Eco-social work and community resilience: Insights from water activism in Canada

Abstract

Summary

Only recently has social work begun to grapple with its place in relation to environmental issues. While considerable progress has been made in bringing environmental considerations into the centre of our profession's scholarship and practice, this project is far from complete. Drawing on environmental literature and based on findings of a qualitative case study of water activism in one Canadian city, this paper argues that the concept of “community resilience” provides both a practical and a conceptual framework for advancing social work's engagement with issues of the natural environment and environmental justice through community praxis.

Findings

In Guelph, Ontario, Canada, water issues are the focal point of considerable community activism. The case study research reveals, however, that while water is the focus, much of this activism is driven by three broad social priorities that reflect ideas of community resilience and which suggest entry points for social work participation in community-based environmental initiatives: self-reliance and sustainability, localization and direct citizen participation, and community.

Applications

“Community resilience” is increasingly popular in environmental and community development fields as a conceptual framework for assessing and building the capacity of communities to support wellbeing in the face of environmental change, adversity and risk. While the concept of “resilience” is well established in social work, “community resilience” remains under-examined in social work literature. In this paper, the author draws attention to this arena of resilience thinking, highlighting its potential for the integration of considerations of the natural environment into social work scholarship, education, and practice.

Keywords

Social work community development social work theory environment community resilience eco-social work water activism

That social work has been slow to incorporate issues related to the natural environment and environmental movements into its practice and scholarship has been well documented (e.g. Besthorn, 2012; Coates & Gray, 2012; Dominelli, 2012; Jones, 2010; Kemp, 2011; Miller, Hayward, & Shaw, 2012; Peeters, 2012; Shaw, 2011; Ungar, 2012). As Molyneux (2011) states, based on a systematic review of literature on eco-centric approaches to social work, “Overwhelmingly, the literature acknowledged the historically shallow relationship endorsed by the social work profession between humans and the natural realm” (p. 62).

Nevertheless, with burgeoning popular discourse on the environment, a growing body of literature on climate change and other ecological concerns across many disciplines, and some important recent environment-oriented social work scholarship, a growing chorus of social work scholars, practitioners and activists is raising critical questions about the profession's diffident approach to engagement with environmental issues and is calling for new approaches. In the emerging field of social work variably referred to as environmental social work, green social work (Dominelli, 2012), or eco-social work (Besthorn, 2013; Norton, 2012) emphasis is placed on the nature-human connections that keep social work practice, and the families and communities with whom social workers work, situated within the broader ecosystems that encompass them (Norton, 2012, p. 305). Advocates of eco-social approaches highlight the ties that exist between environmental degradation and the breakdown of community wellbeing and social justice and argue that social work's mission must be extended to include the natural environment as an important element of practice (Peeters, 2012). So closely intertwined are environmental and social issues, in fact, that some writers have taken to referring to deepening social inequality and accelerating environmental degradation as the “social-ecological crisis” (Peeters, 2012, p. 289).

Eco-social work scholars point out that social work is well positioned to contribute to the pursuit of sustainable development and environmental justice (Hetherington & Boddy 2013, p. 54; Shaw, 2011; Zapf, 2009). With expertise, established practice approaches, and refined academic knowledge in areas such as community capacity building, community engagement, policy advocacy, and the establishment of “new social-economic relations through bottom-up economic projects,” social work represents a skill set and knowledge base that are crucial to the project of building a just and sustainable future (Peeters, 2012, p. 295). “Social work,” Schmitz Matyók, Sloan, & James (2012) remind us, “is a field not only of direct practitioners but also of leaders, change agents, activists and community builders” (p. 278). In this sense, because of their “expertise in collaboration, networking, advocacy, community development and capacity building” (Schmitz et al., 2012, p. 278), social workers are well equipped to contribute to movements and initiatives seeking environmental justice.

Increasingly, social work scholars are not just claiming space for social work at the intersection of the social with the environmental (Norton, 2012), they are also asserting a responsibility for the profession to get involved. Ultimately, as the effects of climate change and environmental degradation advance, impacting the livelihoods and wellbeing of an increasing number of people and communities in a widening range of context around the world, social work will need to come to terms with its relationship to environmental issues and to the community-based movements that address such issues.

In recent years, social work has begun expanding both theory and practice to address the physical environment and the interconnectivity of life on the planet (Coates & Gray, 2012, p. 231). The natural environment is becoming more present, for instance, in social work codes of ethics and related statements of ethical principles (e.g. IFSW, 2012; National Association of Social Workers, 2003, p. 120). Recent reviews of social work literature have identified a variety of environmental issues in which social workers are involved (Coates & Gray, 2012; Gray, Coates, & Hetherington, 2013), such as crisis intervention in humanitarian disasters, activism related to climate change, community organising around water pollution or the creation of green spaces, to name a few examples. Even the efforts made by community development social workers to ensure that people have sufficient resources to meet their basic needs or to strengthen local control of local organisations for local benefit, Coates (2004) points out, often involve an environmental element (e.g. community gardens or community sustained agriculture). Eco-social work appears to be gaining prominence.

The aim of this article is to add to this scholarship further consideration of how discreet examples of community practice might be consolidated toward a coherent and operational conceptualization of eco-social work praxis that reconciles with the multifaceted norms and values that drive environmental activism at the community level. Using insights drawn from a case study of environmental activism in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, this article explores the potential of “community resilience” as an organising framework to spell out the relevance of social work to environmental activism and vice versa, and which orients praxis towards addressing social, economic and environmental priorities as an integrated whole.

Though not a traditional social work context, the community organising happening there around water issues sheds light on the priorities and processes that drive community-based environmental activism. In so doing, this case example provides insights into practical and conceptual directions for the evolution of an eco-social work approach that aims to engage with such grassroots initiatives. As social work experiments with and develops new ways of conceptualising itself and orienting its methodologies to a new paradigm that attends to the inter-relations between human wellbeing and the natural environment (Coates, 2003), Guelph's water activists provide clues, embedded in the language and concepts of community resilience, as to how social work might move forward on this project.

Resilience

“Resilience” is emerging as an increasingly popular conceptual framework for policy analysts, urban planners and designers, community activists, humanitarian agencies, and international development practitioners concerned with maintaining the integrity of governmental systems, municipal functions, community health, and individual wellbeing in the face of rapid change, adversity and risk.

