Doing Good By Looking Bad

In my middle-class California suburb with upper-class pretensions it's verboten to hang our clothes outdoors to dry. If the City was serious about reducing carbon emissions, it would encourage us to beat our dryers into clotheslines instead of putting on feel-good Earth-Day fairs.

The biggest way to cut the environmental impact of cleaning clothes, however, is to stop using a clothes dryer. Drying laundry outside on a line, [UK Merchant] Tesco says, will cut the carbon footprint of every load by a whopping 4.4 pounds.

In Hawaii the culture is more accepting. The warm weather and Island breezes are especially conducive to using clotheslines. In the span of three hours my load was dry.

Common sense should eventually prevail, and it may be sooner than we think when drying clothes the natural way stops being déclassé.