Re-Imagining Rural Social Work During the Time of Covid-19 and a Climate Crisis

Social work in the UK has tended to discount the relevance of disasters in its theory and practice, until Covid-19 raised its profile from an unknown coronavirus to a pandemic. Over time, this left many casualties in its wake while highlighting the destructive impact of existing inequalities along many social attributes and physical environments. Now, social workers across the globe are seeking to examine the impact of Covid-19 on their practice, and are becoming aware of the impact of climate change on both their environment, and the controversies around the role of climate change in both precipitating the pandemic, but also its role in various environmental concerns ranging from air pollution to degraded ocean waters. Green social workers have been working on these issues for a few years, and what seemed remote five years ago, is becoming commonplace today. The settings for these tectonic shifts in the profession’s interests are both rural and urban. However, in this chapter, I focus on the impact of climate change on rural social work, and its role in resisting the encroachment of agribusiness and industrial production methods relying on fossil fuels which contribute to climate change, without ignoring the traps that ensuring livelihoods under the industrial production models favoured by neoliberalism. I also consider the use of coproduction with local communities to innovate new ways of coming to terms with the degradation that burning fossil fuels imposes upon their environment. Additionally, I consider how the failure to deal with the burning of fossil fuels to meet human need has destroyed and degraded wildlife habitats and has contributed to the current pandemic. I conclude with suggestions for how social workers living in rural and remote areas can work to protect the physical environment, its flora, its fauna, and its people. Everyone has a duty to care for and protect planet earth so that it can provide for living things and continue to exist into the long-term future as a healthy, sustainable place for living things to thrive.