From social work towards sustainability work

This development of an adequately deep and broad ecological consciousness, with its promotion and enabling of sustainable lifestyles, is bound to be a difficult task; made more difficult because of the lack of research on the links between a holistic understanding of people's struggle with sustainable living and the effects of these struggles on consumption behaviours and lifestyles. Consumer behaviours have been researched widely (Moisander, 2007; Joshi & Rahman, 2015, Veleva & Ellenberger, 2001), and it has been found that environmental considerations appear to only play a minor role in people's purchasing decisions (Moor, Web, & Harris, 2001); and that there is a gap between consumer thinking about responsible consumption and the actual actions people take (Chen & Chai, 2010; Wheale & Hinton, 2007).

Our understanding is that many people remain locked into unsustainable consumption and living patterns because buying goods and services provide them with 'retail therapy'; which, in reality, is 'retail acting out'; whereas genuine effective therapy has a lasting and healing effect, retail therapy does not. Retail therapy had been defined as the "practice of shopping to make oneself more cheerful" (Google Dictionary); however, the problem reaches far deeper in that such shopping is for many people an unconscious and desperate attempt to mask and deny a much deeper, and often subconscious or denied, self-esteem problem. Unlike sustainability educators, who consider that their task is to provide knowledge on the environmental effects of unsustainable consumption, the task of sustainability workers would be to actually enable people to make unsustainable consumption behaviours and lifestyles redundant, by inviting people to better understand their complex personal sustainable living issues and enable them to develop self-supporting strategies that only have a minimal impact on the environment, and ideally improve its quality, and the quality of their own lives.

The skills

Considering the emotional and psychosocial breadth and depth of people's 'struggles' with sustainable living, we believe that sustainability workers who are enabled to engage in this task will need to:

• Have advanced counselling and group facilitation skills
• Have a deep understanding of relevant knowledge frameworks, including social ecology, deep ecology, and ecofeminism
• Have an understanding of key aspects of environmental deterioration, including the effects of climate change, overconsumption, and of exploitation and social deterioration, such as terrorism
• Have skills in assisting people in enhancing their ability to experience body-mind and person-planet unity
• Be able to understand the emotional and psychodynamic underpinnings of unsustainable behaviours in general, and of consumption in particular
• Have a working knowledge of relevant movements and initiatives such as 'The Slow Moment' and, 'Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability' (LOHAS)
• Have skills in assisting those people suffering from illnesses in making sense of their physical and emotional suffering, e.g., psychosomatics, critical and positive psychiatry, holistic understandings of addictions
• Have a holistic understanding of the socio-political factors involved in enabling genuinely progressive cultural change; as well as the facilitation skills needed to enable this
• Have the design and redesign skills needed to focus on enabling change at the front-end of the sustainability challenges we face, rather than just at the back-end through the more usual temporary problem-solving initiatives that address symptoms instead of causes.

The work

What would the work of a sustainability worker look like? A typical professional would probably work at local community centres in the service of environmentally progressive local councils, and running series of structured sustainable living seminars. Participants of these seminars would probably be individuals interested in enhancing their abilities to lead conscious and satisfying lives on a small ecological footprint; individuals who would welcome opportunities to connect with like-minded others and be open to sharing resources and changing their ways of living.

Sustainability workers would also be able to work with those living with addictions, who would benefit from developing a personalised and ecologically aware approach to growing out of their addictions. Carers of mental health consumers and people working in the disability sector could also benefit from professional development seminars that link the strains that come with their profession with their overall ability to lead more sustainable lives. Professional Sustainability Workers may also choose to work in private practice with individuals interested in making sense of their problems in living, from a wide range of perspectives. A trained sustainability worker would be able to offer such individuals an inclusive way of working that includes the typical counselling modalities, but that also makes sense of the feelings shared in the office from the here-and-now perspective (such as the stress from having to daily deal with the traffic on the way to the office), and, of course, from ecological, psychosomatic and lifestyle perspectives.

Training

Inasmuch as this way of working is a personalised and 'ecologised' version of what social workers do, sustainability work may be viewed as a specialised branch of social work. The most likely pathway to becoming a sustainability worker would probably be a Master degree in Social Work, with a Major in Sustainability Work. The structure for a 'Bachelor of Counselling and Sustainable Living' Degree has recently been developed by one of us (Werner Sattmann-Frese) for an Indian university; this can be viewed, together with a proposal for a Master degree and associated documents, at: https://www.slideshare.net/WernerSF.

So what?

What are the chances of society embracing this proposed profession? If people were rational beings, they would have probably introduced some kind of sustainability work or ecologically aware counselling, psychotherapy and community development a long time ago, i.e., there would be no need for the development of a sustainable worker profession because it would be natural for all of us to conserve because of our deep connection with one another and the natural environment. However, most people, for much of the time, do not function in a rational way, but are driven by unconscious attempts to maintain, and deny, their unsustainable sense of self. Being able to do this through unsustainable and compensatory consumption, growing wealth and power prevents the development of an adequate interest in environmental sustainability. However, the rich and poor alike not only populate the same planet, but are 'passengers on the same boat' when it comes to deep needs for healing and sustainable living. The fact that more and more wealthy people, including CEOs and top managers are now engaging in therapy and mindfulness activities can be seen as a sign that there is a growing acknowledgement of the need for deep change and a transition towards what Ted Trainer has called in his 1995 book a 'conserver society'.