Lena Dominelli - Green Social Work: From Environmental Crises to Environmental Justice

Introduction

Setting the Scene

Environmental crises and their impact on diverse populations across the globe have challenged social work practice at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century not only by the frequency of their occurrence, but also by their complexity and the substantial damage caused to the Earths physical environment and well-being of the countless numbers of people, animals and plants living in it. Those linked to natural hazards such as the 2010 earthquakes that occurred in Haiti, Chile and Christchurch and the 2011 earthquakes in Christchurch and Japan, the latter of which also encompassed multiple hazards caused by a tsunami and radioactive leakages, have overwhelmed the helping services by the magnitude of the damage caused. They have also highlighted the linkages between human behaviours, economic imperatives and social policies and the extent of suffering experienced by victim-survivors. For example, corruption among the elites of Haiti, the inability to observe building regulations in Chile, and corporate secrecy in Japan meant that the damage was more extensive than it need have been and that emergency responses were hampered by the lack of information, infrastructures and resources vital for dealing with these catastrophes. Poor women, children and men bear the brunt of these failures. Victim-survivors experiences demand transformations in the conceptualization of and responses to disasters, as does caring for the environment. Social workers, as the professionals responsible for safeguarding human well-being must rise to the challenges posed by this state of affairs.

While social workers have provided humanitarian assistance and counselling services to those on the ground, their voice has scarcely been heard in the media. Additionally, it is absent from many of the decision-making structures formulating policy for preventing large-scale devastation in the future, and addressing needs during calamitous events and afterwards. Social workers lack of involvement is not unexpected. Their tasks involve supporting those requiring assistance. But they rarely have time to engage with the wider issues of practice, including the development of social policies that draw lessons from micro-level practice and affirmation of their expertise when other professionals extending their roles seek to appropriate it. The profession has a wide-ranging remit, but social workers have played a minor role in deliberations about the deleterious impact of environmental disasters on peoples well-being, in local communities and globally.

Except for community workers, those intervening in deprived localities with poor housing stock have seldom taken action to raise consciousness about the appalling physical surroundings in which service users or clients live. Social workers might advocate for a family needing a new home to protect children suffering from respiratory ailments caused by damp, mouldy housing, but, unless they are community workers, they would not engage in collective action to repair or replace decrepit properties in an entire estate. Their voice has been virtually absent from climate change discussions. Yet, they work in different communities in the aftermath of environmental disasters, whether these are caused by climate change, nature, or industrial accidents like the one that occurred in Bhopal, India, or conflicts between populations like those happening in the slums of Nairobi in Kenya. In the latter, refugees escaping the loss of grazing lands through droughts that had destroyed traditional lifestyles became embroiled in tense confrontations with existing slum dwellers.

This book contributes to filling the gap in the literature caused by the shortage of publications that specifically address environmental issues from a social work perspective, advocating for and strengthening the voice of social workers who support people during disasters at policy-making and practice levels, however and wherever these take place. There are a limited number of texts that address what has been termed environmental social work and ecological social work. I focus on what I call green social work because I want to produce a book that transcends the concerns of ecological social work, which is a systems-based approach to the mainstream social work preoccupation with the person in their environment, usually defined as their social environment (Van Wormer and Besthorn, 2011), e.g., Gill and Jack (2003). Such writings tend to ignore power relations based on geo-political social structures that have a deleterious impact upon the quality of life of poor and marginalized populations and the Earths flora and fauna. They also fail to endorse action that could secure the changes necessary for enhancing the well-being of both human beings and the planet, I argue that green social work focuses on how responses to environmental crises must both challenge and address poverty, structural inequalities, socio-economic disparities, industrialization processes, consumption patterns, diverse contexts, global interdependencies and limited natural resources.