Privileged Socionatures and Naturalization of Privilege: Untangling Environmental Privilege Dimensions

Abstract

Although environmental justice has been developed extensively, both theoretically and empirically, its complementary concept, environmental privilege, has received far less scholarly attention, and it has rarely been reflected in empirical geography. Environmental privilege adds an important dimension to environmental justice scholarship, highlighting the importance of understanding environmental inequality by moving from ghettos into places where racial and economic privilege is enjoyed. In this article, I aim to start defining a review of environmental privilege themes and dimensions. Such a review of this social phenomenon will be relevant for the many fields involved in the understanding of pressing sustainability challenges and of human–nature interactions more broadly. I also draw an initial research agenda for addressing environmental privilege in the postpandemic world.

环境正义在理论和实践上都得到了广泛的发展, 但环境正义的相关概念和环境特权却很少受到学术界的关注, 也很少体现在实证地理学中。环境特权给环境正义研究增加了一个重要的维度。从贫民区迁移到享有种族和经济特权的地方, 环境特权强调了基于这种迁移去理解环境不平等的重要性。在本文中, 我的目标是回顾环境特权的主题和维度。在回顾这一社会现象中, 我还包括了如下的相关领域：理解可持续性的紧迫挑战、理解人与自然更广泛的互动。我还制定了一个初步的研究议程, 旨在解决疫情结束后的环境特权。

Aunque la justicia ambiental ha sido desarrollada extensamente, tanto teórica como empíricamente, su concepto complementario, el privilegio ambiental, ha recibido mucha menor atención académica, y rara vez se ha visto reflejado en la geografía empírica. El privilegio ambiental añade una dimensión importante a la erudición de la justicia ambiental, destacando la importancia de entender la desigualdad ambiental con el movimiento desde guetos a lugares donde se disfruta de privilegios raciales y económicos. En este artículo, yo apunto a empezar a definir una revisión de temas y dimensiones del privilegio ambiental. Esa revisión de este fenómeno social será relevante para los numerosos campos involucrados en el entendimiento de apremiantes desafíos de sustentabilidad y, con más amplitud, las de interacciones humanidad–naturaleza. También diseño una agenda de investigación inicial para abocar el privilegio ambiental en el mundo pospandémico.

Key Words:

• COVID-19 environments
• environmental justice
• environmental privilege
• naturalization of privilege
• politics of representation

关键词:

• COVID-19环境
• 环境正义
• 环境特权
• 特权的自然化
• 代表政治。

Palabras clave:

• entornos del COVID-19
• justicia ambiental
• naturalización del privilegio
• políticas de representación
• privilegio ambiental

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work contributes to the Juan de la Cierva Formación fellowship (FJC2018-036460-I). At the time of research, the author was funded by the ERC Starting Grant (GA678034) GreenLULUs.

Notes on contributors

Lucía Argüelles

LUCÍA ARGÜELLES is a Juan de la Cierva Fellow at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) and the Estudis d’Economia i Empresa at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Barcelona 08035, Spain. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research focuses on how socio-environmental transformations interact with broader political and economic dynamics as well as how people imagine and perceive such relations, in fields such as urban greening or agro-food systems.