Critical Essay: Environmentalism and social work

When it comes to disasters and natural calamities, social work appears to be at the forefront of immediate relief efforts by working alongside emergency service personnel or by providing trauma and emotional support counselling. Despite this expertise in context driven work, social work rarely addresses or attends to human interactions within the natural environment. This review utilises an important reference book released recently called Environmental Social Work (Gray, Coates, & Hetherington, 2013) to explain the need for social work and human services professions to become sensitive and central to environmental concerns. Environmental Social Work (Gray et al., 2013) maintains that the profession of social work has been late to engage with environmental movements and has remained exclusively in the arena of the social environment. The time is certainly ripe for a discussion around the possibility of social work’s environmental engagement as more consistent writings have appeared over the past decade. This article will briefl y review the theoretical orientations of evolving environmental social work practice efforts that are being made to bring this agenda into the profession.