Welcome to a new podcast series on eco-social work practice: ‘Eco-Social Work in Australia.’
PURPOSE: A key objective of this podcast project is to help grow a conversation and interest about eco-social work amongst listeners. The researcher and producer of the series, Andrew Nicholson, is a retired social worker and environmental educator. He and his guests want the series to expand over time to provide an audio record of evolutionary trends in eco-social work practice (ESW) adoption in Australia and elsewhere. They hope that this process will add to the knowledge base of ESW and make a contribution to increasing the speed of uptake of such practice amongst mainstream social work colleagues, in their workplaces, in professional groups, and in networking with other allied professionals. Andrew invites feedback from interested listeners.
BACKGROUND: Recent climate disruption and pandemic disease impacts on public health and wellbeing in Australia and internationally have provided a stark illustration of the serious and often disproportionate vulnerabilities experienced by communities, including social work clients, produced through physical environmental impacts. On current greenhouse gas emission trends, we know that climate disruption impacts, for instance in the form of intensified weather events, are set to get worse; and that the COVID-19 pandemic is caused by just one of many other novel viruses which could pose considerable risks to human health in the future. Both the growing climate emergency and increased vulnerability to pandemic disease are the results of human caused physical environmental damage and disturbance.
In the light of such threats, A recurrent theme in this series is the need for a greatly increased social work focus on the inextricable link between helping achieve client wellbeing and social justice outcomes, and the associated need to protect the wellbeing of the natural world, and to achieve environmental and ecological justice outcomes in that process.
Professional association advocacy for a safer climate, and factoring climate disruption impacts into hospital-based, client health assessments, are just two examples of the physical environmental focus within an eco-social work approach. Another is working to help human communities develop more mutually supportive relationships with the other than human communities of the natural world, which underpin and are so crucial to human and other species wellbeing
Over the last fifteen to twenty years, starting from a low base, there is now an accelerating interest in eco-social work ideas and practice in Australia. Notwithstanding this progress, in 2021, eco-social work remains a marginal concern within mainstream professional practice in this country. At a time when all sectors of society need to make a full, fair and proportionate contribution to tackling interconnected physical environment, ecological and social justice challenges, it is important that we find ways to boost, rapidly, the level of mainstream social work adoption of eco-social work practice in this country and elsewhere, to ensure our profession makes that contribution - and this podcast series is one small attempt to help that process.
FORMAT: Each podcast interview is loosely structured around four key questions put to guests:
- For you, what does eco-social work practice mean?
- How can eco-social work help tackle climate disruption and other ecological sustainability concerns in practical terms?
- Why should the social work mainstream here be involved with such concerns?
- What could or should the short to mid-term future (2-10 years) hold for eco-social work interventions as a body of practice within the Australian social work mainstream?
DISTRIBUTION: The producer hopes that the series will be promoted across relevant networks as widely as possible. He aims for a minimum of twenty individual episodes and 1000 downloads achieved by mid-2022. The first twelve episodes of Eco-social work in Australia are available now on: PODBEAN SPOTIFY GOOGLE STITCHER PLAYERFM and APPLE PODCASTS
For inquiries or feedback about the series, please contact the producer, Andrew Nicholson, at E: counsel1983@gmail.com or on M: +61 (0)413979414 . These details are repeated in the podcast episode text notes. Some individual guest speakers also supply contact details.
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