Academic Jet-Setting in a Time of Climate Destabilization: Ecological Privilege and Professional Geographic Travel*

Abstract

This article analyzes the interrelationship among resource consumption, sociospatial justice, and what is popularly known as global warming by interrogating the ecological footprint of professional geographers, especially in terms of their conference-going involving air travel. In this spirit, the article introduces and employs the concepts of ecological privilege (as well as its inextricably related antithesis, ecological disadvantage) and dys-ecologism as a way to understand the roots and implications of professional geographers’ fossil fuel use and those of globally advantaged classes more broadly. To illustrate this, the article measures the flight-related ecological footprint of the 2011 annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in Seattle, Washington. In doing so, the article examines how professional geographers, in the form of the AAG, have responded to their travel-related ecological footprint. It thus highlights the importance of scrutinizing the complex and dynamic interrelationships among consumption; associated socioecological benefits and detriments and their systemic manifestations; and hierarchy-related and power-infused categories of race, class, and nation—and their spatialities.