Yesterday I heard on the radio about a giant project of modelling marine reefs by crocheting them, as a tool to predict the effects on the fragile reefs of climate change. All over the world now people – mainly women – are crocheting the most amazing reefs, creating models in a few hours that would take supercomputers ages to work out. And the computer stuff still wouldn’t be as effective a model, nor as beautiful.
On the radio they were talking about the co-operative community nature of this project – hundreds of crocheters everywhere making bits of the reef, being reflective of the co-operative community nature of reefs themselves.
The project was begun by the Directors of the Institute for Figuring, Christine Wertheim and Margaret Wertheim. There’s loads of info on the Net.
You can’t help but love a project that brings maths, science, climate action and crochet into the same arena.
2 Comments
Hi Judy,
I heard the story too and I actually met the three women in Australia who are all crocheting. Thay were artists in residence at the same time as me at Bundanon. Their work was fantastic – made me want to pull out a crocheting hook and try to remember waht I used to know.Beautiful.
And I’m guessing you weren’t listening to commercial radio…