Though the Internet has only been in the sphere of popular culture for the last five years, it has in that time become the de facto form of personal expression and communication for the masses. In an era where everyone seems to have an opinion, the Internet provides its users with the fastest, cheapest, safest, and most presentable medium for telling others about their thoughts and feelings. The Internet, unlike almost all other forms of mass-comunication yet devised, does not discriminate based upon race, color, gender, or popularity of the ideas being communicated. Anyone with $20 a month and a little free time can erect a Web Page for the world to see. Every human being on Earth with their own banner advertisement.
This "brave new world" of ideas- and self-promotion has forever altered our perception of what ideas are "relevent" or "irrelevant," "popular" or "unpopular," "worthy" and "unworthy." Before the Internet and its vast collections of people, places, and things the wealth of human opinons came to people through a filter, a system of discrimination designed to present individuals a world-view that encomapssed only the "important" information. Unfortunately, the traditional delivery system -- manifesting itself news media, physical library collections, and before that second-hand accounts and storytelling -- seeks to protect its own existance and serve its masters and creators. Information is doled-out on a hit-or-miss basis, some data being of extreme relevance, some not, much of it supporting a certain cultural ideology. What people know about humanity is limited by geographical location, political alignments of their area, their personal wealth, and similar factors.
The Internet could be considered a great triumph over this flawed, older system. It has not yet attained the goal of complete democratization of knowledge, but it has the potential to radically transform the way everyone on Earth thinks about everyone else.
This "politics of knowledge" plays an important role in Feminist and Ecofeminist theory. Knowledge is a commodity, and the parties in power over the whole use, subvert, revise, and edit information to suit their needs. And in this way, women's history, spirituality, and thought have "swept under the carpet" as it were, erased from history so that a patriarchy, a culture dominated by men and values traditionally associated with men could succede.
Recently, many feminist scholars, writers, and historians have tried to piece together thier lost history. They have tried to make connections from the past to the present, and from idea to idea. Women like Marija Gimbutas, Caroline Merchant, and Starhawk have tried to regain what they believe women have lost.
So, in the spirit of these women and the ones surely to follow in their footsteps, we have constructed this website to tell people what Ecofeminism is, and connect them to some of the best information on the Internet.
Sites for Internet Feminism and Ecofeminism are abundant, to say the least. A search for simply the word "feminism" will produce thousands of hits from all over the world.
In our project, we have tried to be thorough in our collection of sites and and resources, and to make browsing more idea-focused, we have split into different subjects, each one person in our group taking on a different issue of modern Ecofeminism.