Originally derived from language used to describe the ability of a material to “return to a pre-existing state after being stressed” (Barnhart, 1988), the concept of resilience was popularised in ecology literature to describe the ability of an ecosystem to bounce back after a major disturbance (Holling, 1973). In the social sciences, “resilience” has similarly been adopted as a conceptual tool for understanding, predicting and influencing the long-term developmental impact on individuals, families, communities, or organisations of economic, environmental, psychological and social shocks (Shaw & Maythorne, 2013, p. 44). Individuals, social organisations, or natural systems are considered resilient when they possess the qualities and capacities required to “absorb disturbance and reorganise while undergoing change, so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks” (Hopkins, 2008, p. 54; Walker, Holling, Carpenter, & Kinzig, 2004, p. 1).

Within much of the social science literature on resilience is a recognition that “the human enterprise is structurally and functionally inseparable from nature,” and that understanding the dynamics of resilience in human community is thus tied to the resilience and wellbeing of the natural system and vice versa (Rees, 2010, p. 5). In this regard, the concept of resilience renders the delineation between social and ecological systems found in traditional social work approaches, and in other social science disciplines, “artificial and arbitrary” (Folke, 2006, p. 261). Acknowledging the dependence of human wellbeing and sustainable community upon the resources and services of a healthy natural environment, resilience thinking in a social-ecological context seeks the establishment of social relations, economic practices and governance systems that moderate environmentally destructive behaviours (Rees, 2010, p. 5). “Resilient communities,” Rees (2010) asserts, “will develop policies that favor greater regional self-reliance, including mechanisms for import displacement when this is ecologically sound” (p. 6). In this trajectory of the resilience literature, themes related to localisation are prominent, where economies are re-localised through an emphasis on local production for local consumption, and where control over natural resources – and governance in general – are devolved to a local level (De Young & Princen, 2012; North & Longhurst, 2013; Rees, 2010; Stevenson, 2012).

Defining “resilience” and arriving at a shared operational paradigm for it remains a contentious work in progress (Manyena, 2006; Shaw & Maythorne, 2013). Considerable progress has been made, nonetheless, in identifying some central qualities of a resilient social-ecological system like a human community. Carpenter et al. (2012) have identified nine conditions that foster the development of resilience: diversity, modularity, openness, reserves, monitoring, feedbacks, nestedness, leadership and trust. Diversity in a social-ecological system enhances resilience by providing for a variety of different processes, responses, experiences and resources to draw from in the face of disturbance. Modularity refers to compartmentalisation of socio-economic systems into linked but semi-autonomous parts so that the functioning of the whole is not destabilised by a disturbance that affects any individual part. Openness is related to “modularity at the larger scale” (p. 3252), where connectedness to other social-ecological systems enables the sharing of resources that prevents disturbances from occurring or that facilitates recovery from them while mitigating the spread of disturbances through modularity. Maintaining reserves of things like knowledge, skills, organisms and social capital also contribute to the mitigation of and recovery from disturbances. Monitoring of the status and trends in a social-ecological system is also essential to the building and maintenance of resilience, particularly where feedbacks are managed so as to move the system “away from thresholds that trigger outcomes” (p. 3252). Nestedness refers to the recognition of scale in social-ecological systems, and like modularity suggests a decentralised, polycentric model of governance. Leadership and trust, according to Carpenter et al. (2012), “confer resilience on social-ecological systems and social relations in general” (p. 3253).

All of the elements identified by Carpenter et al. (2012) include a social dimension, but it is around the ideas of leadership and trust that the social processes of particular interest to community-based social workers come into full view. As Carpenter et al. (2012) acknowledge the concentration of leadership and governance in the hands of a small group of key individuals can undermine resilience when the trust conferred upon those individuals is abused or otherwise degraded (p. 3253). In their breakdown of seven principles for enhancing resilience, Biggs et al. (2012) identify many of the same elements as Carpenter et al. (2012), but add polycentric governance, learning and experimentation, and “breadth of participation” as explicit ingredients for general resilience. As Folke (2006) points out, “social resources such as social capital and social memory are essential for the capacity of social-ecological systems to adapt to and shape change” (p. 261). Developing resilience at the community level thus involves not just adaptive physical, structural and procedural elements, but the establishment of broad-based participation and the social relations that enable it.

Community resilience

“Community resilience” – the concept of resilience applied to human communities – is emerging in various literatures as a valuable lens through which to understand complex and abstract community processes, and as “an entry point” for action, if not as a paradigm of practice itself (Manyena, 2006, p. 436). In the social sciences and in the environmental movement, “resilience” (including “community resilience”) has come to suggest a more progressive form of adaptation that may involve a shift to a new state rather than a “bounce back” to a previous status quo. “It is important to point out,” Manyena (2006) tells us, “that resilience is arguably about people's capacity far beyond the minimum of being able to cope” (p. 438). “It is also about the opportunities that disturbance opens up in terms of recombination of evolved structures and processes, renewal of the system and emergence of new trajectories” (Folke, 2006, p. 259). In the social-ecological literature, in other words, “resilience” has increasingly come to suggest an evolution to a new adaptive state – a “bounce forward,” as Shaw and Maythorne (2013) call it.

From some perspectives, moreover, community resilience is presented as a conceptual basis from which to pursue a radical agenda that transforms social relations and creates alternative forms of social, economic and ecological organization based in social justice and sustainability. For Rees (2010), for instance, the pursuit of resilience requires us to re-think economic structures, social relations and governance systems in order to moderate “human demands so that they fit within biophysical limits” (p. 5). Folke (2006) makes an important distinction between two different but complementary emphases in resilience work. “Adaptability” in resilience work refers to “the capacity of people in a social-ecological system to build resilience through collective action” whereas “transformability” refers to their capacity “to create a fundamentally new social-ecological system when ecological, political, social, or economic conditions make the existing system untenable” (p. 262). In the resilience literature, Folke says, “There is an increased emphasis on transformability into improved social-ecological systems as opposed to adaptation to the current situation” (p. 262).

