“The Demand Makes People Forget Bad Things Happened Here”: Environmental Risk and Privilege in Elite Communities

• In Event: 50620 - Section on Environmental Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 3: Disasters, Health, and Inequalities

Abstract

Sociological research on disaster and inequality typically focuses on how marginalized groups and under-resourced communities handle the adversity brought on by natural disasters (e.g., Dash et al. 1997; Cutter et al. 2003; Elliot and Pais 2006; Tierney 2006, 2019; Kelman 2021). Less is known about how privileged groups, who increasingly face climate-related disaster risk, understand and respond to these risks and make sense of their experiences of natural disaster. This article examines how race and class-privileged elites understand, rationalize, and experience climate-related disasters and perceive environmental risk, as well as how they make decisions in response to these experiences and perceptions. Using data from seven preliminary interviews and 30 hours of fieldwork in a high-status but high-risk community in California, I illustrate how financial and emotional investments in property, privacy, and coastal proximity outweigh threats of natural disaster for community members, despite their frequent acknowledgment of risk. Findings from preliminary data analysis indicate that 1) some residents feel that their community is safe because of, not in spite of, previous disasters, 2) classed choices for maintaining residential privacy have unintended consequences of increasing disaster risk, and 3) coastal proximity and climate simultaneously serves a benefit and risk to living in the community. This project has the potential to contribute to research on race, class, and gender privilege, environmental and disaster sociology, and community studies.

Author

• Sara Tyberg, University of California-Santa Barbara