Exploring the Moral Ecology of Social Work's Urban Environmentalism, 1880-1917

Background and Purpose:  From the 1890s through World War I, social workers in the urban settlement houses played key roles in efforts to redress the environmental injustices plaguing poor urban neighborhoods, including substandard housing, woefully inadequate sanitation, unregulated industrial pollution, lack of green space, and hazardous working environments. Social work’s historical record readily acknowledges these activities, but has not recognized them as an important precursor to contemporary environmental justice activism. Building on recent work by historians in other disciplines (e.g., Gottlieb, 2005; Montrie, 2011; Pellow, 2002), the larger study on which this paper is based aimed to deepen existing scholarship on social work’s contributions to Progressive era urban environmentalism, particularly its involvement in nascent forms of environmental justice activism. This paper focuses on the ethical dimensions of this work.     

Methods: Primary data sources for this historical study included the Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, archival materials (e.g., the Russell Sage Foundation papers), contemporary periodicals (e.g., The Survey), published writings of leading social workers of the period, and contemporary publications such as Mary Beard’s landmark study, Women’s Work in Municipalities (1915). The study findings are informed analytically by scholarship in environmental ethics, community based participatory research, and critical urban theory, and by a wide range of secondary historical work on Progressive era environmentalism, social work, and social reform.

Results: Social work’s Progressive era environmental activism made the horrendous conditions in the urban slums visible to the wider public and galvanized important reforms in housing, sanitation, public health, industrial safety, and urban space. Yet the historical evidence also illuminates the ethical complexities inherent in “outsider” efforts to address unjust environmental conditions. The settler’s work and writings evidence an unusually detailed and sympathetic understanding of local conditions and people, reflecting an “epistemology of proximity” (Jackson, 2000) derived from shared experiences as residents and neighbors. At the same time, many of the interventions the settlers implemented, from supervised playgrounds to “municipal dusting and sweeping” (Beard, 1915), forthrightly aimed at “civilizing” poor urban residents and communities. Local residents engaged some of these efforts but actively resisted others, illuminating the complex moral and cultural ecology in which the settler’s environmental justice efforts were situated, and demonstrating that shared commitment to place is an important but not sufficient basis for collaborative environmental action.        

Conclusion and Implications: Social work’s rich but complicated history of environmental justice activism both warrants acknowledgement on its own terms and provides important foundational knowledge for current practice. By illuminating the complex, layered, and at times unproductive interactions between privileged social reformers and residents of poor and marginalized urban communities, this study offers instructive lessons for contemporary environmental activism. Spurred by escalating concerns about climate change and global environmental inequities, the profession is evidencing resurgent interest in environmentally-oriented social work practice and research. In this context, it is essential that it not only recognizes the environmental contributions of earlier social workers, but critically interrogates and learns from these efforts.