This paper offers a psychoanalytically informed reflection on how the environmental crisis has been framed and debated. The author draws attention to the ways in which apparently radical responses to the environmental crisis may often only reinforce established sociopolitical positions. By examining various responses to the environmental situation, it is argued that solutions-focused thinking runs counter both to the underlying assumptions of much environmentalist literature, and to basic psychoanalytic insights concerning the nature of change. Emphasis on action and the theme of adaptation is portrayed as being fundamentally opposed to a more substantive shift in consciousness.