Environmentalism in Social Work

Abstract

I am designing an elective on environmentalism in social work; there are numerous directions that the course could take. In the social work literature, an emerging theme is the depiction of Indigenous peoples as the original environmentalists, best situated to mentor the profession. However, I argue that this bypasses the ways that ideologies of nature operate in political spaces. Indigenous social movements around land and resources face resistance and we must engage with interdisciplinary critiques of the dangers of simplistic conceptualizations of the environment to see the intense political struggles taking place.

In the last decade plus, the topic of environmentalism has gained prominence in social work education and scholarship. In their recent collection, Environmental Social Work, Gray, Coates, and Heatherington (2013) write that “Environmental realities have played a significant role in pulling social work to re-evaluate its modernist foundations, and to shift from the primacy of therapy and rehabilitation to recognize humans’ essential connection to all of nature, including all people and all life on the planet” (p. 4, emphasis added). Those now interested in the physical environment and discourses of environmentalism lament earlier social work models that ignored the physical environment entirely. Many students and educators approach the profession with political allegiance to green issues and living their lives accordingly; social work scholars and educators find compatibility between professional practice and a range of views on spirituality, environmental justice, social service provision, and various ecological viewpoints. Fears over environmental destruction and a general sense of disconnection from nature are finding traction in social work literature, conferences, education, and activism.

I am in the process of designing a new graduate elective on environmentalism in social work. In preparation for this, I have been familiarizing myself with the debates and discussions on the subject in the social work literature and looking at course syllabi where I can find them. It is clear that there are numerous directions that such a course could take. As Gray et al. note, the profession finds common cause with many of the themes in ecological discourses, including sustainability, ecological justice and global environmental movements, wilderness preservation as antidote to rampant materialism, indigenous worldviews, environmental ethics, ecofeminism and spirituality, environmental racism, and climate change and its concomitant disasters. I would add to this list food and fresh water access and security, ecotourism and ecopractica, as well as critical inquiries into ethical and environmentally sound consumption practices. Some of these linkages between the professional mission and environmentalism draw a direct link between professional expertise and practice in the face of global environmental calamity. For example, Dominelli (2012) turns her focus to the vital role of social workers in ameliorating the devastating impacts of climate change and environmental crises on people globally, particularly those living in poverty. Strengthening the voice of social workers who “support people during disasters at policy-making and practice levels,” Dominelli argues for approaches that address power relations and endorse responses to the ways that environmental crises intersect with things like socioeconomic disparities, global interdependencies, and limited natural resources (pp. 2–3). Other earlier social work literature addressed the environmental justice movement, environmental racism, and the negative impact of industrial pollution on particular communities through an explicitly social justice lens, citing the links between ecological crises and political concerns in which social workers are engaged (Hoff & Polack, 1993; Rogge & Darkwa, 1996).

My first degree is in plant biology. I was taught the intricacies of plant morphogenesis, alpine plant ecology, and the science of keying out fungi and bryophytes to genus and species. Geography courses were part of this degree—soil science, cartography—and all of this information, combined with my love of hiking and alpine meadows, made my time in the mountains—for work and for play—a great source of pleasure and relaxation.

I changed scholarly direction and did graduate work in critical race studies and the sociology of education and knowledge production. For the last 12 years, I have been on faculty in a Canadian school of social work, teaching feminist, antiracist, postcolonial and poststructuralist theory and social analysis to bachelor of social work and master of social work students who want to both find employment and make a difference in peoples’ lives. In graduate school, I began my education in critical race theory. New questions arose that challenged my simple alpine pleasures: As Pratt (1992) pointed out, cartographers and botanists were not simply identifying and mapping; violence is much more than an army; and when I was happily strolling through a national park, I rarely had to think about displaced peoples and the violences that preceded me. Mawani’s (2005, 2007) work on the social and legal construction of wilderness landscapes such as parks reminds us that it is now well accepted that landscapes are not natural entities but are social, historical, and cultural artifacts to which colonialism has been crucial. There is nothing natural about nature. These thoughts stuck with me, and of late, as I witness the surge of interest in social work and the physical environment, I have found myself wondering about the scope and limitations of the environmental conversations going on in social work literature and education. I seek to design an interdisciplinary course that brings together geography, cultural studies, environmental racism scholarship, and postcolonial literature to bear on social work’s treatment of environmentalism. Starting from the premise that language does not simply reflect what is there but rather is productive and contested, it seems paramount that we unpack contested and complex, yet taken-for-granted, concepts like nature, wilderness, and environmentalism.

