Solar Power

The world has been enthusiastic for some time about solar power. And what brand of solar power could be more easily adopted than one that's been around forever?

Practical as it might be, however, the use of clotheslines is approaching extinction in America. Whatever the reasons for this logical oddity, and there are some, it's a mockery of any pretense of  energy efficiency. Even so, there are enough clothes dryer Luddites that 19 states forbid the enactment of anti-clothesline regulations by subordinate municipalities, home owners associations and other private groups. The situation is explored to some extent in this article from 2009.

Legal issues aside, why would anyone with the combination of available space and awareness of energy facts be opposed to clothes on a line? Especially when the clothes and line occupy the property of someone else?  The answer to this could be termed "visual pollution syndrome".

The sun not only ultimately provides the power for everything on earth, it also allows animals with eyes to see those things. VPS is the affliction that viewers of things that they don't like suffer when they gaze upon these visual outrages. Clothes lines are just one of the many visual externalities that cause VPS trauma.

A common trigger for VPS is an automobile junkyard, or salvage yard. These are required to be surrounded with view-proof fencing almost everywhere. But what is really the difference between an auto salvage yard and, for instance, long term airport parking? OK, the airport facility is usually paved, the junkyard is infested with plants that gardeners call weeds. That's really the only difference. The same people that hire others to mow their lawns or even actually do it themselves in what amounts to a religious experience, suffer from VPS when driving by a gathering of 30 year-old products of well-paid Detroit design teams. Why should they care?

In fact, now even currently operating motor vehicles are deemed VPS offensive. The parking ramp pictured above has screening installed specifically to avoid offending VPS victims.  It may also have the ancillary purpose of preventing those that cannot find their car from flinging themselves from the ramp in suicidal frustration. It's noteworthy that no one will mistake this multi-level parking lot for an art museum or a local headquarters of the FBI. Everyone that looks at it will quickly realize that it's a parking ramp. But for someone it was important to provide it with an ineffective disguise.

Significantly, but perhaps not primarily, is lobbying by businesses opposed to clotheslines. These would be laundromats. If every person without a dryer hung their wet clothes on a line, laundromat receipts would be cut in half. There's no doubt that lobbying by laundromat interests have in some cases had an effect on the adoption of anti-clothesline regulations.

Another aspect of the issue is psychological. Part of the reason people use clothes driers is because it requires physical effort to pull wet clothes from the washer, lug them outdoors and hang them on the line. Later they must be retrieved. While this is a negligible amount of effort, it is an inconvenience in a society devoted to the elimination of inconvenience. People possessing any amount of critical thought know that use of a dryer instead of clothesline is evidence of two things. One is a positive, affluence. No clothes on a line equals a family above poverty. The second is a negative, laziness. If a single family in an area was the only one with a dryer it would signal affluence but it would also raise the specter of laziness. Far better to forbid wet clothes on a line for everyone than be thought of as lazy.

The ultimate objection justifying VPS, including residential clothes lines. is, of course, economic, the most important objection to almost anything. In this case it would be that hanging clothes on a line in a yard lowers the value of neighboring property. As if, somehow, it's one owner's obligation to insure that a piece of nearby real estate owned by someone else always increases in value.