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From social work towards sustainability work

By Werner Sattmann-Frese and Stuart Hill - posted Tuesday, 9 October 2018


In our 2008 book Learning for Sustainable Living: Psychology of Ecological Transformation the authors of this paper have argued for the need to create the profession of sustainability workers; a professional focused on the task of enabling the population and communities to explore their psychosocial sustainability issues, and to support individuals and their families to lead satisfying and meaningful lives with a low ecological footprint.

In 2018, almost 10 years after the publication of our book, we are still far away from being able to say that most people in the Western world have significantly advanced their ecological consciousness. Ecological progress has been slow and has mainly taken the form of technological advances, and curative (back end) rather than enabling and preventative (front end) measures.

Although the current American President, Donald Trump, has been widely rebuked for leaving the Paris climate change agreement, and many countries have reaffirmed their commitment to it, the agreement itself is mainly concerned with the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energies; in our view an important transition, but only one of many pressing issues that need urgent attention. Here we are thinking, for example, of the continuing rise of global inequality, the rise of right-wing fascism in many countries, the continuing deterioration of mental health, even in countries with a relatively well-organised health system, and the need to radically design and redesign systems at all levels to avoid rather than just ameliorate problems. The extent of what this requires is illustrated by one of us in relation to the design and management of a genuinely sustainable food systems (Hill, 2014).

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Considering the above, we endeavour here to justify the need to establish the profession of sustainability workers, and to describe what this might entail. One way to understand this need is to compare this proposed profession with conventional social work, a profession that has had, over the last 120 years, enormous positive impacts on the lives of millions of people; and that is now in the process of branching out into a broad range of socially important fields.

Social work and sustainability work

From the establishment of the first Summer School in Philanthropic Work in New York in 1898 to the academic training programs found in many countries 120 years later, professionals trained in social work now are active in areas such as welfare and income support, child protection, aged care, disability services, health care, psychiatric and general mental health care, youth work, and justice. They are employed as counsellors in diverse contexts with individuals, groups, and increasingly also in disaster management teams. Common driving forces for social work has been concerns for poverty, exploitation, misfortune, traumas, and also increasingly the effects of problematic lifestyle choices.

It is with the latter that we see the need for sustainability workers. Although we acknowledge that poverty continues to be an enormous psychosocial problem, with poverty rates in 2015 in 19 OECD countries affecting over 10% of the population, and in Australia at 13% , we now also suffer from affluenza, a "painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more" (de Graaf, Wann & Naylor, 2002; see also Hamilton and Denniss, 2005, Affluenza: When Too Much Is Never Enough). This 'pursuit for more', in our view, is best viewed as the unsustainable medication of feelings of self-deficit through compensatory consumption of (and distraction by) goods and services; this being one of the main contributors to increasing ecological deterioration. Another driver is the vast number of people who, though living above the poverty line, do not have enough disposable income to afford sustainable high-quality products and services that have minimal environmental impact. Living often hand-to-mouth, and engaging in unhealthy lifestyles, these people add to the unsustainable consumption that continues to drive climate change, and contribute to health and social problems.

Considering the above, we believe that the task of sustainability workers is to enable people to develop an ecological consciousness, and to remove the barriers to acting on this. The people likely to be most receptive are those who are not acutely struggling with the effects of poverty, are not acutely physically or mentally ill, are not dealing with the effects of sexual and other abuse, and are not facing immediate environmental disasters. These are the people who, at least viewed conventionally, appear to lead 'normal' lives by pursuing their careers, holding down jobs, and by having enough available income to cover more than their basic living expenses. Yet, their environmental impacts are substantial; and sustainability workers could help them reduce this significantly.

Green and environmental social work

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The question then arises to what extent sustainability work, in this sense, is already covered by what has become known as 'green social work? According to the website at https://www.socialworkhelper.com/2016/10/13/green-social-work:

Green social work is a branch of social work that deals with the impact of the faltering environmental stability upon human populations. It is essentially a broadening of the definition of environment, sociologically speaking, from referring exclusively to someone's immediate surroundings to referring to the planet that we all share.

The task

This development of an adequately deep and broad ecological consciousness, with its promotion and enabling of sustainable lifestyles, is bound to be a difficult task; made more difficult because of the lack of research on the links between a holistic understanding of people's struggle with sustainable living and the effects of these struggles on consumption behaviours and lifestyles. Consumer behaviours have been researched widely (Moisander, 2007; Joshi & Rahman, 2015, Veleva & Ellenberger, 2001), and it has been found that environmental considerations appear to only play a minor role in people's purchasing decisions (Moor, Web, & Harris, 2001); and that there is a gap between consumer thinking about responsible consumption and the actual actions people take (Chen & Chai, 2010; Wheale & Hinton, 2007).