However, as I study the social work literature on environmentalism, I have been struck by the ways in which the problem and its solutions have been formulated. My questions orbit around knowledge and its production—that is the assumptions that underpin the ways in which the environment and nature are conceptualized. Environmental discussions occur at the convergence of several events in social work education today. One is the trend to introduce social workers to critical analyses of the profession, its history, and its function in contemporary neoliberal societies (e.g., the profession is mired in the neoliberal restructuring of the job, the workplace, and the very mission of the profession); another is the proliferation of interest in “greening” social work’s knowledge base, that is, drawing together the mandates of a profession charged with managing social problems with the proliferation of environmental talk; another is the reemergence of spirituality as an organizing grammar underpinning the profession (in the environmental context, this is framed as ecospirituality); and finally we have seen an emphasis, although uneven perhaps, on antiracist social work, and in particular practices of whiteness that pervade professional practice and knowledge (e.g., Jeffery, 2005). I am left wondering how to engage the richness and breadth of environmentalism and its myriad relevant topics in a way that attends to the complexity of the social, political, and economic context. Let me illustrate this with an example.

The mission statement of the department in which I work claims a commitment to “social justice, antiracist, antioppressive social work practices, and to promoting critical enquiry that respects the diversity of knowing and being” (http://www.uvic.ca/hsd/socialwork/home/home/about-us/index.php). One of our priorities is Indigenous social work education, wherein all students, Indigenous and non, will gain a sound foundation in working with and alongside Indigenous communities, cognizant of colonialism and its violences as well as resistance movements. Indeed, at a recent curriculum meeting, a group of faculty who teach in the MSW program spent several hours talking about what it would mean to “Indigenize the curriculum,” infusing each course with Indigenous authors and substantive content. In preparing a course on environmental discourse in social work, I think about how to honor these various educational commitments. To that end, I went looking at scholarship on Indigenous social work. In a 2008 edited collection, Indigenous Social Work Around the World, this phrase caught my attention:

For Indigenous Peoples, land and nature are inseparable and the spiritual, social and material are inextricably entwined. Everything is connected. The environment is sacred and people are expected to live in harmony with nature as the nurturer of all life. Land shapes their cultural identity and well-being. This is a social and economic reality. Indigenous People have a special relationship to the land and their traditions prompt them to work at being good environmentalists, which is an expertise of benefit to all lands and peoples. Many people in mainstream society who intimately understand the delicate balance in which the earth hangs cite the importance of Indigenous religious and material relationships to the earth and look to model sustainable practices upon Indigenous beliefs, values and practices…For Indigenous Peoples, place constitutes life in the highest ontological sense. The land and nature lie at the heart of identity and culture and shape the view of the world wherein human life mirrors nature flowing in cycles, circular rather than linear time. (Gray, Coates, & Yellow Bird, p. 52)

The authors go on to warn of the perils of misunderstandings and appropriations by those who have “fashion[ed] a New Age culture that feeds [on] the emptiness of secular, de-traditionalized, modern, Western culture” (p. 53). What has captured my attention is the focus on Indigenous peoples at the point where nature, culture, spirituality, and environmental good practices come together. Indigenous peoples around the world are distinguished by their “place-based existence” (Alfred & Corntassel, 2005, p. 597) and interdependency to the land on which they and their ancestors live. My point here is not to question whether or how Indigenous worldviews encompass place, connection to land, and relationship to the human and nonhuman worlds. Rather, what troubles me, from a critical anticolonial, antiracist standpoint, are the ways in which unproblematized concepts of and assumptions about “Indigeneity” tend to function in much of the social work discourse that lays out a rationale and practice direction. Representations of native and nature seem to easily slide into nostalgia and depoliticized longing for a premodern self.

Anthropologist and American Native Studies scholar, Paul Nadasdy’s (2005) work on Indigenous peoples and environmentalism has been helpful in articulating my unease with what I experience as limitations in the conversation. I agree with him that representations of the “ecologically noble savage” (Redford, 1991, cited in Nadasdy, p. 292) and debates over Indigenous peoples as good stewards of the land, or not, are racist and futile diversions. Nadasdy argues that the problem lies in the “spectrum of environmentalism” itself. Environmentalism can be understood as a “catchall term” referencing a wide range of differing beliefs and practices, with these existing on a spectrum ranging from the anti-environmentalists comprised of mass consumers, industrialists, and capitalists who draw a sharp distinction between humans and the environment to mid-spectrum environmental reformists who advocate lifestyle changes, protective legislation, and a utilitarian view of nature and its use to humans; and at the other end of the spectrum the green or more radical environmentalists who blur the boundaries between humans and the environment, see nature as having inherent value, independent of its utility to humans, and may “cultivate a spiritual relationship with the environment” (pp. 296–297). While he readily acknowledges the risks of overgeneralizing and oversimplification of these categories, Nadasdy argues that they serve a purpose in that they capture a truism in environmental thinking about Indigenous peoples: “…the argument over whether indigenous people are environmentalists or not is nearly always an argument about where they belong on the spectrum of environmentalism” (p. 298). Mainstream environmentalists

tend to view the ecologically noble Indian as the original conservationist…while environmentalists with more radical goals see in the ecologically noble Indian a subversive figure, one who holds the philosophical keys to environmental revolution. From whatever point on the environmentalist spectrum they hail, it seems, environmentalists invoking the image of ecological nobility seek to locate indigenous people beside themselves on the environmentalist spectrum. (p. 299)

And that is a problem because the concept of this spectrum reflects a set of culturally specific assumptions about people and their possible relationships with the environment while presuming that there is something natural about the configuration of the spectrum.

