Environmental Justice

An Issue for Social Work Education and Practice

Sondra Fogel, Carenlee Barkdull, Bret Weber, Sondra Fogel, Carenlee Barkdull, Bret Weber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317209645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Sociologia

What is environmental justice? Why is it important to social work? Social work has a long history with the term "environment" as part of our guiding Ecological Framework. Yet frequently, the assessment of the environment is left out or seen as a difficult domain to understand as part of the complexities of the human experience, particularly for those who are vulnerable, oppressed and poor. This book contains nine articles that showcase environmental justice work in social work practice and in educational settings from around the world. The profession now seems ready to ensure that the "environment" is once again given the consideration it deserves when we are assessing problems in living. These articles were selected for their helpfulness in moving the profession forward conceptually while offering practical tools for the classroom, institutions, and for further scholarship. This book was originally published as a special issue of Social Work Education: The International Journal.

Rethinking Social Work’s Interpretation of ‘Environmental Justice’: From Local to Global

Dawn Philip & Michael Reisch

This article challenges social workers to expand their understanding of the ‘person-in-environment’ perspective and become more active in addressing current environmental crises. Although social work scholars have begun to explore the relationship between social work and the natural and built environment and professional organizations mandate the integration of this content into practice and education, these goals remain unrealized, particularly in the USA. To address these issues more effectively, social work educators will need to distinguish between understanding persons in their environment and environmentalism, and between environmentalism and environmental justice. This article analyzes the emergence of the environmental justice movement in the USA and other nations and its relationship to environmental racism. It presents a case study of a local environmental justice effort to demonstrate how social workers can use their knowledge and skills to make important contributions to environmental justice and sustainability. It also discusses the potential of ‘green social work’ and transformative learning theory as tools to help social work educators better equip students to make strategic alliances across professions, disciplines, and systems to address contemporary environmental crises.

Introduction

Scholars have recently begun to explore the relationship between social work and the natural and built environment (Gray & Coates, 2013; Pulla, 2013); and professional organizations (National Association of Social Workers, 2009; International Federation of Social Workers, 2013) mandate the integration of this content into practice and education. Yet, to a considerable extent, these goals remain unrealized, particularly in the USA, although social justice principles and the person-in-environment perspective have formed the foundation of the profession for over a century. Because of the primacy of selfhood over collective rights, contemporary social work practice in the USA focuses more on adaptation than on challenging the structures underlying environmental inequities (Reisch & Jani, 2012). Consequently, the relationship between persons and the environment is viewed in a static, individually oriented manner that fails to recognize the differences that exist, among and within nations, based on cultural norms and political-economic realities (Jani & Reisch, 2011).

These differences appear in accounts of creation itself. Many indigenous narratives emphasize harmony between humans and the Earth. By contrast, Western religious and secular ideas about this relationship reflect an anthropocentric view of the universe that rationalizes environmental exploitation and destruction in the name of progress.¹

The earliest Western concerns about the environment emerged from both idealistic and scientific perspectives. In response to the social impact of the Industrial Revolution, the nineteenth-century Romantic Movement celebrated a pre-industrial view of nature, while the public health movement responded to increased evidence that environmental degradation had deleterious health and social effects, particularly on the urban working class.² Yet, the US government did not overcome corporate opposition and develop major environmental initiatives until the 1960s and 1970s, inspired in part by Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring (1962). It soon became clear, however, that these reforms did not address the environmental injustices that disproportionately affected racial and ethnic communities, indigenous peoples, and low-income persons all over the world (Bullard, 1994).

This article challenges social workers to expand their understanding of the ‘person-in-environment’ perspective and become more active in addressing current environmental crises. To address these issues effectively, social work educators will need to articulate the links between the ‘person-in-environment’ perspective and environmentalism and distinguish between environmentalism and environmental justice. We assert that social work’s ‘ambivalent understanding of its relationship to the natural world’ is not only unacceptable, but arguably unethical (Besthorn & Saleebey, 2003) and suggest how educators can better equip students to make strategic alliances across professions, disciplines, and systems to address these crises. After summarizing the evolution of social work perspectives on the environment in the USA, we discuss the emergence of the environmental justice movement and its relationship to environmental racism, describe how globalization influences international perspectives on the environment, and, through a case study, outline how social workers can use their knowledge and skills to make important contributions to environmental justice and sustainability.