The Transition Towns movement positions its call for building community resilience as a proactive response to concerns about a looming energy crisis brought about by an over-dependence on cheap fossil fuels (Hopkins, 2008). In this view, increasing community resilience means revamping community in ways that enhance cooperation and facilitate local production, and re-orienting communities to environmentally efficient and sustainable consumption within local resource limitations. Making this transition, Hopkins tells us, will require political and economic localisation, the learning of practical skills that sustain life, and the establishment of political and social processes that strengthen local governance and distribution of resources. The focus of community resilience thinking in this trajectory is as much about identifying and amplifying the adaptive capacities of communities as about mitigating deficiencies and vulnerabilities in relation to energy, climate change, or other external forces (Shaw & Maythorne, 2013, p 56).

Far from envisioning a return to a previous equilibrium following the initial shock of an energy shortage or some other crisis, grassroots activists understand “community resilience” as a call to action toward building a new paradigm of social systems and relations. “Transition initiatives,” Hopkins (2009) explains, promote resilience “through offering skills-sharing, building social networks and creating a shared sense of this being a historic opportunity to build the world anew” (p. 15, emphasis added).

Resilience in social work

The concept of resilience (or “resiliency”) has been adopted quite widely in social work literature to understand and describe things like family coping in the context of parental mental illness (e.g. Power et al., 2016), death in the family (Clute & Kobayashi, 2013), and childhood exposure to domestic violence (e.g. Anderson & Bang, 2012; Lemola, Schwartz, & Siffert, 2012). Resilience is used in social work practice as the basis for intervention with at-risk youth (Ungar, Dumond, & McDonald, 2011) and youth with disabilities (Hannun, Briggs, & Hammond, 2013), and for predicting recovery paths from domestic violence and devising service responses (Douglas, 2013). The concept is used to understand the mental health of foster children and their general adjustment to foster care (e.g. Andersson, 2009; Bulat, 2010; Jones & Morris, 2012) and for understanding the conditions under which reunification with the family of origin succeeds (Lietz & Strength, 2011).

Resilience is also recognised in some social work literature as including a community-level dimension:

Community resilience is important in its own right and the three aspects of resilience (recovery, sustainability, and growth) apply equally to communities as they do to individuals … By intervening on a systemic level, not only can we improve the quality of our families and communities but also we can simultaneously influence individual resilience. (Murray & Zautra, 2012, p. 339)

Some social work literature makes explicit links between individual and community resilience and adaptation to ecological and climatic disasters (e.g. Hrostowski & Rehner, 2012) or to climate change (Dominelli, 2011, 2012, 2013). Other eco-social work scholars have articulated the perspective at the heart of this article: that “resilience building,” including empowerment and social capital formation, is at the centre of the contribution that eco-social work practice can make to affecting social-political change within the context of social-ecological crisis (Peeters, 2012). Drawing on this work and borrowing from Hopkins (2008), for the purposes of this article, “community resilience” refers to the capacity of a community to absorb disturbances and reorganise while undergoing change or in anticipation of risk or imminent change, so as to protect or improve wellbeing and retain core functions and identity.

In Guelph, Ontario, Canada, interest in water issues has been growing over the past several years, leading to considerable grassroots community organising and activism. While motivated in part by traditional environmental concerns such as pollution of source water or the ecological impact of diverting water from its natural course, examination of the activists' normative motivations for getting involved reveals that many activists in this context are driven by broader social themes that not only reflect concepts of community resilience, but in so doing demonstrate its potency as an organizing principle and its utility as a conceptual framework through which social work can claim a role in community-based environmental justice work.

Methodology

The findings discussed below are derived from a case study of Guelph's social networks of water activism that consisted of two principle methodologies combined to, first, generate an overview of the social network structure underlying the local water movement (a social network map) and then to elicit normative articulations of the significance of participation in social action on water issues from actors in different locations within that overall social network. These normative articulations, which are the focus of the current analysis, were gathered through a combination of qualitative methods including an open-ended question in a survey circulated among Guelph's water activists (“What are the main ideas, challenges or issues, related to water, that motivate or concern you?”; n=51), a series of interviews with activists (n=17), and participant-observation during three water-related public events. Data were gathered between January and June 2011.

Key informant interviews were the primary source of data regarding the normative factors underlying involvement in social action on water issues. To ensure a mix of perspectives from different factions of Guelph's overall community of water activism, the social network map generated in the first phase of the study was used as a sampling pool. From the network map, a sample was selected that included a balance of men and women, as well as some actors who were densely enmeshed in the central core of the network, some actors from the margins of the network, and actors who appeared as key connectors between the various segments of the overall network. Interviews were also conducted with six activists (three men, three women) during a protest march to the nearby Nestlé Waters’ national headquarters. In contrast to the structured, in-depth data of the strategically sampled key informant interviews, these “actor interviews” gathered perspectives from a convenience sample of people involved directly in social action.

The interview participants included a near equal balance of nine men and eight women, and people of different ages. Demographic and other background information was not collected, but actor interviewees tended (by appearance) to be younger as a group than the key informants, ranging in age from approximately the early 20 s to the mid-40 s. Of the key informants, one was in his 20 s, but all others were between 40 and 75 years of age. Occupations and other background information of actor interview participants is not available, but among the key informants were three academics (engineering and sociology), an entrepreneur, a student, a stay-at-home mother, and two people working in non-profit community-services organisations. Consistent with the broader community of people involved in environmental causes in Guelph, though not verified by the participants themselves or through any additional empirical measure, all of the interview participants appeared as white and middle class.

In both cases, interviews were guided by a standard protocol that included three open-ended questions and two sub-questions about involvement in water issues and the values that drive it:

What kinds of community issues are you most interested in or concerned about right now?

Where does water fit in relation to the community issues you are most interested in/concerned about or involved in?

What would you define as the most fundamental problems or challenges related to water in Guelph?

Are these water issues – or your interest in them – in any way related to the other community issues we were talking about a minute ago?

Are there similar values or conflicts in values involved in water issues or your interest/involvement in water issues?

The data from all qualitative sources were combined and analysed together, and then reviewed separately as a means of corroborating the findings through triangulation by method (Denzin, 1978). Aiming generally to understand the norms, values and priorities underlying water activism in Guelph, an inductive thematic approach to data analysis was used, drawing important and patterned meanings from the data rather than imposing theoretical constraints on themes being considered (Braun & Clarke, 2006, pp. 83–84). Qualitative analysis was conducted in five phases: an iterative process of “open-coding” (Strauss & Corbin, 2008), an exploration of the coded data to identify emergent themes (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 82; Patton, 2002), an analysis and integration of the themes with the goal of drawing broader meaning from overall data (“interpretation", Cresswell, 2009, p. 154), the corroboration of findings through triangulation, participant feedback, the exploration of negative cases, concluding with the articulation of key findings and their implications for theory and practice.

