Taking Responsibility as Consumers and Citizens : Individual Responses to Environmental Crises

How should people respond to the realization that their actions are bound up in the causal processes that cause such environmental problems as resource depletion and climate change? Should they take responsibility as consumers primarily, engaging in practices of green consumerism as a remedy, aiming to extricate themselves from contributing toward acknowledged problems? Should they instead, as others have claimed, engage primarily in political activities designed to bring about collective rather than individual solutions to such problems? What, ultimately, should each of us do, in either or both of these domains in order to satisfactorily discharge our responsibilities? This question concerns two distinct problems that come together around this imperative of individual action: 1) the empirical consideration of whether consumer or citizen activism constitutes a more effective means of bringing about the desired ends; and 2) the normative entailment of acknowledging our complicity in larger states of affairs like environmental crises. Drawing on the respective scholarly literatures of social movement theory and practice and moral responsibility theory, I shall defend a view of what individual responsibility for such problems entails and how persons might discharge these responsibilities. In so doing, I shall attempt to explicate the roles played by differentiated past contributions to the problem, differential capacity to remedy it, different levels of knowledge and intentionality, and various sorts of co-benefits play in determining and discharging one's responsibilities