there's something to be said for how the premise of the game is based on colonialism, but in terms of environmentalism, you can sustainably harvest wood and metals, and the game gives you many incentives for planting more trees https://twitter.com/adamconover/status/1248355067209506816

specifically, this edition of the game has a big emphasis on making things yourself by hand, with sustainably harvested local materials, and/or trading valuables within your community rather than ordering them out of a catalogue

you can conceivably level your entire island, pave over it square by square, and turn it into a parking lot, but there's no actual reward for doing so?

but there's plenty of rewards for planting trees and flowers

and when you make "roads," you can have them all be dirt paths

all of your clothes are made by a local family running a small business, and all of the money goes directly to them rather than some faceless multinational running a sweatshop

Animal Crossing comes across as someone's intentional attempt to take the horrors out of capitalism

you could argue it amounts to propaganda - "look how good capitalism could be if only we all got along!" - but it doesn't come across like that to me in the mechanics and story

Tom Nook's backstory, according to the scant details he hands out, amounts to "someone who went into day trading, had a life-altering existential crisis, decided to literally screw off to a deserted island to form an anarcho-syndicalist commune"