<p>The impact of the environmental crisis on humans is most often discussed either in terms of its adverse physical effects, such as illness or bodily harm resulting from pollution, extreme weather, and related factors, or in terms of its psychological effects, including environmentally related emotions such as anxiety, grief, or solastalgia. These perspectives, however, tend to overlook its existential dimension: namely, the ways in which the environmental crisis can undermine an individual’s sense of meaning, purpose, and agency in life. The paper draws on Gabriel Marcel, Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and argues that, from the perspective of existential phenomenology, the environmental crisis can be understood as a form of trial, that is, as a demanding obstacle that must be confronted and overcome. When such a trial cannot be meaningfully resolved or escaped, it gives rise to a condition the paper terms environmental captivity: an existential state in which individuals feel that their freedom and their sense of purpose and meaning have been profoundly diminished. The paper then distinguishes three specific forms of environmental captivity: (i) creative environmental captivity—when the environmental crisis constrains how a person may express themselves creatively in their profession or in their free time; (ii) relational environmental captivity—when the environmental crisis places strain on interpersonal relationships and on the sense of purpose people derive from social connections; and (iii) ecological environmental captivity—when the crisis affects how people derive a sense of rootedness from physical places in nature that are being destroyed.</p>