Environmentalism and social work

When it comes to disasters and natural calamities, social work appears to be at the forefrontof immediate relief efforts by working alongside emergency service personnel or byproviding trauma and emotional support counselling. Despite this expertise in context drivenwork, social work rarely addresses or attends to human interactions within the naturalenvironment. This review utilises an important reference book released recently calledEnvironmental Social Work (Gray, Coates & Hetherington, 2013) to explain the need forsocial work and human services professions to become sensitive and central to environmentalconcerns. Environmental Social Work (Gray, et al, 2013) maintains that the profession ofsocial work has been late to engage with environmental movements and has remainedexclusively in the arena of the social environment. The time is certainly ripe for a discussionaround the possibility of social work’s environmental engagement as more consistentwritings have appeared over the past decade. This article will briefly review the theoreticalorientations of evolving environmental social work practice efforts that are being made tobring this agenda into the profession.