During the analysis process, emergent codes and themes were periodically checked against the original data to ensure coherence within and consistency across all data sets. Key informant interview data were triangulated with data from the actor interviews, participant observation, and the qualitative data from the survey. As the major themes reported here began to emerge, the data were examined for divergent codes and contrary meanings. Before finalising the analysis, preliminary results were shared with research participants and other people involved in Guelph's water activist networks for feedback. This occurred through two individual meetings and through a community research presentation attended by approximately 14 individuals from environmentally oriented local organisations. While some degree of researcher bias may persist in spite of these measures, efforts were made to maintain a data gathering and analysis process of sufficient rigour to generate plausible exploratory findings, as presented below.

Contextual factors contributing to collective action

To an international readership, Guelph, Ontario, Canada, might seem an unlikely context for grassroots concern about water. Citizens of a wealthy nation with well-developed municipal infrastructure (at least in the cities and most of Canada’s densely-populated south), the 120,000 people who live in Guelph can turn on their taps every day and access a seemingly endless supply of safe, clean water at minimal cost. Yet, even while water remains cheap and available, concern over water issues finds expression in a growing array of community-based initiatives, lifestyle choices and social trends, municipal government programs, entrepreneurial ventures, technological and design innovations, academic explorations, and social actions in the community.

The specific factors underlying the growing concern over water in Guelph are as diverse as the individuals and agencies involved. That being said, a significant part of the story concerns Guelph's water source. Supplied almost entirely by groundwater, the long-term sustainability of Guelph's current water supply depends on maintaining a balance between rates of water extraction and the rate at which the aquifers can be recharged. Identified in provincial planning documents as one of the “Places to Grow”, Guelph’s population is slated to nearly double over the next two decades (Ministry of Infrastructure, 2006), creating increased demand for water while at the same time putting development pressure on the green spaces needed to recharge the groundwater system on which this population growth will depend. Both the municipal government and the citizens of Guelph have thus launched myriad measures and initiatives, in recent years, to raise awareness of Guelph's long-term water issues and to promote conservation and innovation in water management.

While the ability of the local groundwater supply to sustain population growth has emerged as a concern for many citizens in Guelph, securing an alternative long-term water source does not seem to be the priority for local activists. The City of Guelph's (2006) Draft Water Supply Master Plan sparked controversy by tabling the option of joining other nearby municipalities in the construction of a pipeline to transport water from Lake Erie. A technically feasible means of preventing water scarcity in Guelph into the distant future, the pipeline option nonetheless triggered the formation of a public action group calling itself the “Stop the Pipe! Campaign,” which sparked considerable public discourse contributing ultimately to the rejection of the pipeline option by City Council. As the authors of the Draft Water Supply Master Plan put it, in addition to the significant financial cost of its construction, operation and maintenance, “the ‘pipeline option' has been perceived by some members of the public as a deterrent to conservation measures, [and] a loss of local control of water supply” (City of Guelph, 2006, p. 44). As the Stop the Pipe! Campaign illustrates, water activism in Guelph is about something more than a simple fear of running out of water.

The Stop the Pipe! Campaign eventually gave way to a new round of action on water issues in Guelph when news became public of an application for renewal of a water-taking permit for a major water-bottling plant just outside of Guelph. On 2 April 2007, Nestlé Canada Incorporated filed an application for a five-year license to pump as much as 3.6 million litres of water per day from aquifers adjacent to those supplying Guelph (Province of Ontario Environmental Registry, 2008). In the context of growing public concern over long-term water supply, leadership of the Stop the Pipe! Campaign quickly joined others to form the Wellington Water Watchers, which by May 2007 mobilised the public to send e-mails, faxes, and letters to the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, generating an unprecedented 8000 plus objections to the permit application. While Nestlé Waters was ultimately granted its permit, the public action surrounding the application process did influence the decision-making process and contributed to some significant concessions. Moreover, the success of the campaign raised the profile of water issues in the Guelph area, and consolidated a growing concern into collective action.

Yet Nestlé Waters is not the most significant threat to Guelph's water source. Nestlé is not the largest industrial water user in the area, and anyway, the City of Guelph's take of 51 million litres per day¹ makes Nestlé's take look like a drop in a bucket. When understood through a broader frame of community resilience, however, the relevance to Guelph's water activists of things like local water bottling operations and plans to build a pipeline to Lake Erie take on considerable significance.

Key findings: Themes of community resilience

Water bottling is a central issue driving water activism in Guelph, and given its operations in the area, Nestlé Waters Canada is an important target of protest. Part of that opposition stems from a general distrust of big corporations and some distrust of the Nestlé brand itself. A slightly more prominent source of opposition has to do with the environmental impacts of water bottling including the plastics involved, the environmental costs of shipping bottles of water to market, and the amount of water being extracted from the local ground water supply. Even so, the statements of research participants make clear that the amount being extracted is not the primary concern, as this protester explains:

If it were the water itself we'd have to be going after the gravel companies, the golf courses, all that, right? And it is the water, but it's more the attitude, the values. (Actor Interview)

More significant than the amount of water being taken or the carbon footprint associated with water bottling, this research found that water activism in Guelph is motivated by meanings attached to water, and by values and norms embedded within those meanings that connect water and water stewardship to the broader questions of democratic, self-reliant and environmentally sustainable community. Unanticipated in the research questions and unprompted by the open-ended language of the research tools, three central themes emerge from an analysis of the data that demonstrate the potency of the concept of community resilience as an organising concept in this context and also suggest entry points for social work participation in community-based environmental initiatives: self-reliance and sustainability, localisation and direct citizen participation, and community.

