The Land Ethic in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Nathan Schmidt, Contributing Editor

No matter where you live, there’s a good chance you have at least one annoyingly perfect ecological friend. They show up at potlucks with a little rack of cute thrift-store mugs instead of disposable cups. Their garden is somehow both immaculate and homespun, those hydrangeas looking just disheveled enough in their little repainted, upcycled planters. Their yard, which is seeded with native plants instead of regular suburban grass, is disorganized, but not ugly. They seem genuinely happy riding their bike, not just to work, but to the store and back, bags bursting with in-season produce and brown rice. Their backyard compost somehow smells…good? I mean, earthy, but not like shit. They’re a genuine delight to be around, and their whole life looks like it could be a Ursula Le Guin novel. The only unlikeable thing about them is how badly you want to be them, but the last time you tried to grow a plant it survived three weeks of neglect and dehydration until the cat gave it the coup des grâce. And last week, out of the desperation of a year indoors with your children, your whole family ate off paper plates. 

I think I get why Animal Crossing: New Horizons has had such a huge year. It’s not just because we’re all inside and the game lets you playact outdoorsiness. It’s that the whole Animal Crossing franchise is about appealing to our aspirations. Who wouldn’t want to live in a world where the mortgage banker is a kindly raccoon who charges no interest, where the economy is driven mostly by turnips and fish? It’s no anarcho-Marxist utopia, but I’d rather live under turnip capitalism than whatever the hell we have now. Sign me up! New Horizons isn’t a perfect game when it comes to ecology, but it’s a game that lets me live my truth—well, okay, maybe not my real truth. My wish-truth. I get to pretend like I know how to garden and stylishly upcycle.

The same might be said for twentieth-century conservationist Aldo Leopold, author of books like A Sand County Almanac and the essay “The Land Ethic.” His work isn’t perfect, but it suggests some aspirations. Leopold bemoans relationships to land that are “guided by economic self-interest,” suggesting he’s not all that into capitalism. But by casting the relationship between humans and their environment as a matter of individual ethics, he doesn’t exactly offer a complete overthrow of the status quo, either. “An ethical obligation on the part of the private owner is the only visible remedy,” he says, for environmental devastation. That’s not quite the “Abolish private property!” of the Communist Manifesto, now, is it? But the land ethic itself, as he describes it, isn’t a bad idea: “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.”

My invocation of Leopold here is a bit tongue-in-cheek. I think, were he alive today, he would be one of those super outdoorsy uncles who hates video games and really wishes you would put that thing down and come with him on a weekend hunting trip where cleaning the deer yourself is a “rite of passage.” But, if my experience playing New Horizons is any indication, I think there’s actually some element of the land ethic, and its many imperfections, at play in the game.

So, I’m the “official representative” on the island my little family shares, which means that Tom Nook gives me all the hard crap to do while everybody else plays around and leaves their furniture outside like the southern Indiana denizens we are. But over the course of the time I’ve spent working for the man (or, well, the raccoon), I’ve found myself meaningfully taking ownership of our little island—with a “conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land,” as Leopold puts it. I’ve found real joy in making things beautiful, for myself and for others around me. The little garden plot I started for myself has blossomed into a full-on greening project for everybody on the island to share and enjoy; in New Horizons, every garden is a community garden.

The Animal Crossing franchise notoriously monetizes everything, and to a certain extent New Horizons accentuates this trend by giving you “Nook Miles,” not just bells (the game’s regular currency) for doing even the most basic tasks. (I’m pretty sure that last night I actually got Nook Miles…for getting Nook Miles.) Leopold would be quick to point out the flaw in this system, from the perspective of a land ethic: “One basic weakness in a conservation system based wholly on economic motives is that most members of the land community have no economic value.” To a degree, Animal Crossing artificially creates an economic value for pretty much everything, from fruit to bugs to fossils. But there’s a major wrench in the cogwheels of economic utility: Blathers, the owl.

Blathers is the loquacious owl who runs the island’s museum, and he introduces a whole new ethical dilemma into the game’s most basic mechanics. As soon as Blathers shows up, you have to ask yourself, “Am I going to sell this fish to the store so I can buy more stuff for myself, or am I going to donate it to the museum so everyone can enjoy it?” In a game where your biggest goals revolve around paying off increasingly high (and suspiciously interest-free) mortgages so you have more space to fill with new purchases, this is a serious question. If I really play the game with an eye towards the virtual space that I share with those closest to me, I am more likely to feel that individual responsibility towards my fellow islanders and the land itself. I like this little island. I want it to be nice, look nice. Now that I’ve caught that huge koi, well, maybe it will be happier in the habitat Blathers has for it than wherever it goes after I sell it for 4,000 bells. Maybe a little beautification is better than my economic self-interest.

Having grown up with the original Animal Crossing (well, the GameCube version, not N64 one, which also came out in 2001), I thought the crafting mechanic in New Horizons was going to be a big pain in the ass, but I’ve actually come to see it, too, as the part of the game that really makes my environmentalist aspirations come to life. I think, actually, the first time the game really clicked for me was when I learned the DIY recipe for the item “succulent plant”: ten weeds and one empty can. I was used, you see, to the original game’s dump, which is the only suitable place for the garbage you occasionally catch floating in the water. However, when I turned those weeds and garbage into something beautiful, something that I could display in my house and (in a kind of weird way) be proud of, I felt like I was one step closer to being the kind of ecological person I wish I was.

So, like Leopold, maybe Animal Crossing: New Horizons is too focused on individual ethical responsibility, not quite anti-capitalist enough—and when they make Animal Crossing: Molotovs on Wall Street, I’ll be the very first person in line for it. But also like Leopold, New Horizons suggests that there’s something meaningful in sharing an individual responsibility for a collective world, in purposely making that world a place that will be nice for all of us to share because it has a value all its own. It may well be that the whole order of things as we know it needs to be reworked from the ground up in order for our planet to remain habitable in the long term, but you also have to start somewhere. When I fly off to my Animal Crossing island, it’s not to escape the disaster of extraction capitalism. It’s to dream about the person I want to be in response, even though I know full well that my eco-friendly lifestyle aspirations are far from the only thing at stake.