ABSTRACT
The environmental crisis is worsening and helping professionals are being required to become more sensitive to links between environmental problems and the kinds of issues with which they deal. In what might be termed an ‘eco-spiritual’ perspective, however, everything is interdependent and connected and, within an overarching and integrated whole, there are many overlapping and interlocking groups, for example families, villages, cultures, economies and ecologies. Quality of life, R. Eckersley argues, is ‘the opportunity to experience the social, economic, cultural and environmental conditions that are conducive to total well-being—physical, mental, social, spiritual’. Issues of spirituality will, thus, be increasingly important in helping professional practice because this challenge entails the process of questioning our identity, our ultimate values and sources of meaning and engages us in ‘striving for personal integrity and wholeness in the context of relationships between oneself and nature, society and ultimate meaning’.
