Consider the Clothesline

A meditation on air drying laundry, Antarctic heatwaves, the bird that could help protect the Great Salt Lake, and more.

Dear friends,

There’s something complicated about the clothesline: Many films and novels depict pivotal gossip and stolen kisses between white sheets billowing on the line, and many real-life women have found both peaceful moments of solitude and connecting moments of shared stories in this space. Nonetheless, the clothesline resists nostalgia; drying clothes outside is a physically demanding chore that most people have been glad to set aside for decades.  

I started drying my family’s clothes outside several years ago, and over time my commitment to doing so has deepened. It’s simultaneously a chore, a privilege, a transgression, and an effective way to reduce carbon emissions. On some days it’s also an unexpected meditative practice. I wouldn’t say it sparks joy, but it can be oddly satisfying.

Like all individual action, drying our clothes outdoors isn’t enough on its own, nor should it stand in for the radical change needed to address the larger climate-warming system (we need to stop burning fossil fuels—yesterday!). 

I’m aware that using my clothesline is a drop in the bucket—but it’s not an inconsequential drop.

Photo courtesy of joeannenah via Flickr.

The benefits of air-drying

My backyard is just big enough to dry a load of laundry if I combine a clothesline and a folding drying rack. The latter is light, so I can easily move it from the small porch to various parts of the yard as the sun shifts. When it rains, I use the rack to let at least some portion of the load dry in my tiny kitchen overnight.

Where I live, the sun shines more days than not, and I have a hard time rationalizing using fossil fuels to do work the sun can do. Even on days when I’m pressed for time, I can take five minutes to hang the heaviest items and shove the socks and cloth napkins in the dryer for a quick spin. A few minutes of dryer time upfront can also soften towels and gets the wrinkles out of thin cotton shirts.

As with the practice of collecting greywater during droughts, I dry my clothes outside because it makes me (in that way that we are remade every day) the kind of person who is also deeply invested in systemic change—precisely because I’m continuously reminded of just how small my actions are in the grand scheme. 

This action is more than just for my own edification, though. Dryers use up to 10 times more energy than washing machines. Line drying your clothes ranks somewhere in the middle of the list of things that reduce your personal greenhouse-gas emissions (higher than recycling but lower than, say, cutting out one long-distance flight a year or reducing driving), and the EPA now officially recommends that we “use a clothesline or drying rack for 50 percent of [our] laundry.” Replacing gas-powered dryers with heat-pump dryers, which use 28 percent less energy, can also go part of the way toward making laundry less impactful on the climate.

Barriers to clotheslines 

I’m not going to lie, line drying clothes is a chore! I realize not everyone has the time, energy or physical ability to hang their clothes out to dry. Like putting that night’s soup on at noon, using my clothesline is something I can only do with consistency because I work from home. And while telecommuting can be lonely at times, it has allowed me to build a tiny, relatively low-carbon homestead in the middle of a city—and I’m thankful for that.

While most people do technically have space to dry their clothes (in many countries, it’s not uncommon to dry them on indoor racks, even in small apartments), doing so in the United States is often officially prevented or subtly frowned upon. 

Clotheslines used to be the way everyone dried their clothes. But as many white and middle-class families moved out of cities and into suburbs around the middle of the last century, private, indoor laundry drying became associated with middle-class life. As one energy district put it recently: “Aggressive promotional campaigns by the electrical appliance industry encouraged consumers to switch to dryers as one of the many marvelous electric servants available to the modern homemaker, a marker of post-WWII prosperity.” 

Clotheslines, meanwhile, became associated with poverty and were perceived as bringing down property values (the phrase “airing your dirty laundry” says it all, doesn’t it?).

Today, apartment buildings and homeowner associations (HOAs) all over the country prevent people from drying their laundry outside. Thankfully some people are fighting for their right to do so, and in California a civil code that had previously allowed HOAs to forbid clotheslines and drying racks even in private backyard spaces was finally changed in 2016.

The romance of a clothesline

Many Americans visiting Europe, South America, Asia and even their local Chinatown take photos of laundry strung up over the street and share them as charming symbols of the old-world. Like the storytellers who use the clothesline as a narrative device (or Cat Power covering Michael Hurley in the iconic song, Sweedeedee), we sense something deeply familiar tugging on us when we see clothes drying in the sun. What if using our own clotheslines could become an emissions-reducing meditative practice, a grounding into our sustainable past that actually helps us reckon with climate crisis?

I’ve been thinking a lot about what allows us to turn toward what is difficult—about how to look right at all the inequity and pain in the world right now while staying present—and I have come to believe that it’s only really possible if we slow down and find our own form of meditation. 

On warm days in my backyard, you can almost see the moisture evaporate, and the t-shirts, dishtowels and pillowcases transform quickly from heavy wet objects into light, airy problems miraculously solved while I was looking away. On those days, the idea of turning on a machine to heat up clothes seems absurd. But on cloudy days the process can drag on for what seems like forever, and I often find myself impatiently cycling clothes through the warmest parts of the yard. Sometimes I give up and just heave it all into the large drum of the dryer.

There’s a way that chores and meditation can work like a mobius strip. Slowing down can feel like a chore in itself, but focused repetition can also sometimes open up into something more spacious and contemplative. And not unlike gardening and tending to animals, the process puts me squarely on the ground, where I can really see what the world is made of, with all its challenges and possibilities.

