SIXTH ANNUAL
SOCIAL WORK DAY AT THE UNITED NATIONS
Impact
Of The Environment On The Human Condition:
An International Human Rights Problem
First Avenue
Wednesday, March 29, 1989
International Federation of Social Workers
Associate Professor, Faculty of Social Welfare,
University of
Impact of the Environment on the Human Condition:
An International Human Rights Problem
Background
The
word “environment” does not appear at any point in the International
Code of Ethics for the Professional Social Worker (IFSW Code of Ethics,
authored by Chauncey Alexander, and adopted by the IFSW general meeting, San
Juan, Puerto Rico, July 10, 1976).
The Code does state, however, that one of the standards by which ethical
conduct can be demonstrated by professional social workers is that they
“identify and interpret social needs, the basis and nature of individual,
group, community, national and international social problems…“
(IFSW1976: 2, Item 6). Surely, there can be no dispute that the state of the
environment is an international social problem… Surely there can be no
dispute that a social work perspective -- one that is concerned with the
patterns of relationship among living things, and how those patterns may be
changed to achieve social justice -- can and should be brought to bear on the
fundamental task of saving our endangered planet.
Historian William Irwin Thompson, writing from his Canadian retreat of
“We will have to come right up to the edge to find out where we are, and
who we are. At the edge of history, history can no longer help us, and only
myth remains equal to reality.”
Thompson, At the Edge of
history:
Speculations on the
Transformation of Culture, 1971: 230
Looking “from one end of history to another”, as Thompson did, we
see that as a species we have made increasingly closer approaches to
eradicating ourselves and every other living thing from the face of this good
planet.
Social workers around the world have in common the task of teaching people how
to interpret their experience, how to make sense of their personal,
inter-personal, familial, social, political, work, and economic environments.
To these, we must now add an understanding of the environment, itself, for our
interactions with it are largely unseen, and beyond our awareness, and largely
beyond the awareness of those who have been, traditionally, the clients of
social workers. And, just as we have been able to make explicit to
direct-service clients those unseen political and economic forces that have
shaped their lives, so must we now make explicit those unseen environmental
factors which shape their lives. The difference is that such a stance removes
the boundaries between social worker and client: neither is spectator in this
enterprise. Each has equal need and equal capacity to affect our chances for survival.
Models
help us to explain old things and they help us see new things. When social
workers turn their minds to environmental matters more extensively than they,
as a collectivity, have to date, which items will they include on their agenda?
What they include is as important as what they exclude, for their
interventions will be shaped by their perception of the range of inter-related
environmental problems, by their appreciation of the connectedness between what
they already know of the human condition, and by their being clear about which
actions they can take in their role as professionals, and which actions they
take in their role as citizens. For example, one could predict that the
majority of social workers, world-wide, would list many of the same
environmental concerns as does my own national government:
Environment
and Development Canadian Visit”, May
1986
One
suspects, however, that few social workers (at least in my own nation) would
list two agenda items which are noted by our own government:
The Human Rights Aspect
The
International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) has issued a volume entitled
international policy papers (1988) which, in eleven subject areas , provides
guidance for social workers and their professional associations, on “the
broadest issues confronting society at large” (IFSW, 1988: 1). The very
first of these policy papers, and the one which sets the foundation for the
remainder, is our “international policy on human rights”. In it, we
define human rights as “those fundamental entitlements that are
considered to be necessary for developing each personality to the fullest
“ (Alexander for IFSW, 1988: 6). The document further delineates a
somewhat expanded version of the original United Nations Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, and talks of rights in the areas of
governance, justice, the family, education, employment, and health, and closes
with the responsibilities individuals must assume to advance the cause of human
rights.
What we do not discuss in the document is a right that may now be considered as
an over-arching one: the right to a safe, clean, non-toxic environment…
and the right to have key natural resource issues and key human settlements
issues solved, in such a fashion so as to promote the continuance of the planet
earth (World Commission on Environment and Development, “Mandate for
Change: Key Issues, Strategy and Workplan”, Switzerland, 1985).
As president of IFSW, I can tell you that it is my sense of our members in
fifty nations that they would agree with such an addition to our existing human
rights policy. I think that they believe, as does one of Canada’s leading
human rights pioneers, Kalmen Kaplansky, that “anything which affects the
dignity of people and their standing as equal members of society is a human
rights issue” (Canadian Human Rights Advocate, 1988). And nothing
can affect each of us more than the fact that if we exploit the environment, we
exploit each other. . . Even unto death. And in death, there can be neither
social nor economic progress, nor development. The closure of our planet is the
last “development”.