Self-reliance and sustainability

Awareness of the pressures placed on Guelph's groundwater supply is certainly one element that draws Guelphites into collective action on water issues. While many of Guelph's water activists are focussed on water conservation in general, many are also driven by a more specific concern about “the long-term carrying capacity of the Guelph groundwater supply” (survey respondent) in particular. What is most relevant about this concern, for the current analysis, is that it does not appear to be motivated predominantly by a fear that Guelph will eventually run out of water, but rather by the importance that those involved ascribe to increasing and securing Guelph’s local self-sufficiency in terms of water supply and delivery. A case in point is the Stop the Pipe! Campaign, which, as one key informant put it, was significant because “you'd think that … people would be like: ‘Oh great, we've found a new source of water!'” (key informant). In the view of at least some local water activists, pipelines and other large-scale water systems are costly in terms of infrastructure and environmental impact, and in the end such initiatives simply externalise the problem of unsustainable water use:

At some point, we need to go back to exploring our local resources. … that means dealing with water where it falls, or where it hits rather than bringing water from a distance. (Key Informant)

The data do reflect some degree of concern about simply running out of fresh water at a local or even the global level, and not all research participants explicitly embed this fear within questions of local self-sufficiency. Nonetheless, the overall body of data indicates quite strongly that achieving and sustaining local self-sufficiency in water, rather than looking elsewhere for more, is a more dominant objective among Guelph’s water activists.

For many of these people, the issues around water are symptomatic of a larger problem of unsustainable resource consumption tied to population growth, global inequality, individual irresponsibility and profit-driven economic activity. For activists with this mind-set, the pressures affecting sustainable supply and equitable distribution of water are illustrative of the consequences of the pursuit of limitless economic growth and indicative of a need to re-orient our consumption to local environmental resource limitations. Building self-sufficiency, not just around water but also around all resource needs, was an expressed priority for several of the research participants. Finding ways to accommodate population growth within the resource capacity of the watershed, without fossil fuels or an over-reliance on importing things (including water) across vast distances, was described in the interviews as not only more environmentally sustainable, but as necessary for long-term survival and resilience:

A community that relies very little on importing resources and having adaptive measures that, in a time of tragedy or natural disaster … they can have enough resilience that they can persevere, instead of just collapsing. (Key Informant)

Almost certainly influenced by the language of the Transition Town movement (Hopkins, 2008), which has a strong presence in Guelph, some of Guelph's water activists anticipate a time not too far in the future when, whether due to peak oil or simply to resource depletion, even communities like Guelph will not have the resources they need to survive. Working now toward building local self-sufficiency, in this view, is an important part of the solution:

If we didn't live in communities that require resources beyond your land base, we probably wouldn't run into these issues. (Key Informant)

Ultimately, for at least some research participants, the importance of focussing on water issues is less a distinct cause than a part of a broader project. Using words and phrases like “sustainability”, “self-sufficiency,” “local control,” “cooperation,” and “community building,” and expressing a desire for less dependence on the “global economy” and imported goods for survival, these research participants set water use and governance priorities in the context of a drive toward building more self-sufficient, resilient community. Asked where water issues fit in relation to other community issues he or she was interested in, and without prompting, one key informant illustrated this theme this way:

I’m definitely deeply interested in the water component, but water is part of our greater resilience as we move forward … Definitely building community resilience and I think water is actually an essential feature of that. (Key Informant)

Localisation and direct citizen participation

Closely tied to the priorities that Guelph's water activists articulate about sustainable water use and the building of self-reliance at a community level are questions about how to appropriately and effectively govern the use of water and other life resources. Among the research participants is a strong and nearly unanimous desire for more local control over decisions affecting water and other shared resources on which communities depend and for more direct involvement of local citizens in decision-making.

For many of Guelph's water activists, decentralising water governance to the local level where those who depend on the water source can have more access to decision-making processes is part and parcel of building more sustainable and self-reliant communities. Consistent with the resilience concepts of localisation (De Young & Princen, 2012; North & Longhurst, 2013; Rees, 2010; Stevenson, 2012), nestedness (Carpenter et al., 2012) and polycentric governance (Biggs et al., 2012), some of Guelph's activists envision a bio-regionalist paradigm where government is structured around watersheds and where decision-making power is devolved to smaller, more localised, and more ecologically-bounded jurisdictions. A radical sentiment in this vein is that water should be governed directly by the citizens who depend on it:

I don't think it should be under the government … in the sense that it's [administered from outside the local context]; it should be regulated by the people, by the resource itself, looking at the capacity of the watershed. (Actor Interview)

Although the idea that water should not “be under the government” is a marginal viewpoint within Guelph's social networks of water activism, the idea of localising decision-making power and involving local citizens directly is widely shared.

While consistent with the literature on community resilience, themes surrounding localisation and direct citizen participation also closely mirror common themes in the scholarship and praxis of community organisation in social work. Referring generally to methods in community-level intervention that combine theory and reflection with “action upon the world in order to transform it” (Freire, 1970, p. 36), community praxis emphasises the building of grassroots capacities and the broad-based, direct involvement of community members in social action concerning shared challenges and the development process (Smith & Chambers, 2014). Throughout the data on water activism in Guelph are statements that prioritise the role of grassroots citizens' organisation and which call for community empowerment and leadership in conjunction with, in addition to, or in opposition to government action or inaction regarding water governance:

… when as a community we feel there's a mess being done by our government, we should be working in our neighbourhoods to protect our water. We've got these grassroots organisations that rise up. (Key Informant)

What is required for effective water stewardship over the long term, Guelph's water activists seem to be saying, is the kind of community organisation and empowerment that is at the heart of both community praxis in social work and community resilience.

Guelph's water activists are highly involved in community organisations, most of them reporting involvement in more than one and some as many as seven. In addition to collectively belonging to more than a dozen water-issues organisations, Guelph's water activists are involved in a variety of other associations: environmental, labour, political, cultural, educational, neighbourhood, faith-based, poverty eradication, newcomer integration, seniors support, youth activities, and more. Running throughout the data is the belief, shared by community-oriented social work practitioners and resilience scholars (Biggs et al., 2012; Folke, 2006; Rees, 2010) that solutions lie in the engagement of community members and in community building:

Every citizen can take some effective action on some scale, and all of us can share responsibility … Not relying on the governmental level only, but by working at the community level, joining together in community at whatever scale looks right … to take all the action we can. (Key Informant)

Guelph's water activists, in short, do not simply want water to be more effectively looked after for them. Although the dissolution of state power in favour of more direct governance by local citizens is an extreme extension of the sentiment of local self-sufficiency, the ideals of more decentralised, localised power and responsibility with respect to water, and more direct engagement of citizens with water issues and with each other, resonate strongly across the data.