Our understanding is that many people remain locked into unsustainable consumption and living patterns because buying goods and services provide them with 'retail therapy'; which, in reality, is 'retail acting out'; whereas genuine effective therapy has a lasting and healing effect, retail therapy does not. Retail therapy had been defined as the "practice of shopping to make oneself more cheerful" (Google Dictionary); however, the problem reaches far deeper in that such shopping is for many people an unconscious and desperate attempt to mask and deny a much deeper, and often subconscious or denied, self-esteem problem. Unlike sustainability educators, who consider that their task is to provide knowledge on the environmental effects of unsustainable consumption, the task of sustainability workers would be to actually enable people to make unsustainable consumption behaviours and lifestyles redundant, by inviting people to better understand their complex personal sustainable living issues and enable them to develop self-supporting strategies that only have a minimal impact on the environment, and ideally improve its quality, and the quality of their own lives.

The skills

Considering the emotional and psychosocial breadth and depth of people's 'struggles' with sustainable living, we believe that sustainability workers who are enabled to engage in this task will need to:

  • Have advanced counselling and group facilitation skills
  • Have a deep understanding of relevant knowledge frameworks, including social ecology, deep ecology, and ecofeminism
  • Have an understanding of key aspects of environmental deterioration, including the effects of climate change, overconsumption, and of exploitation and social deterioration, such as terrorism
  • Have skills in assisting people in enhancing their ability to experience body-mind and person-planet unity
  • Be able to understand the emotional and psychodynamic underpinnings of unsustainable behaviours in general, and of consumption in particular
  • Have a working knowledge of relevant movements and initiatives such as 'The Slow Moment' and, 'Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability' (LOHAS)
  • Have skills in assisting those people suffering from illnesses in making sense of their physical and emotional suffering, e.g., psychosomatics, critical and positive psychiatry, holistic understandings of addictions
  • Have a holistic understanding of the socio-political factors involved in enabling genuinely progressive cultural change; as well as the facilitation skills needed to enable this
  • Have the design and redesign skills needed to focus on enabling change at the front-end of the sustainability challenges we face, rather than just at the back-end through the more usual temporary problem-solving initiatives that address symptoms instead of causes.

The work

What would the work of a sustainability worker look like? A typical professional would probably work at local community centres in the service of environmentally progressive local councils, and running series of structured sustainable living seminars. Participants of these seminars would probably be individuals interested in enhancing their abilities to lead conscious and satisfying lives on a small ecological footprint; individuals who would welcome opportunities to connect with like-minded others and be open to sharing resources and changing their ways of living.

Sustainability workers would also be able to work with those living with addictions, who would benefit from developing a personalised and ecologically aware approach to growing out of their addictions. Carers of mental health consumers and people working in the disability sector could also benefit from professional development seminars that link the strains that come with their profession with their overall ability to lead more sustainable lives. Professional Sustainability Workers may also choose to work in private practice with individuals interested in making sense of their problems in living, from a wide range of perspectives. A trained sustainability worker would be able to offer such individuals an inclusive way of working that includes the typical counselling modalities, but that also makes sense of the feelings shared in the office from the here-and-now perspective (such as the stress from having to daily deal with the traffic on the way to the office), and, of course, from ecological, psychosomatic and lifestyle perspectives.

Training

Inasmuch as this way of working is a personalised and 'ecologised' version of what social workers do, sustainability work may be viewed as a specialised branch of social work. The most likely pathway to becoming a sustainability worker would probably be a Master degree in Social Work, with a Major in Sustainability Work. The structure for a 'Bachelor of Counselling and Sustainable Living' Degree has recently been developed by one of us (Werner Sattmann-Frese) for an Indian university; this can be viewed, together with a proposal for a Master degree and associated documents, at: https://www.slideshare.net/WernerSF.

So what?

What are the chances of society embracing this proposed profession? If people were rational beings, they would have probably introduced some kind of sustainability work or ecologically aware counselling, psychotherapy and community development a long time ago, i.e., there would be no need for the development of a sustainable worker profession because it would be natural for all of us to conserve because of our deep connection with one another and the natural environment. However, most people, for much of the time, do not function in a rational way, but are driven by unconscious attempts to maintain, and deny, their unsustainable sense of self. Being able to do this through unsustainable and compensatory consumption, growing wealth and power prevents the development of an adequate interest in environmental sustainability. However, the rich and poor alike not only populate the same planet, but are 'passengers on the same boat' when it comes to deep needs for healing and sustainable living. The fact that more and more wealthy people, including CEOs and top managers are now engaging in therapy and mindfulness activities can be seen as a sign that there is a growing acknowledgement of the need for deep change and a transition towards what Ted Trainer has called in his 1995 book a 'conserver society'.

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About the Authors

Dr Werner Sattmann-Frese is a Senior Lecturer at the Jansen Newman Institute in Sydney. After studying medicine and psychotherapy from 1977 to 1984, he has been in private practice as psychotherapist and supervisor for more than 30 years. He has completed a Master of Applied Science degree in Social Ecology in 1998 and a PhD on the psychological causes of ecological deterioration in 2006. Before joining the Nansen Newman Institute in 2011, he has worked as a casual lecturer at the University of Western Sydney from 2006 to 2010.

Professor Stuart B. Hill is Foundation Chair of Social Ecology at the University of Western Sydney.

Other articles by these Authors

All articles by Werner Sattmann-Frese
All articles by Stuart Hill

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