Radical Ecologisms: Insights for Educating Social Workers in Ecological Activism and Social Justice

Social work's person/environment models have been guiding frameworks of professional practice for decades. Social workers separated themselves from other helping professionals by claiming as their particular jurisdiction a unique and dual concern for both person and environment. In practice, however, the person/environment orientation has become problematic partly because of the difficulty associated with attending equally to personal and environmental issues (Besthorn, 1997, 2000). The persistent tendency has been to focus on knowledge and services directed to the personal domain while the depth of knowledge involving the environment has become constricted (Weick 1981; Saleebey, 1991, 2001; Kemp, 1994; Besthorn, 2000, 2001). Much of what social work finds wearisome in fulfilling the primary goal of optimizing realization of person and environment constructs has to do with its struggle to conceptualize and act upon both its personal and especially its environmental commitments