Climate news you might have missed

“Heatwaves” in Antarctica

Two years ago, Antarctica saw a record-breaking temperature jump as warm wind from Australia (where it was late summer at the time) caused an increase of 101 degrees Fahrenheit (38.5 C) in a single day. As Professor Michael Meredith, science leader at the British Antarctic Survey told The Guardian last week, “It is simply mind-boggling. In sub-zero temperatures such a massive leap is tolerable but if we had a [100 F] rise in the UK now that would take temperatures for a spring day to over [122 F] — and that would be deadly for the population.”

That leap it wasn’t an isolated incident, however. In a research article released in the Journal of Climate recently, a group of scientists shared data gathered at research stations on Antarctica over the last several years and concluded that a “regime shift” is taking place due to an increase in the number of heat waves impacting summer sea ice. These heat waves are almost never bringing the temperature of the continent up above freezing, but in a place where it’s often -100 degrees, the change is still notable. And it doesn’t bode well for sea level rise in the coming decades, especially when you add the potential for melting Antarctic ice to the already-rapidly-warming arctic.

Grandmothers turn up the heat

If you’ve attended a climate protest in the last decade, the odds are good that you encountered a contingent from the 1,000 Grandmothers project, a group of elders who came together to resist the construction of the DAPL oil pipeline at Standing Rock and see their ongoing work as fighting both the climate crisis and system racism.

I’ve been inspired by these strong women and I was reminded of them this week when I read about the group of more than 2,500 elderly women who took the Swedish government to court for failing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Older people face a higher risk of death during heatwaves and the plaintiffs argued that the government had put their health at risk by failing to reduce greenhouse emissions fast enough. The court agreed. According to Reuters, the court “also asserted that keeping global warming below the 1.5C limit set under the 2015 Paris climate agreement is part of human rights protections—a ruling that could have a ripple effect for other international courts.”

The bird that could help save the Great Salt Lake

A small shorebird called the Wilson’s phalarope is intimately tied up in the future of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, which reached an all-time low in 2022 and is increasingly a source of toxic dust. The bird—and hundreds of others—relies on the lake as one of three saline bodies of water that provide respite in their migration from Canada to South America. And its population has declined radically in recent years—in part due to the Great Salt Lake’s reduction in size. Now, a group of advocates, including writer and naturalist Terry Tempest Williams, have petitioned the US. Fish and Wildlife Service to include the Wilson’s phalarope as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, a shift that could help bring more water back to the Great Salt Lake.

According to the Salt Lake Tribune, U.S. Fish and Wildlife has a year to issue a decision about whether to list the lovely little shorebirds—whose females have showier, more colorful plumage than their male counterparts— on the list. And if the federal government determines the phalarope is endangered, a University of Utah law professor told the Tribune, “it is because the Great Salt Lake is endangered.”

Reading about the petition to save this bird, I couldn’t help but think about the 2022 Guardian article and photo essay featuring the bright green lawns maintained by the Mormon church, even during megadroughts. And although the church has since “donated” a portion of the water it has long had exclusive rights to back to the lake last year and the state is working to incentivize removal of non-essential lawns, it is clear that drought isn’t the only factor when it comes to the diminished size of the lake. Development and agriculture (much of it likely taking place on land owned by the Mormon church, the largest owner of farmland in the US) are also significant factors. And it’s hard not to wonder how much more water the church is sitting on.

On the Brighter Side

1.  In late March, Indigenous leaders in New Zealand, Tahiti, and the Cook Islands signed an historic treaty recognizing whales as legal persons. Much like other efforts to recognize the rights of nature, they hope that the move will make it easier to protect whales and other ocean mammals. As Māori conservationist Mere Takoko wrote in Atmos, “This includes the right to freedom of movement, a healthy environment, and the ability to thrive alongside humanity. This revolutionary concept, inspired by the Te Urewera Act of 2014 in New Zealand, which granted legal personhood to the Te Urewera forest, reflects the growing respect for Indigenous knowledge systems and their significance in environmental protection on a global scale.”

2. The federal government is moving forward with a $19 million plan to install solar panels over irrigation canals in California, Oregon and Utah, in a move that could cut down on evaporation while adding clean energy to the grid.

3. European activists from across the continent are coordinating a major campaign against fossil fuel subsidies. According to Extinction Rebellion Netherlands, “Thirty groups from 15 countries are now fighting for an end to European fossil subsidies under the name United for Climate Justice.”

4. Last week, the Biden administration announced it was investing $20 billion in creating the nation’s first green bank network, with a goal to provide low- and zero-interest loans, “to fund tens of thousands of climate and clean energy projects across America, especially in communities historically left behind and overburdened by pollution.”  

A map of the existing + planned Great Redwood Trail, from the Great Redwood Trail agency.

5. The LA Times reported on early plans for a 307-mile trail along a now-defunct railroad line that once connected San Francisco and Humboldt Bay called the Great Redwood Trail. The committee overseeing the project estimate that it could take ten years to complete but the final project is being likened to the Pacific Crest Trail and the Appalachian Trail.

6. Scientists have identified a dwarf deer in the Andes Mountains of Peru that averages 15-inches tall, or about the size of a Jack Russel Terrier.

Take care of yourselves,
Twilight