It’s audacious, when you think about it, that right wingers accuse environmentalists of promoting a radical agenda. What’s radical, after all, about protecting our ability to survive on the only planet we know that is capable of serving as our home?
I thought about this yesterday as I hung a basket of laundry out on the clothesline to dry. Pick the extremist act:
1. Taking wet clothes and hanging them out in the sun to dry
2. Taking wet clothes and putting them into a noisy machine that turns them around and around while blowing hot air through them, powered by electricity created by burning the remains of ancient living things
Environmentalism is really about a few basic things that most people agree on: Cleanliness, simplicity, and efficiency. The values of environmentalists are the values of the clothesline, an old American tradition that lead us back from the brink of the radical world created when we pollute the sky in order to clean our clothes.
Americans were using zero emissions solar power generations ago. Isn’t it time we reconsidered our reckless abandonment of the traditional approach to energy?
What a great post. Thanks for joining the movement!
Oh dear, I hate to bring this up but that green thingee will probably need ironed and probably the blue thingee too. More fossil fuels.
If I can be super critical here, I would also have to say that folding the material over the line before sticking the clothes pin on it will cause an unsightly crease. It is possible to hold the item straight behind the line then clip it to the line without a crease. The jeans are a bit heavy for that, but you can do it with them too, maybe with more clothespins.
And what about the sun bleaching out the color? If you don’t want them to fade, you want to turn them inside out.
And since I’m being so anal about your technique, you may ask, how do I myself do it? I have installed above my bathtub an extra aluminum shower rod and can dry my stretchy things on plastic hangers, even in winter. They don’t smell nice like your line dried things will, but I have a goofy tenant in the back who likes to take a garden hose to anything hanging on the line. Also if you only wear things that stretch, you don’t have to iron, which is convenient if ironing is against your religion.
New Scientist magazine has a good article on the come-back of a forgotten 20 year old solar energy source called CSP, for concentrated solar power. It’s taking off in desert regions where the sun is unhindered and the radiation can be “collected” in parabolic dishes that concentrate the power to heat oil, which runs a turbine. The heated oil can hold the temperature for days (even weeks in some cases) and the power industry and banks are beginning to jump on it as a revenue source. Other countries like Spain and Morocco are building these plants in anticipation of their future power needs. It’s clean and ultimately renewable.