Back to the Feminist Future with Mud Floors and Quilting Bees

We have begun to seriously reconsider how a healthy lifestyle and a feminist politics of consumption requires concerted attention to the commodity chain. Here are two interesting points of intervention:

As mainstream takes note of the environmental fringes in natural building, NYT writes about mud floors, and the women's enews folks follow the feminist impulse in women's crafting, knitting, and DIY community.

In "Young Women Re-Craft Feminism as DIY Project," Courtney E. Martin points out that "almost half of crafters in the $13 billion-a-year industry are under 45 years of age and two-thirds are women," and, increasingly, these women see themselves as making a difference on several fronts:

. . .[I]n an era of rising anxiety about the effects of globalization--on everything from the economy to social cohesion to the biosphere--many young women in their teens, 20s and 30s are joining a push to make things local and more personally connected. And for many of them knitting and stitching is the way in.