Community

Unanticipated at the beginning of the study was the frequency and clarity with which water activists, in response to questions about priorities and challenges related to water issues, evoke the importance of “community.” For some of Guelph's water activists, water is seen as a key issue around which to build community relationships. For many of Guelph's water activists, conversely, the water issues they are concerned with are a symptom of the breakdown of the kinds of social relationships needed for robust and sustainable community. Activism, from this perspective, is motivated not just by a specific concern regarding water issues but in part also by a desire to build – or re-build – healthy community relations.

Community relationships, for one thing, are seen by at least some of Guelph's water activists as a key protection against vulnerability in times of crisis:

So let’s say if there is an issue, a challenge, a crisis of sorts, at the end of the day you are going to rely on your neighbours or the people who are closest to you geographically. (Key Informant)

Relatedly, a fairly strong theme in the data has to do with the importance that activists ascribe to the transformation of community relationships as a means to achieving environmentally efficient living. At a practical level, building or re-invigorating cooperative relationships among neighbours and other community members can produce concrete ecological efficiencies through, for example, the sharing of tools and resources like water. Surplus rainwater collected off one neighbour's roof, for instance, could quite easily be distributed to other neighbours for their use if neighbourhoods were designed to facilitate cooperation among households rather than to maximise independence and privacy. Here again, themes underlying water activism in Guelph are revealed that coincide closely with elements of the community resilience literature (e.g. Hopkins, 2008; Rees, 2010).

More broadly, in some of the data is a sentiment that the dominant models of economic and urban or suburban development – including the centralised, technology-based municipal systems of water delivery and disposal – undermine the interdependence of community members and community cohesion, and contribute thereby to a neoliberal atomisation of households and individuals. In this context, many of Guelph's water activists see the building of relationships among neighbours and other community members as an important step toward creating communities that not only govern and use water more responsibly, but which are more efficient, environmentally sustainable and resilient in general. When asked what they see as the most significant issues or challenges related to water, a common thread in the responses of the activists revolves around the building or rebuilding of community:

Neighbourhoods need to become – they used to be the social hub or network, and we got rid of them. And I think we need to rediscover them, perhaps with new tools. (Key Informant)

The idea of building community and transforming relationships among community members is as important to many of Guelph's water activists as are the water issues. One reason some activists in Guelph get involved in water issues, in fact, is because they see it as a compelling focus point around which to engage the public, strengthen community connections and build transformative social relationships. The words of one of the key informants illustrate this theme well:

Obviously water is an important component to me, but I use water as a tool to build community … Water is something that everyone understands, everyone is connected to. It’s an easy portal for community development. (Key Informant)

Guelph's water activists are motivated to engage in social action by the concerns and opportunities they see arising out of water issues themselves, and in some of the interview transcripts, no references to community appear at all. The overall body of data is clear, nonetheless, that a drive to reconstitute or transform community is also a major normative factor in local water activism, both as an end in its own right and as a means to more sustainable water use and more resilient community. Guelph's water activists are compelled to action by concrete concerns about their own water sources and by more global concepts of water justice specifically, but also by a more fundamental project of building the kinds of social relations at the local level that are conducive to environmental stewardship and just, sustainable community:

I don’t care what great technologies we may have and what type of regulations in place and so on. If we do not have good communities, none of those will work. So ultimately, my primary purpose is to … help build a strong community. (Key Informant)

Limitations

In the absence of further research, some caution should be exercised in extrapolating the findings from Guelph's social networks of water activism to other contexts of community-based environmental activism. Although study participants were selected to maximise their diversity relative to the broader population of local water activists, convenience sampling limits the confidence with which results can be generalized. The Transition Town initiative in Guelph, moreover, is the strongest in Canada, suggesting the possibility of a particular sensitivity in Guelph to resilience-related themes and/or a particularly strong influence of the movement on environmental rhetoric and values in that context. At least one of the key informants for this study, in fact, had been directly and actively involved in the local Transition Town initiative, and others may have some personal contacts with local “transitioners” as well. The selection of key informants from disparate positions within the overall social network of water activism helps to lessen any such influence, but readers should be aware of this potential influence nonetheless.

Conclusion

Notwithstanding these limitations, this research reveals that at the level of grassroots organisation and social action, water issues, like other environmental issues, cannot be relegated to a narrow sphere of biophysical environmental science. As part of a broader drive toward building more sustainable and resilient community, motivations underlying much of the activism surrounding water in Guelph quite clearly transcend the boundaries of water issues and environmentalism per se, connecting squarely to social, economic, and political spheres in which mainstream community social work scholarship and practice operate. The concept of “community resilience,” and the literature and practice emerging around it, provide a pragmatic “meeting-point” at which questions of environmental sustainability and social wellbeing are brought together, and describe well some of the most central objectives driving social action on water issues in Guelph. Even if influenced to a degree by the local Transition Town movement, the strength of Guelph's local water movement relative to similar other locations in Canada suggests that resilience-related themes are a potent normative stimulus for activism.

Community resilience champions and Guelph's water activists tell us that achieving ecological sustainability and resilience at a community level involves the social processes of community organisation identified with the community praxis traditions of social work. Community praxis in social work has much in common with grassroots environmental initiatives like water activism in Guelph in the central value placed on stimulating local, grassroots participation, building social networks of resistance and experimentation, strengthening community capacity, leadership and autonomy and facilitating community processes that transform social relations and build healthy, sustainable, resilient community. The concept of resilience is already well established in social work scholarship, practice and education. Extended to the community level, resilience thinking presents a tremendous potential for the engagement of social work scholars and practitioners with grassroots environmental causes, for the development of new strategies for community building in traditional social work contexts, and for integrating issues of ecological sustainability and environmental justice into social work theory and education.