Implications for Social Work and Social
Work Education
A
“new” emphasis on the environment will not be “new”, in
some senses, to the social workers of the world. We have already laid the
foundation for this development in the evolution of the profession and in the
training of its students for practice. We need only to expand our vision
slightly to incorporate the new realities.
1. Many north American schools and faculties of social work have already
adopted a generalist perspective for social work education, especially at the
level of the first professional degree (BSW), teaching to students what the
common base, or elements of all practice, are. We are fond of talking of
clients “in their situation”, or the “person in
context”… Surely, it cannot stretch us too far to include the
environment as part of “Context”.
2.
Many schools and faculties, likewise, have adopted general systems theory as a
model for organizing social work practice, and while this is
“borrowed” knowledge, systems theory does teach us a focus on
“the inter-relationships of elements in nature…” (Barker, The
Social Work Dictionary, 1987: 162). While those of us in academic circles
have found this to be a useful (if not non-controversial) perspective, it is a
perspective which allows us to incorporate into our knowledge base those facts
about environment which enhance our understanding of the range of misery in the
human condition… and to enhance the breadth of our opportunities for
intervention. It may be that our assumptions about the importance of social and
economic and cultural and organizational emphases have precluded observations
concerning the primacy of the environmental issues.
3.
Further, many North American schools and faculties have organized their
approach to social work from an ecological perspective, i.e., a perspective
borrowed from biology, that studies the relations between organisms and their
environment. In its application to social work, the “organisms” are
humans, and the “environment” is sometimes rather narrowly
construed as being the social environment, solely. This need not be the case,
and we could expand our definition of environment to incorporate its real meaning,
which is much closer to the meaning ascribed to it by the United Nations and
others. For example:
“An orientation in social work… that emphasizes the environmental
contexts in which people function. Important concepts include the principles of
adaptation, transaction, and goodness of fit between people and their
environments, reciprocity, and mutuality.”
Barker, The Social Work
Dictionary, 1987: 48
4. In addition to the commonalities between our North American social work
education programmes, particularly with reference to our perspectives on the
use of systems theory and an ecological perspective on practice, there is
international agreement among IFSW member associations on the core subject
areas that should be taught in any post-secondary program of social work
education. One of these -- human growth and social environment - - offers a
vehicle for expanding the knowledge base of future practitioners. [The other
core subject areas are: social policy; social welfare administration; research
methodology and design; supervised practice or field work experiences; and
methods courses in the application and integration of the learned knowledge
base.]
It is in this course(s) that we can teach students that human behaviour cannot
be understood except in its environmental context. There is already an
excellent but not well-known model for doing so, one developed by Mukerjee (The
Dimensions of Human Evolution, 1963: 41) and brought to the attention of
academics by Dr. Shanti Khinduka (Dean, George Warren Brown School of Social
Work, St. Louis) at the 1976 Habitat Conference in Vancouver. In brief,
Mukerjee organizes our world and, therefore, our knowledge about it, into four
types of environments:
·
The Internal Biological Environment
·
The Social Environment
·
The Ecological Environment of External Nature
·
The Ideal or Metaphysical Environment
Coming from the perspective of environment, rather than the more traditional
way of beginning with the individual and moving outward, is perhaps an antidote
for those students and social workers who have confined their interests and,
therefore, our profession to too narrow a view of the real world in which they
are living. It is also a perspective which unites in common cause the social
workers in developed and developing countries.
5. Finally, IFSW in a revised code of ethics might give guidance to its member
associations in drafting their codes to reflect the duty of care that social
workers owe to all client systems to practice as though the environment
mattered. The code of ethics for the Canadian Association of Social Workers is
explicit in this matter:
“3.6 The social worker will have adequate knowledge and abilities to meet
standard of service requirements:
3.6.1. Knowledge and understanding of human development and functioning;
cultural and environmental factors affecting human life and the patterns of
social interactions contributing to the interdependence of human
behaviour.”
Conclusion
These are but a few modest ways in which we can link our growing knowledge of
environmental matters to what is already important to us in the profession as
it is practiced in our world. Social workers have always believed at least two
of the basic laws of nature/ecology: everything is connected to everything
else… (and) there is no free lunch. And it is through days such as
this, which allow us to know each other and to join our hands in a common
effort, and through our representatives to this august world body, that we
shall undertake uncommon decisions that may yet help all of us on planet earth
stave-off the impending night… a night of our own creation.