Class, climate change, and closed systems: inverted quarantine on Nantucket Island

Abstract

ABSTRACT Environmental sociologists have debated the role of individual versus societal responses to climate change impacts and threats. Some are critical of all individual consumption-driven private responses; others see some value in conscious consumption. One characterization of private threat response is ‘inverted quarantine’: attempting to isolate an individual from a ‘sick’ world by purchasing safe products or spaces. Inverted quarantine scholars theorize this can have unintended consequences such as harm displacement onto the unprotected and redirection of resources toward privilege. Little work, however, has empirically documented the causal relationship between inverted quarantines and unintended consequences, which are typically spatially and temporally distant. This multi-method ethnography of Nantucket Island fills that gap by leveraging characteristics of ‘islandness,’ enabling observation of sequential processes of inverted quarantine, consequences, and responses. The study confirms that harm displacement and resource redirection occur. It also finds an additional, insidious consequence of inverted quarantines: a double bind impeding effective public solutions. Public solutions threaten the private-threat-response industry and therefore the livelihoods of laborers producing inverted quarantines. While creating the conditions for its own eventual failure, inverted quarantines may also guarantee their continued manufacture at the expense of public solutions, by monopolizing the means of economic and social reproduction.