This article debates the possibility that social work as a profession can, if it is not vigilant to the underlying premises of social development, contribute to the promotion of social injustice towards the same people it sets out to empower by unwittingly depleting and destroying the environment. Social development with its strong focus on economic development is driven mainly by modernity as a worldview. Values from this view underline aspects such as the natural environment as resource, economic growth and domination (...) over nature. Although some definitions of social development might include the concept of sustainability, thereby implying that the environment is an important issue, this level of work does not require social workers to practise from an eco-spiritual or a deep ecological point of departure. An eco-spiritual social work approach is harnessed to try and explain social work's contribution to the critical issue of the survival of all species. Guidelines and possible actions from an eco-spiritual social work approach are indicated for a shift from that of fitting in with modernity to one of sustainability and participation in the creativity of the environment. (shrink)

: Aarne Naess, in a seminal paper on environmental philosophy, distinguished between two streams of environmental philosophy and activism--shallow and deep. The deep, long-range ecology movement has developed over the past four decades on a variety of fronts. However, in the context of global conferences on development, population, and environment held during the 1990s, even shallow environmentalism seems to have less priority than demands for worldwide economic growth based on trade liberalization and a free market global economy.

Aarne Naess, in a seminal paper on environmental philosophy, distinguished between two streams of environmental philosophy and activism—shallow and deep. The deep, long-range ecology movement has developed over the past four decades on a variety of fronts. However, in the context of global conferences on development, population, and environment held during the 1990s, even shallow environmentalism seems to have less priority than demands for worldwide economic growth based on trade liberalization and a free market global economy.

From a feminist perspective, I am interested in ‘women's ways of knowing’ ( et al., ) and the relationship between knowledge, difference and power ( et al., ). Here I trace the relevance of Gramsci to my own feminist consciousness, and the part he played in my journey to praxis. I also address feminism's intellectual debts, most particularly in relation to the concept of hegemony. The intellectual context has shifted in emphasis from macro‐ to micro‐narratives which reject Marxism as masculinist (...) and dichotomous. The dilemma has been an overemphasis on the personal‐cultural at the expense of the collective‐political, distracting us from action for social justice at the same time as globalisation is creating escalating world crises of justice and sustainability. In conclusion, I advocate a re‐reading of Gramsci in the light of key feminist critiques of class and patriarchy in order to develop i) analyses based on multiple sites of oppression and ii) action which reaches from local to global through alliances to achieve a more integrated feminist praxis. Throughout, I use ‘dis’ability and ‘race’ to denote the socially constructed nature of these concepts. (shrink)

A transition to a sustainable future depends on mobilizing social and cultural resources associated with a re-animation of place. Taking as its basis ongoing research in Rjukan, an industrial monocultural town in Norway, the article shows how industrialized regions in a post-industrial world are in the frontline of western societies' relationship to nature and the environment. There is much potential in the restoration of human relationships to place in industrial towns, in terms of health and social and economic development, but (...) not least in terms of sustainability understood as authentic, positive and healthy self-development. (shrink)

In The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, Cynthia Eller describes a dangerous, ‘ennobling lie’ that must be overturned in order for women to have a viable future. The so-called matriarchal myth which she attempts to debunk is the idea that human societies have not always supported male domination in social structure and religious practice and that societies have existed in which women and the entire natural world were honored. This article examines Eller’s stated assumption that such ideas are utopian inventions and (...) that male dominance is the most reasonable, scientifically sound approach to an interpretation of prehistory. (shrink)

Corporate engagements with pressing environmental challenges focus on expanding the role of the market, seeking opportunities for growth and developing technologies to manage better environmental resources. Such approaches have proved ineffective. I suggest that a lack of meaningful response to ecological degradation and climate change is inevitable within a capitalist system underpinned by a logics of appropriation and an instrumental rationality that views the planet as a means to achieve economic ends. For ecofeminism, these logics are promulgated through sets of (...) hierarchical and interrelated dualisms which define the human in opposition to the realm of “nature”. This has led to the resilience of ecosystems, social reciprocity and care being unvalued or undervalued. An ecofeminist, care-sensitive ethics is proposed that focuses on the interconnections between human and nonhuman nature and on affective engagements with the living world. A practical morality is developed that sees the self not as atomized nor as self-optimizing, but as a self in relationship. Such an ethics is necessary to motivate action to contest capitalism’s binary thinking, evident within corporate environmentalism, which has re-made the web of life in ways that are not conducive to planetary flourishing. (shrink)

The Western metaphor of self-as-identity?as a static, inherently exclusive entity?has been instrumental, historically, to our radical separation from nature, and still hampers a reviving of genuine participation with nature. Suggesting an alternative to this metaphor (informed by literacy as technology), I explore the more nature-informed metaphor of dynamic, complex self-systems, involving both natural and human subsystems. Through this latter metaphor, I re-vision radical participation with nature: in the process of perception, in epistemology/ontology, and in the ways of indigenous, oral cultures. (...) This systems metaphor also sheds contrasting light on literacy-informed, Western ways. (shrink)

Environmental management (EM) is at a turning point in its evolution as a discipline. Daunting social, ecological and spiritual problems of global magnitude implore EM to be inspiring and efficacious in theory and practice. Ironically, the present EM movement, in its ontologically dualistic configuration—measuring and manipulating the environment as an abstract, objectified economic resource for human gain—is unknowingly contributing to the very ecological degradation it wishes to ameliorate. In order for EM to become a truly ‘transformative epistemology’,1 its praxis must (...) ontologically transcend the narrow foundations of staunch empiricism, logical positivism and rationalism that now firmly gird it. As a possible alternative to EM’s ‘monological flatland’,2 we introduce a holistic praxiological system grounded in the ancient Indian vedanta wisdom tradition. Natural law-based environmental management (NLBEM) portends a radical metamorphosis of EM into a discipline that makes a meaningful impact on today’s precarious global condition. (shrink)