| The passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964, while protecting millions of acres of land from actions of industrialized society, also had the consequence of commoditizing wilderness. In defining wilderness as it did, the Wilderness Act of 1964 advocated an idea of wilderness that never existed and could never exist. The propagation of millennial and jeremiad narratives to espouse the values of nature in order to protect non-attainable outcomes has lead to eco-anxiety in the United States. This eco-anxiety is seen in many aspects of consumer culture, including coffee consumption. After outlining the implications of the Wilderness Act of 1964, this thesis explores the ways in which eco-rhetorics have pervaded the discourse of coffee consumption in both the public and private spheres, first by analyzing the eco-rhetorics at play in coffee sleeves and then by examining the ethos evolution of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc. into Keurig Green Mountain, Inc. |
