Green distractions? When did environmental politics become a matter of personal responsibility?

When did the personal responsibility frame enter environmental politics? Many Americans take voluntary actions—e.g., recycling waste or buying “green” products—to reduce their carbon footprints. Environmentalist organizations have long promoted this behavior through their communications. Experts, meanwhile, have debated the effects of this framing choice, as individual action alone is insufficient for addressing the climate challenge. Some even suggest that emphasizing personal action depoliticizes environmental issues, weakening the capacity for collective action. Little is known, however, about when and where the personal responsibility frame emerged. We begin to fill this gap by (1) developing a theory about why a personal responsibility frame is expected to have deleterious consequences for environmental organizations like the Sierra Club, (2) tracing the over-time development of the frame by analyzing a multi-decade corpus of Sierra Club magazines, which shows that the emphasis on voluntary individual action accelerated rapidly in the 1980s, and (3) offering some potential explanations for the timing of this shift.