraging supporters to “do their part” through energy conservation, recycling, and lifestyle decisions. Experts, meanwhile, have debated the downstream effects of this framing choice: The magnitude of the climate challenge and the high proportion of pollution that comes from industrial activities means that individual action alone does little to improve the state of the environment. Some even suggest that the emphasis on personal action effectively depoliticizes environmental issues, weakening the capacity for the large-scale, sustained collective action demanded by the climate crisis.

Little is known about where and when the personal responsibility frame emerged and became incorporated into advocacy communications. Despite longstanding speculation about the frame’s effects, no studies have assessed its impact on the political power of the environmental movement. We begin to fill this gap in two ways. First, we develop a theory to explain why the rise of a personal responsibility frame is expected to have deleterious consequences for environmental organizations; building on extant work on social movements and interest group influence, we make a case for why the frame matters for the power building efforts of groups like the Sierra Club. Second, we trace the over-time development of the frame by analyzing an original, 50+ year corpus of Sierra Club magazines; the analysis examines when and how the magazine’s articles and advertisements began to emphasize voluntary individual action. This paper is a first step in a project exploring the origins and consequences of the personal responsibility frame.

Authors

• David A. Karpf, George Washington University

• Matthew Lacombe, Case Western Reserve University