feminist blogs

First is was the slow food movement. Next it was slow fashion and slow furniture. Could the glamorous world of laundry be the next slow revolution? As people look for ways to decrease their energy consumption, clotheslines are steadily returning to the American landscape. However, this return to one of the original forms of solar power is being hampered (gotta love laundry puns) in some places. Some local municipalities and many homeowners associations prohibit the use of outdoor clotheslines citing aesthetic and property value concerns.

Treehugger is sponsoring a clothesline photo contest.

and Project Laundry List is expanding to encourage local chapters. I hope someone starts one in Austin, because I'd love to hang out (ar ar) with the clothespin set, but I just don't have the time to head a chapter myself.

Ms. Dahlia hooked me up with this video this fine morning. I can hear the birds singing outside, and if I close my eyes, I can imagine it coming true.

This article points out something that came up during a lecture I attended recently. The speaker, a marine ecologist, concluded his grim forecast by basically saying that academia is too focused and specialized, and that we aren't going to solve any of these problems until all of the areas of specialization work together. For instance, economists need to learn to take the biological impact of fiscal policies into account.

It's something I, as a reg'lar old uneducated joe never really took into account, but it's so true. I recently had an experience with a data nerd that I know where someone pointed out the practical applications of his data with regard to the education system. He was astonished. He didn't realize that all that data he loves so much actually had a real-world application.

You see what I'm saying? And maybe this ties in, also, with the whole Wisdom of Crowds theory. Those of us who are less specialized can be here on the ground, pulling the data geeks, the intellectual snobs, and the pie-in-the-skyers back down to the here and now. Of course, that requires that we finally gain the capacity to start actually, you know, working together rather than in fragmented social groups based on arbitrary characteristics.

So much evolving to do...so little time!