“National Hanging Out Day” in the USA

Barga shows the way — The following was on the front page of the Independent newspaper in the UK this morning as it reported on the new phenomenon in the states as they look for new/old methods to combat the damage to our climate though greenhouse gases. What could be more environmentally friendly than hanging out your laundry in the fresh air? A movement is stirring all across North America to reinstate the venerable clothesline and ditch the dryer.

The clothes-peg is making a comeback (not plastic, please, but those sturdy wooden ones with springs your mother used to collect). The reason, of course, is concern about global warming but the growing global movement has met outrage in America from those who want to keep their neighbourhoods knicker-free.

The drive to reinstate the clothes lines is suddenly getting a lot of people’s attention.Saturday, believe it or not, was “National Hanging Out Day” in the US and it was not an invitation for kids to assemble at the shopping mall. (They do that anyway.) It was about damp whites and was the brainwave of an advocacy group based in New Hampshire called Project Laundry List. (site here) For its motto it borrows from Benjamin Franklin. “We must all hang together or most assuredly we will all hang separately.”

Its mission is to educate. With our harried existences, most of us do not think twice about using whatever labour-saving devices are at hand. Tumble dryers certainly fall into that category. But most of us are beginning to worry also about what we can do in our own homes to reduce our so-called carbon footprint. In this country, households count for about a quarter of all the greenhouse gases wafting into our atmosphere. Project Laundry List will tell you that dryers account for about 6 per cent of energy consumption in a typical American home, just behind fridges and lights. Use them regularly and they will generate emissions roughly equal to driving five cars.

Changing to green electricity means paying a bit more on your monthly bill. Resurrecting the clothes-line should be appealing because it implies no additional monetary costs. How many other opportunities do you see out there for cutting your carbon footprint substantially for free? “A clothes line is not a solar panel or a Prius,” notes Alexander Lee, the founder of Project Laundry List. “It’s something that everyone can afford.” It will cost you time of course, but fresh air is good for you and your clothes.

But the Right to Dry movement, as it has been named, is meeting resistance. In fact, it has detonated warfare in many communities. In the red corner is the smattering of homeowners across the land who have seen the error of their tumble-drying ways and are erecting either lines or those umbrella-like contraptions that were once popular in Britain.

In the blue corner are their neighbours who consider knickers in the wind a blight. For these people (yes, I was one of them), seeing clothes on a line somehow denotes poverty and an absence of sophistication. It’s a class thing. Neighbourhoods with washing in the gardens are not nice neighbourhoods. Heavens, it could even be lowering the values of the homes all around them.

Not helping is the fact that for many in this country, their home is not exactly their castle. Nearly 60 million Americans live in communities, usually called housing associations, where occupying a unit – whether apartment, row-house or even detached house – means also accepting a range of regulations regarding upkeep and general appearances, such as lawn-mowing and paint colours. Most of these associations also impose a strict no-clothes-line rule. But inside these associations rebellions are starting to erupt. In Concord, New Hampshire, for instance, there is the case of Mary Lou Sayer, a grandmother in her 80s who sought permission to begin hanging out her clothes in the assisted-living complex she calls home after hearing a talk by Mr Lee. She was turned down and for now suspends her dripping smalls from her dining-room light fixture and opens the windows. She is considering hanging a line outside anyway in protest. “Most of my friends are taking environmental issues seriously,” she says.

But Mr Lee believes that the logic of switching off the tumble dryer will eventually prevail against the Nimby forces of not in my – or rather your – back yard. Partly, he says, it is about changing popular perceptions. Clothes lines need to be seen as acceptable once again, even praiseworthy. “We want Martha [Stewart] and Oprah [Winfrey] to make the clothesline into a pennant of eco-chic,” he said, “instead of a flag of poverty”.

His group is also spearheading an effort to persuade state and local legislatures to pass laws overriding individual housing association rules. Pro-clothes line laws are now pending in Vermont, Connecticut and Colorado. One was also tabled in New Hampshire but was recently thrown out in committee.

“People think it’s silly, but what’s silly is to worry so much about having to look at your neighbours’ undies that you would prevent them from conserving energy. We’re not making a big deal over clothes lines; we’re making a big deal over global warming.” - state senator, Dick McCormack.

For now, just two states, Utah and Florida, have laws on the books specifically protecting the right of homeowners to flaunt their smalls in the garden. How much longer it will be for one of the initiatives to find favour is hard to say. But there is encouraging news from just across the border where the Premier of Ontario, Dalton McGuinty, just last Friday introduced a law that precisely overrides the ability of housing associations to ban clothes lines. “There’s a whole generation of kids growing up today who think a clothes line is a wrestling move,” the Premier said. “We want parents to have the choice to use the wind and the sun to dry their clothes free.”

Mr McGuinty took the action partly in response to a petition from Phyllis Morris, the Mayor of Aurora, Ontario, who had been made aware that numerous ecologically conscious residents in the town were chafing at clothesline restrictions. She took up their cause without a moment’s hesitation. “If we can’t change simple stuff like this, we’ll never handle the big things we need to do for the planet,” she said of her petition which declared the clothes-lines bans a “barrier to conservation”. “People say, ‘Oh, Phyllis, you want to turn women back into the laundry lady’, and I say, ‘Wrong: this is about rights. It’s about the environment.”

Recently, I was tempted to try out a new brand of washing powder from Tide that promises a “clean breeze” scent, described as “the fresh scent of laundry line-dried in a clean breeze”. How daft is that? As far as I know, there is not a thing to stop me from junking the tumble-dryer upstate. Which means I have no excuse but to knock on Bud’s door and borrow some pegs. Article on the front page of The Independent newspaper UK by David Usborne

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Be sure to read the article written by Frank Viviano about the paintings on The Mutande of Barga site - here

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