Social Work and the Environment

The responses of the social work profession to environmental issues paralleled those of US society as a whole. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, social workers, particularly in the settlement house movement, were at the forefront of the public health response to urban problems created by industrialization. They recognized the relationship between the physical environment and human well-being, that ‘where people live profoundly influences how they live, with important implications for … social justice’ (Kemp, 2011, p. 1200). By addressing these public health and psycho-social effects, radical social workers articulated an early version of environmental justice that resonates to some extent today in the work of the Social Work Action Network (SWAN) in the UK and the Social Welfare Action Alliance (SWAA) in the USA (Reisch & Andrews, 2002).

During the twentieth century, this emphasis declined in US social work for several reasons. In pursuit of professional status, social workers increasingly focused on individual or family problems rather than structural issues (Specht & Courtenay, 1994). Many social workers embraced the popular view that economic growth, rather than redistribution, would ultimately reduce the environmental injustices poverty created. They viewed the solution to environmental injustice in terms of adaptation to environmental conditions or amelioration of the problems these injustices produced, rather than eradicating their underlying causes (Reisch & Andrews, 2002).

Although Richmond (1917) exhorted social workers to ‘treat individuals by way of their social environment,’ and social work theory consistently emphasizes an ecological, person-in-environment approach (Karls & Wandrei, 1994), practitioners tend to regard the environment as the context for practice instead of a dynamic component of people’s lives (Jani & Reisch, 2011). The recent focus on ‘evidence-based practice’ has transformed social work research from analysis of structural causes of societal inequities to measurement of the effectiveness of scientifically determined ‘interventions,’ tacitly accepting the status quo (Reisch & Jani, 2012).

The Environmental Justice Movement and Environmental Racism

The idea that environmental forces determine the quality of human well-being aligns with key principles of the contemporary environmental justice movement, which emerged during the early 1980s, fueled by growing concerns that toxic facilities were disproportionately located in low-income communities of color. Described as a ‘marriage of the movement for social justice with environmentalism’ (McGurty, 1997, p. 303), the environmental justice movement applied a civil rights approach and inspired a broad range of local struggles to redress existing environmental inequities through targeted action. Unlike frameworks that stress the preservation of ecosystem biodiversity and natural resources, an environmental justice framework centers the experiences of populations who are most affected by environmental degradation and enhances their ability to participate meaningfully in local environmental decision-making (Bullard, 1994). Developing robust public participation mechanisms, for example, allows communities to proactively challenge inequitable environmental decisions made on their behalf. Many barriers to such participation still exist, including limited access to health and environmental data and insufficient funding for technical assistance that would facilitate a community’s understanding of the often complex scientific and regulatory policies that drive environmental decision-making. Reducing these barriers is critical if low-income communities are to have a voice in shaping the environmental decisions that directly affect their short- and long-term health and well-being.

A statement by the US Environmental Protection Agency (United States Environmental Protection Agency, 2014) acknowledges this imperative. It defines environmental justice as the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental law, regulations, and policies.

At the local level, environmental justice can be advanced by analyzing the consequences of undesirable land use (Maller, Townsend, Pryor, Brown, & St. Leger, 2006). For example, there has been increased attention recently to the impact of hydraulic ‘fracking’ by extractive industries on racial and ethnic minority, low-income, and rural communities in the USA and developing nations (Davis, 2012; Kovats et al., 2014).

The environmental justice movement also inspired the term ‘environmental racism,’ which Bullard (1993–1994) defined as ‘any policy, practice or directive that differentially affects or disadvantages (whether intended or unintended) individuals, groups, or communities based on race or color’ (p. 1037). This term gained currency after the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice (1987) issued a groundbreaking report demonstrating how race, more than any other factor, predicted the location of toxic waste facilities. There is abundant evidence of this phenomenon. The impact of uranium mining in the North American West on Indigenous people; the frequent exposure of Latino farm workers and Indian cotton farmers to toxic pesticides; and the effects of illegally dumped manufacturing waste on the drinking water of residents along the USA-Mexico border are just a few examples.

Lack of Diversity Within Mainstream Environmental Movements

Environmental racism is also reflected in the composition of the environmental movement. During the first half of the twentieth century, environmentalists focused primarily on wilderness and wildlife protection (Worster, 2008). These goals mirrored the interests of the movement’s initial supporters—privileged white populations who wanted to retain their ability to enjoy outdoor recreational opportunities, particularly in the nation’s new national parks. Early environmental organizations excluded racial minorities and working-class people and largely ignored the environmental problems of inner cities, because they regarded urban areas as places of physical degradation and moral decay.

