Home Object Activities Contact Who's who How to join NSF How to support NSF What's on Nature and Society Book Review Frank Fisher: Response Ability A few years ago while at the ANU studying Human Ecology, one of my favourite procrastination pastimes was reading a website called ‘The living room’. This website was put together by a wide range of researchers, community practitioners, and artists of various ilks, but the main themes were clear: sustainability from a community perspective, bicycling, localism, and a healthy respect for what the creators called the resulting ‘new civility’ This website has been through a number of changes, but has recently had a delightful breath of fresh air breathed into it and it can now be found, with all the old site stuff and resources and more at www.bicyclefixation.com This new civility was being brought about via a fantastic array of resources devoted to understanding, appreciating and advocating what it was like to attempt to live more sustainably in an urban environment of cities built for cars, emergent disconnected communities, and increasingly fragmented natural landscapes. All of these themes, and a great deal more, can be found in Frank Fisher’s new book, Response Ability: Environment, society and everyday transcendence. This book has been well edited by Frank McDonald, and catalogues a wide selection of Frank’s personal and professional writings on social activism and environmental science. Response Ability is without a doubt one of the most insightful books on these themes to have come out in Australia, and there is far too much in the book to give a full flavour in a single review. For instance, the book wanders through such interesting topics and issues as educating for energy, environment and economics, liberating energy and myths of renewable energies, sustainable transport and public policy, living with chronic illness, and taking action. In ‘From being precious to precious being’ Frank deftly examines some very large, and not very easy to understand issues such as why we as humans seem to have created a fixation on treating ourselves as ‘precious’ (as epitomized by the Volvo style car with so many protective measures) yet we do not have many ways to socially understand why we need the protective measures in the first place (the inherent danger to one another of driving). In Frank’s words: Being precious … involves developing and maintaining special conditions which set one apart … [it] is a necessary consequence of seeing ourselves as separate from nature and requiring protection from it. Cars provide a good illustrative example of this throughout the book, but many other examples are used: stamp collecting, books, waste management, and even the raising of children. In all these examples Frank is illustrating that there are so many aspects of our lives which give us ‘security’ in a purchase-able, consumable package (such as mobile phones, insurance, or roadside assistance for cars), but only in a very limited (an ultimately irrelevant) way. Instead, Frank posits the value of what I would call ‘softer’ networks of relationships and ties with nature that let us understand and enjoy the environment in which we live, rather than needing to be protected from it. Energy has long been a strong professional focus of Frank Fisher’s work, and the pieces in Response Ability dealing with energy and energy–environment issues reflect this professional experience very readably. Important questions addressing conservation and renewable energy, solar energy and environmental impacts are presented. For example, in ‘Liberating Energy’ Frank discusses a very subtle, yet powerful approach to understanding our relationship with energy use, the environment, and our sense of ‘security’ in the modern urban context. Frank uses a personal experience of his when the Victorian electricity authority proposed to build a powerful overhead transmission line for reasons of energy supply security to the CBD. Not surprisingly, many people opposed the line on aesthetic reasons and fear of electromagnetic radiation. However, Frank (on behalf of a community health centre) opposed the line because for security reasons the line should not be built at all – his grounds being that not building the line would give the opportunity to learn to live with blackouts (which are a risk no matter how powerful the line) and in turn, as a community, develop social mechanisms to recognise and deal with reliance on the grid. Speaking from over forty years’ experience, Frank’s writings on the chronically ill in the modern urban context are invaluable, and carry meaning which is hard to imagine anyone would not be better off with. With little space to do justice in this article, the titles of some of these writings indicate the variety and value; ‘the silent majority’ (the non-visibly disabled – chronic disease sufferers and a wide and significant variety of institutional and social discrimination), ‘The social genius of the chronically ill’ (in which we learn of the myriad ways chronic disease suffers live with, and manage such discriminations), and ‘A discriminating Act’ (a brief, terse piece outlining the discrimination explicit in the Federal Government’s 1992 Disability Discrimination Act). At times this book is very academic, and a number of heavy intellectual concepts are used with little warming up or context. Nevertheless the nexus of issues of sustainability, health, public policy, local and personal activism is a rare find, and combined with Frank’s subtle, but infectious determination to see the meeting of many of these challenges as fun, as a journey, and as a reward in and of itself, make this a remarkable book which can be re-read, or read in an ad-hoc style. Rory Eames April - May 2007 edition accessible here Back to top ________________________________________________________________
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