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.