ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors provide an historical overview of social work’s engagement with the physical environment as a critical factor in professional practice. They focus on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the rapid development of industrialisation and urbanisation in the developed world created significant environmental problems. The authors present historical engagement; early re-engagement, awakening awareness, environmental degradation and environment central. Jane Addams understood the critical impact of environmental degradation and poor living conditions on human health and wellbeing, particularly when those affected were powerless to change their circumstances. Meanwhile, the release of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 reshaped global attention to the environmental degradation being caused by humans. F. H. Besthorn was later to refer to this as a period of ‘environmental racism’ – that is a disproportionate amount of environmental degradation occurred in areas where racial and ethnic minorities lived.