Today, many mainstream environmental organizations still reflect these initial characteristics. Consequently, many low-income and minority communities feel alienated by the environmental movement and consider it elitist. They view the reforms it promotes as disproportionately benefiting the movement’s supporters while imposing costs on them (Bullard, 2005).

In response to this neglect, the environmental justice movement gained momentum and relevance. In 1991, more than 650 grassroots and national leaders representing over 300 environmental groups attended the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. In 1994, President Clinton issued Executive Order 12898, the first major federal initiative requiring all government agencies to collect data on the health and environmental impact of their programs on minority and low-income populations (Executive Order No. 12898, 1994). By the end of Clinton’s second term, however, resistance from Congress, industry groups, and even within the EPA, significantly blunted this push for environmental justice. Today, however, environmental advocates are making important progress in preventing undesirable and unaccountable local land use and other environmental injustices in low-income communities through targeted policy reforms, public education campaigns, and sustained community organizing. The case study below illustrates how social workers can be important catalysts in advancing these efforts.

Case Study

In September 2009, Energy Answers International (EAI) applied to construct the largest waste-to-energy (WTE) incinerator in the USA in the Curtis Bay neighborhood of Baltimore. The incinerator would be less than a mile from a high school; over 230 trucks each day would transport 4,000 tons of waste through Curtis Bay and surrounding communities (Smith, 2014). Curtis Bay is already overburdened by toxic facilities, including one of the largest medical waste incinerators in the country, chemical plants, fuel depots, and a 200-acre coal pier (Williams, 2015). It has some of the poorest health statistics in Maryland and the dubious distinction of ranking first in the USA for its concentration and quantity of toxic air pollutants (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment, 2013). Given this overall community profile, a cumulative risk assessment would likely demonstrate the compounding effects of additional noxious facilities (Sexton & Linder, 2010). Although the WTE industry insists that incineration is environmentally and economically efficient, environmental advocates and the United Nations have pointed out the numerous adverse effects of incinerators on human health, climate change, and efforts to reduce waste and promote recycling.

Inspired by the incinerator project, a group of local high-school students initiated a campaign to block construction, using creative strategies to highlight community opposition to the project and undermine the incinerator’s financing plan. Greg Sawtell, a social worker and organizer with United Workers, a Baltimore-based human rights group that advocates for low-wage workers, has worked with these students for several years on an innovative human rights study project called Free Your Voice (FYV). They built a small, but growing movement to stop construction and raise the environmental literacy, social justice consciousness, and leadership skills of these youth. The students’ campaign stresses the connection between human rights and the impact of recent developments on their communities. It addresses such questions as ‘What broader structural changes are needed to facilitate our human rights?’

FYV investigated how local and state authorities allowed EAI to construct the incinerator in an environmentally overburdened community. Students learned that only a handful of community members knew about the project, although many residents had serious concerns about the health risks associated with living in such close proximity to a large incinerator. To increase community awareness, Sawtell worked with FYV to attract media attention through such tactics as a march from the school to the proposed incinerator site, a presentation to the Baltimore City School Board...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Environmental Justice and Social Work
• 1. Rethinking Social Work’s Interpretation of ‘Environmental Justice’: From Local to Global
• 2. Environmental Justice and Social Work Education: Social Workers’ Professional Perspectives
• 3. Changing Gears: Shifting to an Environmental Perspective in Social Work Education
• 4. Sustainable Social Work: An Environmental Justice Framework for Social Work Education
• 5. Social Work and Sustainable Social Development: Teaching and Learning Strategies for ‘Green Social Work’ Curriculum
• 6. Cultivators of Change: Food Justice in Social Work Education
• 7. Exploring the Intersection of Environmental Degradation and Poverty: Environmental Injustice in Nairobi, Kenya
• 8. Transforming Social Work Curricula: Institutional Supports for Promoting Sustainability
• 9. Environmental Sustainability and Social Work: A Rural Australian Evaluation of Incorporating Eco-Social Work in Field Education
• 10. Reflexive Development: A Model for Helping Social Workers Contribute to a Sustainable Global Future
• Index