Green Social Work: from Environmental Crises to Environmental Justice - Softcover

Dominelli, Lena

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745654010 ISBN 13: 9780745654010

Publisher: Polity, 2012

Synopsis

Social work is the profession that claims to intervene to enhance people's well-being. However, social workers have played a low-key role in environmental issues that increasingly impact on people's well-being, both locally and globally.

This compelling new contribution confronts this topic head-on, examining environmental issues from a social work perspective. Lena Dominelli draws attention to the important voice of practitioners working on the ground in the aftermath of environmental disasters, whether these are caused by climate change, industrial accidents or human conflict. The author explores the concept of 'green social work' and its role in using environmental crises to address poverty and other forms of structural inequalities, to obtain more equitable allocations of limited natural resources and to tackle global socio-political forces that have a damaging impact upon the quality of life of poor and marginalized populations at local levels. The resolution of these matters is linked to community initiatives that social workers can engage in to ensure that the quality of life of poor people can be enhanced without costing the Earth.

This important book will appeal to those in the fields of social work, social policy, sociology and human geography. It powerfully reveals how environmental issues are an integral part of social work's remit if it is to retain its currency in the modern world and emphasize its relevance to the social issues that societies have to resolve in the twenty-first century.

About this title

Review:

Lena Dominelli has done it yet again with another first in social work education! In Green Social Work, she combines her usual interests in human rights, poverty and inequality, and social justice with that of climate justice. Crossing the lines between the natural and the social sciences, pragmatic intervention strategies and case studies are provided that make the book a necessary companion for educators, practitioners and students of social work and related disciplines.
Vishanthie Sewpaul, University of KwaZulu Natal

This book could not be more timely. The global crisis caused by climate change, environmental degradation and associated issues of food and water insecurity and poverty have created fertile ground for global inequalities within and between nations. The role of social work in intersecting between people and policy can ensure that the human rights of the most vulnerable are protected and that socially just solutions are enacted. I applaud Lena Dominelli on her book and see it becoming a seminal social work text.
Margaret Alston, Monash University

Green Social Work makes an important contribution to explicating the links between the social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainability. While burgeoning popular movements, such as “Occupy” and “Climate Justice” are doing this, too often academic and professional practice, not to mention government policy, focuses on only one of these aspects at the expense of the others. Lena Dominelli convincingly argues that social workers, working with societies’ most marginal and disadvantaged people and communities, are key to articulating the social with the environmental in both their daily engagements with the people they work with, and as campaigners against structural inequality and injustice. At the same time, this book crosses disciplinary boundaries by providing environmentalists with valuable insights into the ways in which societies’ more vulnerable people and communities experience social-environmental disadvantage.
Susan Buckingham, Brunel University

About the Author:

Lena Dominelli is Professor of Applied Social Sciences in the School of Applied Social Sciences, and Associate Director of the Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience Research at Durham University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Polity
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0745654010
• ISBN 13: 9780745654010
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200