ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of Mother Earth in healing. Social work now has to be practiced under the existential threat of extinction, a menace driven by human activities. The world is fragmented and wounded because of the impact of vast inequalities and disparities in vulnerabilities. Environmental disaster is the end result of extractive capitalism and settler colonial ideologies. Settler colonialism is based on a binary understanding of the universe that divides the mind from the body, the material from the sacred, the human from nature. For Indigenous Peoples, the sacred has always been reflected in the inherent relationality and interconnection of human beings and Mother Earth. Indigenous ways of knowing are inherently holistic, grounded in reciprocal relationships between land and people with a strong emphasis on local knowledge. Early social work saw the role of the environment, land, or place from a settler colonial perspective. Environmental social work theories have increased in recent years, though there is a noticeable gap in the application of environmental social work methods to everyday institutional practices. The chapter ends with a story about Indigenous forest therapy in Finland.
