Communities sometimes react to environmental crises by creating local environmental organizations to engage in environmental advocacy, conservation and pollution control. Prior work has examined antecedents of such organized collective action by focusing on community attributes, such as trust, social capital, collective efficacy, and institutional legacies of past collective action. Yet, small, bounded geographic communities differ also in how they perceive environmental crises are true risks that deserve attention and organizational action. In this paper we argue that such variations in risk perceptions from environmental crises are associated with the degree of individualism vs collectivism is communities that is hyperlocal rather than national as has been assumed in the past. We test this broader proposition by studying how communities differ in their organizational responses to environmental crises posed by industrial accidents based on their degree of individualism, and how such responses are moderated by whether the underlying causes of the accident are natural vs manmade. Our paper speaks to the enduring puzzle of how local community action emerges not just in collectivist communities but also in deeply individualist communities such as in much of the United States heartland. We discuss implications at the intersection of entrepreneurship and the natural environment.
