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Any theory of therapy or image of human nature must proceed from the assumption that man, whatever else he is, importantly is the creator of meaning

Families today are under siege as they try to respond to economic, social, and cultural challenges beyond their control. The myths of economic self-sufficiency and psychological normalcy have engendered, in both public policy and family treatment, strategies that isolate, punish, and pathologize families. To move beyond these myths, it is necessary to draw more generous definitions of what constitutes family by placing families within the nurturing membrane of community life and actively seeking to support family strengths through imaginative and innovative policies and empowering practices.

Social work's notion of environment and its environmental responsibilities
has always been narrowly defined. The profession has tended to either neglect
natural environmental issues or accept shallow, ecological conceptualizations of
nature as something other, quite separate from the human enterprise and/or outside
the reach of social work activity. The Biophilia Hypothesis, first articulated by
Harvard biologist E.O.Wilson in 1984, offers social work as a fundamentally different
view of the person/environment construct and argues for a primary shift in the
way the profession views its relationship with the natural world. This article traces
the conceptual development of the Biophilic theory and reviews pivotal empirical
evidence explicitly arguing for the essential Biophilic premise that humans have
acquired, through their long evolutionary history, a strong genetic predisposition for
nature and natural settings. It offers key insights and examples for incorporating
Biophilia into social work's values and knowledge base and how it may impact the
profession's practice strategies and techniques.

The future of strength based social work is both promising and precarious. In this article we seek to capture this uncertain state by sketching the evolution of the strengths approach and offering and offering a brief evaluation of its status today. There are any number of approaches to both theory and practice at present that profess to be strengths-based. It is imperative that we develop stable and concrete criteria for determining whether a given perspective if framework is, in fact, funded by strengths principles and practices. We offer six standards for making such a judgment. We also examine the future of the strengths model. Of course, writing on the future tempts one to make predictions. We have eschewed such folly. Instead, we offer four tasks that we believe would bolster the development of strengths-based social work in the future.