5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

In recent years, the private jets, luxury yachts, and mansions of the super-rich have attracted attention for their extraordinarily high levels of CO2 emissions. A growing number of studies focus on the contribution of the consumption patterns of the super-rich to the climate crises. While this research is important in highlighting that certain social groups cause more CO2 emissions than others and should be held accountable for their actions, it minimises the underlying modes of domination of nature to consumption practices. Much less studied are the perceptions, attitudes and behaviours of the super-rich with regard to nature control more generally. These include, for example, particularly space-consuming recreational activities such as hunting or horse-riding, the ownership and cultivation of forests and landed property, as well as the extractivism of fossil-intensive companies owned by them.

In this session we welcome contributions that explore the specific understandings and practices of nature control by the wealth elite. In particular, we invite contributions that examine the ownership of land, forests and firms by the super-rich and how they contribute to the preservation and destruction of nature. We seek to foster a productive discussion on the particular human-nature relationships of the super-rich, including forms of subjugation and commodification. As the climate crisis intensifies and leads to major distributional struggles, we believe this nexus is crucial to exploring and understanding the contemporary dynamics of social inequalities.