Monday, October 12, 2009
Wind Energy Drying Device (photo: Helaine King)
Democratic state Senator Linda Puller of Virginia thinks it’s wrong that at a time when energy consumption is vital and money tight, Americans are forbidden from using clotheslines to do their laundry. So Puller introduced legislation in the Virginia legislature to prohibit community associations from banning the use of “wind energy drying devices”—otherwise known as clotheslines.
Restrictions on clothesline have become commonplace throughout the country in recent years, prompting lawmakers in Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Vermont, Florida, and Utah to override local ordinances and protect peoples’ right to hang laundry outdoors.
“It seems like such a mundane thing, hanging laundry, and yet it draws in all these questions about individual rights, private property, class, aesthetics, the environment,” filmmaker Steven Lake told The New York Times. Lake is releasing a documentary next May called “Drying for Freedom,” about the clothesline rights debate in the United States.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Debate Follows Bills to Remove Clotheslines Bans (by Ian Urbina, New York Times)
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