Adopting a community resilience perspective, moreover, and considering the dynamics underlying water activism in Guelph, social work is well positioned to extend its scholarship and practice to matters of environmental justice and to make important contributions in that regard. Diversity, for instance, is considered an important precondition for resilience in a social-ecological system (Carpenter et al., 2012). Guelph's social networks of water activism, however, reflect the general lack of diversity that exists within the environmental movements of Western Europe and North America, and within the Transition Town movement itself (Alloun & Alexander, 2014; Connors & McDonald, 2011; Poland, Dooris, & Haluza-Delay, 2011). Social work, with strong ethical commitments, theoretical constructs, and practice traditions related to diversity and social inclusion, and with robust professional ties to diverse communities and their agencies, has tremendous potential to assist in bridging this gap at both a practical and theoretical level. Combined with its community organisation and community development traditions and expertise, social work represents practice approaches, skill sets and a knowledge base that are crucial to the project of building resilient and sustainable community.

Eco-social work scholars and community-based practitioners have elsewhere documented the power that local environmental initiatives like tree planting or community gardens possess for engaging local residents across difference, for building social capital, indigenous leadership, and momentum for social change, and for stimulating the bottom-up community development processes that social work practitioners seek to facilitate. If there is any truth to the old community organizing adage “start where the people are at,” then the evidence from Guelph's social networks of water activism suggests quite strongly that community-based social workers and other community organisers should be paying attention to local environmental issues and initiatives.

Resilience thinking challenges social work scholars and practitioners interested in community engagement and community wellbeing to reach beyond the dominant focus on the social domain, and provides a conceptual framework through which to do so. Schools and teachers of social work can begin to make this happen by including eco-social work perspectives in introductory courses and by bringing the concepts and literature of community resilience into the curriculum, particularly in courses on community development and community organisation. Examined through the lens of community resilience, the use of environmental initiatives as sites of research and as case studies in community development classes can help to move professional thinking and practice beyond the anthropocentric limits of current scholarship and practice. A community resilience perspective, similarly, suggest that schools of social work should be actively building relationships with local environmental organisations and encouraging social work students to engage directly with local environmental groups and initiatives through practicum work and research.

Further empirical and conceptual work is required to refine and operationalise what is meant by “community resilience” in a social work context, to test its applicability and efficacy across different fields of the profession, and to develop theoretical and methods-oriented materials for social work education. Further research will also be required to better understand its applicability to other sites of community-based environmental contestation. The existing literature paired with the results of this investigation of water activism in Guelph, Ontario, nonetheless, point to community resilience as a conceptual framework with considerable promise for evolving social work toward the new paradigm of eco-social work praxis.

Footnotes

Ethics

Ethical approval for this project was given by the Wilfrid Laurier University Research Ethics Board, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada [REB #2563].

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was made possible by a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2010/2011).

Note

References

Alloun, E., & Alexander, S. (2014). The transition movement: Questions of diversity, power, and affluence. Simplicity Institute. Retrieved from http://simplicityinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/TransitionMovement.pdf.

Anderson

K. M.

Bang

E. J.

(2012) Assessing PTSD and resilience for females who during childhood were exposed to domestic violence. Child & Family Social Work 17(1): 55–65.

Andersson

(2009) Foster children: A longitudinal study of placements and family relationships. International Journal of Social Welfare 18(1): 13–26.

Barnhart

(1988) The Barnhart dictionary of etymology, Bronx, NY: H. W. Wilson.

Besthorn

F. H.

(2012) Deep Ecology's contributions to social work: A ten-year retrospective. International Journal of Social Welfare 21(3): 248–259.

Besthorn

(2013) Radical equalitarian ecological justice: A social work call to action. In: Gray

Coates

Hetherington

(eds) Environmental social work, New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 31–45.

Biggs

Shlüter

Biggs

Bohensky

E. L.

BurnSilver

Cundill

Dakos

Daw

T. M.

Evans

L. S.

Kotschy

(2012) Toward principles for enhancing the resilience of ecosystem services. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 37: 421–448.

Braun

Clarke

(2006) Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology 3(2): 77–101.

Bulat

(2010) A longitudinal study of depression in children in public care. International Journal of Social Welfare 19(4): 412–423.

10.

Carpenter

S. R.

Arrow

K. J.

Barrett

Biggs

Brock

W. A.

Crépin

A. S.

(2012) General resilience to cope with extreme events. Sustainability 4(12): 3248–3259.

11.

City of Guelph (2006) Draft water supply master plan, Guelph, ON: City of Guelph.

12.

Clute

M. A.

Kobayashi

R. R.

(2013) Are children's grief camps effective? Journal of Social Work in End-Of-Life & Palliative Care 9(1): 43–57.

13.

Coates

(2003) Ecology and social work: Toward a new paradigm, Black Point, NS: Fernwood.

14.

Coates

(2004) From ecology to spirituality and social justice. Currents: New Scholarship in the Human Services 3(1): Unpaginated. Retrieved from http://www.ucalgary.ca/currents/files/currents/v3n1_coates.pdf.

15.

Coates

Gray

(2012) The environment and social work: An overview and introduction. International Journal of Social Welfare 21(3): 230–238.

16.

Connors

McDonald

(2011) Transitioning communities: Community, participation and the transition town movement. Community Development Journal 46(4): 558–572.

17.

Denzin

N. K.

(1978) Sociological methods, New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

18.

De Young

Princen

(2012) The localization reader: Adapting to the coming downshift, Cumberland, RI: MIT Press.

19.

Dominelli

(2011) Climate change: Social workers’ roles and contributions to policy debates and interventions. International Journal of Social Welfare 20(4): 430–438.

20.

Dominelli

(2012) Green social work. From environmental crises to environmental justice, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

21.

Dominelli

(2013) Social work education for disaster relief. In: Gray

Coates

Hetherington

(eds) Environmental social work, New York, NY: Routledge.

22.

Douglas (2013) Resiliency and recovery from intimate partner violence. In: Pulla

Shatté

Warren

(eds) Perspectives on coping and resilience, New Delhi, India: Authorspress, pp. 202–216.

23.

Folke

(2006) Resilience: The emergence of a perspective for social-ecological systems analyses. Global Environmental Change 16(3): 253–267.

24.

Freire

(1970) Pedagogy of the oppressed, New York, NY: Continuum International Publishing Group.

25.

Gray

Coates

Hetherington

(2013) Environmental social work, New York, NY: Routledge.

26.

Hannun

Briggs

Hammond

(2013) Resilience reintegration during adversity: Case of young people with disabilities. In: Pulla

Shatté

Warren

(eds) Perspectives on coping and resilience, New Delhi, India: Authorspress, pp. 420–443.