I draw extensively on Nadasdy’s ideas here because they call up themes in the social work literature in which, overtly or implicitly, Indigenous peoples are identified as the original environmentalists and best situated to mentor the profession on its path toward a greener accountability (Besthorn, 2012; Coates, 2003; Zapf, 2009). One of the repeated arguments stresses the idea that we have gotten too far from a sense of connection to the nonhuman world that is essential to our overall well-being; this materialism is a misstep and has to be addressed. The antidote to this excess of materialism is a shift toward spirituality in general and closer attention to Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies in particular, worldviews that are based on a more fundamentally nonhierarchical relationship to land and the natural world. My concern here is with what sounds like a depoliticized romanticization of this ontological and epistemological position, available for adoption by anyone looking to step away from the consumption and the materialism underpinning the social woes that social workers encounter. As Grande (2004) states, environmental debates limit the discourse around Aboriginal people to questions of identity, authenticity and the white, liberal, multicultural fantasy of “Indians living in harmony with nature” (p. 64). Additionally, I think there is a further point to be made here and that is that the epistemological position is itself a construction of the white imagination. It isn’t just that an Indigenous position is available to all for adoption but that, in fact, it isn’t real in the first place. Recalling Crosby’s (1991) rendering of “the imaginary Indian,” romanticized ideals sidestep, whether we intend them to or not, the historical facts of what colonialism has done to Indigenous communities and their cultures, how peoples have evolved, and the non-static nature of values and traditions.

However, critical inquiry in social work would benefit greatly, for example, from an analytics of the neoliberal context which Brown (2005) tells us is an economic and political rationality that “while foregrounding the market…involves extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action” (pp. 39–40). To better understand the perils and resistances that Indigenous social movements, in particular around land and resources, face globally, we need to consider the work of critical scholars such as Jodi Melamed (2011) who argues that neoliberal multiculturalism “is one of the most useful discourses functioning today to dispossess indigenous peoples of their lands and resources” (p. 183). Melamed’s insights into neoliberal multiculturalism and the new racial capitalism shed light on indigenous movements for social justice and strategies deployed. She writes:

As the global resource wars have pushed onto indigenous lands, the knowledge apparatuses sustaining economic globalization have had to bring indigenous peoples into representation in a manner that explains their exploitation as inevitable, natural, or fair. But this state of affairs has also provided an opportunity for indigenous-led cultural activism to insert its own signifying systems into public discourse in order to displace the structures of legitimate knowledge, to contest dominant systems of representation, and to try to open them up to cultural meanings and epistemic orientations originating in indigenous-led interpretative communities. (p. 183)

Melamed’s point here is that the knowledge economy of neoliberal multiculturalism justifies the exploitation of land and resources for a global good. Multiculturalism is presented as the “spirit of neoliberalism” and investor–producer access to diverse markets, as well as consumer access to diverse goods, is equated with multicultural values and antiracist justice. At the same time, the removal of indigenous peoples from their lands is justified “by describing the entire world as the rightful potential property of global multicultural citizens” (p. 183). However, this lexicon is also being strategically deployed in the interests of Indigenous cultural activism where Indigenous activists are “successfully using [their] own version of multiculturalism to make the conceptual bases for new categories of indigenous rights and new strategies for claiming land tenure appear necessary, well founded, and just” (p. 184). Analyses like this capture the cultural politics of nature and social difference, as they play out in a neoliberal context and thus enrich social work’s efforts to understand, ameliorate, and intervene productively and accountably.

My readings leave me wondering about the lines of analysis not taken in our discussions about environmentalism within social work. If we are to move beyond well-worn tropes “of preservationist constructions of threatened environments (wilderness lost and in need of redemption; the landscape of the noble savage; a prescribed site of the anti-modern; the place for scientific intervention)” (Rossiter, 2008, p. 115), our pedagogies need to explore environmentalism through the lens of race, space, and environmental justice. We might ask how ideologies of nature have operated in political spaces. When we look closely, what can we learn about the “complexity and contradictions of the ways in which nature itself is produced” and the ways in which these connections between environmental and social politics are manifest in people’s daily lives (Kosek, 2006, p. 22)? How, in social work education, can we consider knowledge and its production in a way that insists on engaging with the compelling interdisciplinary critiques of the dangers of simplistic conceptualizations of nature, culture, wilderness, and the environment to see the intense political struggles taking place? My hope is that questions like these might form a launching pad from which to consider the critical deployment of environmental discourses within a helping profession.

I end this article where I started—pondering the purpose and range of a course for social work students on environmentalism and the many issues that compete for inclusion and analytical development. In this brief discussion here, I have only been able to introduce some of the many directions that a course on environmentalism and climate change might take. Yet the social work classroom seems a fertile site to begin the preliminary work of drawing on a wide range of interdisciplinary inquiry to theoretically inform the sorts of practical applications that students and practitioners seek.