Ursula • Franklin • Reader
originally published by the island word, february 2007 issue
••• Full Article (PDF)– Selected Passage –
The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism as a Map is a collection of articles, documents, lectures, and interviews from 4 decades of her career. In the prelude she writes of her resistance to, ...a thematic grouping or ordering of the papers, which would seperate, say, women’s issues from peace issues, questions of teaching and learning from consideration of equality, the need to care for the environment from citizens’ responsibility or the advancement of human rights.
I am a Quaker, a feminist, and a physicist; my perspectives may differ significantly from those of others attending the symposium.
As a writer, I can attest to the difficulty she must have had in organizing these works into an entertaining yet powerful answer to her thematic question: How can one live and work as a pacifist in the here and now and help to structure a society in which oppression, violence, and wars would diminish and cooperation, equality, and justice would arise.
The topics of her papers are as broad and varied as her audiences, and more than a few begin with Franklin introducing herself as an outsider: I am a Quaker, a feminist, and a physicist; my perspectives may differ significantly from those of others attending the symposium.
But her message is universal: Peace is the absence of fear. Peace is the presence of justice.
Advocacy in the urban habitat now turns to advocacy for the urban habitat.
Through decades of involvement in citizen politics and urban planning, she has witnessed a smothering of citizen voices beneath the megaphones of commercial enterprise: We aren’t governed, there is no one to mediate powers for the benefit of all. We are manged.
Many of her talks try to reclaim that voice: Advocacy in the urban habitat now turns to advocacy for the urban habitat.
Franklin’s belief that peace can’t exist without justice on every level of government and society is what connects her larger theme with community level issues, and makes her collection of works a kind of guide book for concerned citizens.
Her arguments are clear and she has a knack for imagery; whether comparing her growth model to the production model for education; the arms race to a neighborhood full of vicious attack dogs, or comparing social ecology to wilderness ecology, and their common need for diversity. Even her choice of words is out of consideration for the reader: I do not find it helpful to speak about ‘target audiences’, since I do not want to shoot the people who come to my lectures, I actually want to talk to them.