27.

Hetherington

Boddy

(2013) Ecosocial work with marginalized populations: Time for action on climate change. In: Gray

Coates

Hetherington

(eds) Environmental social work, New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 46–61.

28.

Holling

C. S.

(1973) Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4(11): 11–23.

29.

Hopkins

(2008) The transition handbook: From oil dependency to local resilience, White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.

30.

Hopkins, R. (2009). Resilience thinking: Why ‘resilience thinking' is a crucial missing piece of the climate-change jigsaw and why resilience is a more useful concept than sustainability. Resurgence, Nov./Dec.(257), 13–15. Retrieved from http://www.resurgence.org/magazine/issue257-resilience-climate-change.html.

31.

Hrostowski

S. S.

Rehner

T. T.

(2012) Five years later: Resiliency among older adult survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Journal of Gerontological Social Work 55(4): 337–351.

32.

IFSW (2012, March 3). Statement of ethical principles. Berne, Switzerland: International Federation of Social Workers. Retrieved from http://ifsw.org/policies/statement-of-ethical-principles/.

33.

Jones

(2010) Responding to the ecological crisis: Transformative pathways for social work education. Journal of Social Work Education 40(1): 67–84.

34.

Jones

A. M.

Morris

T. L.

(2012) Psychological adjustment of children in foster care: Review and implications for best practice. Journal of Public Child Welfare 6(2): 129–148.

35.

Kemp

(2011) Recentring environment in social work practice: Necessity, opportunity, challenge. British Journal of Social Work 41(6): 1198–1210.

36.

Lemola

S. S.

Schwarz

B. B.

Siffert

A. A.

(2012) Interparental conflict and early adolescents' aggression: Is irregular sleep a vulnerability factor? Journal of Adolescence 35(1): 97–105.

37.

Lietz

C. A.

Strength

M. M.

(2011) Stories of successful reunification: A narrative study of family resilience in child welfare. Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services 92(2): 203–210.

38.

Manyena

S. B.

(2006) The concept of resilience revisited. Disasters 30(4): 433–450.

39.

Miller

S. E.

Hayward

R. A.

Shaw

T. V.

(2012) Environmental shifts for social work: A principles approach. International Journal of Social Welfare 21(3): 270–277.

40.

Ministry of Infrastructure (2006) Places to grow. Growth plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe. 2006. Office consolidation, January 2012, Toronto, ON: Ministry of Public Infrastructure Renewal, Province of OntarioRetrieved from https://www.placestogrow.ca/content/ggh/plan-cons-english-all-web.pdf.

41.

Molyneux

(2011) The practical realities of ecosocial work: A review of the literature. Critical Social Work 11(2): 61–69.. Retrieved from http://www1.uwindsor.ca/criticalsocialwork/the-practical-realities-of-ecosocial-work-a-review-of-the-literature.

42.

Murray

Zautra

(2012) Community Resilience: Fostering recovery, sustainability, and growth. In: Ungar

(eds) The social ecology of resilience: A handbook of theory and practice, New York, NY: Springer, pp. 337–346.

43.

National Association of Social Workers (NASW) (2003) Environmental policy. Social work speaks, Washington, DC: NASW Press, pp. 116–123.

44.

North

Longhurst

(2013) Grassroots localisation? The scalar potential of and limits of the ‘Transition' approach to climate change and resource constraint. Urban Studies 50(7): 1423–1438.

45.

Norton

C. L.

(2012) Social work and the environment: An ecosocial approach. International Journal of Social Welfare 21(3): 299–308.

46.

Patton

M. Q.

(2002) Qualitative research and evaluation methods, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

47.

Peeters

(2012) The place of social work in sustainable development: Towards ecosocial practice. International Journal of Social Welfare 21(3): 287–298.

48.

Poland

Dooris

Haluza-Delay

(2011) Securing supportive environments for health in the face of ecosystem collapse: Meeting the triple threat with a sociology of creative transformation. Health Promotion International 26(Suppl. 2): 202–215.

49.

Power

Goodyear

Maybery

Reupert

O’Hanlon

Cuff

Perlesz

(2016) Family resilience in families where a parent has a mental illness. Journal of Social Work 16(1): 66–82.

50.

Province of Ontario Environmental Registry (2008, April 18). Permit to take water. Environmental Bill of Rights posting (Ref. No. 010-0224). Environmental Registry, Ministry of the Environment, Government of Ontario. Retrieved from http://www.ebr.gov.on.ca.

51.

Pulla

Shatté

Warren

(2013) Perspectives on coping and resilience, New Delhi, India: Authorspress.

52.

Rees

W. E.

(2010) Thinking resilience. In: Heinberg

Lerch

(eds) The post carbon reader: Managing the 21st century's sustainability crises, Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, pp. 25–42.

53.

Schmitz

C. L.

Matyók

Sloan

L. M.

James

(2012) The relationship between social work and environmental sustainability: Implications for interdisciplinary practice. International Journal of Social Welfare 21(3): 278–286.

54.

Shaw

Maythorne

(2013) Managing for local resilience: Towards a strategic approach. Public Policy and Administration 28(1): 43–65.

55.

Shaw

(2011) Is social work a green profession? An examination of environmental beliefs. Journal of Social Work 13(1): 3–29.

56.

Smith

Chambers

(2014) Decolonizing psychological practice in the context of poverty. In: Goodman

R. D.

Gorski

P. C.

(eds) Decolonizing “multicultural” counseling through social justice, New York, NY: Springer, pp. 73–84.

57.

Strauss

Corbin

(1998) Basics of qualitative research: Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

58.

Stevenson

(2012) Localization as subpolitics: The Transition Movement and cultural citizenship. International Journal of Cultural Studies 15(1): 65–79.

59.

Ungar

Dumond

McDonald

(2011) Risk, resilience and outdoor programmes for at-risk children. Journal of Social Work 5(3): 319–338.

60.

Ungar

(2012) The social ecology of resilience: A handbook of theory and practice, New York, NY: Springer.

61.

Walker

Holling

Carpenter

Kinzig

(2004) Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social–ecological systems. Ecology and Society 9(2): 5. Retrieved from http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss2/art5/.

62.

Zapf

M. K.

(2009) Social work and the environment: Understanding people and place, Toronto, Canada: Canadian Scholars’ Press.