Project Laundry List
Alexander Lee

It is hard to take me seriously when my first sentence makes such a ludicrous assertion; however, I am a true believer and hope to evangelize successfully here. Furthermore, I do not want to be taken too seriously. I majored in Environmental Studies, or what my college advisor often half-jokingly labeled the “$100,000 migraine.” I wrote part of my undergraduate thesis on a well-known writer whose book bears the ominous title The End of Nature. I know the gravity of the problem that we face and I intend to face it with a sense of humor. Despair is the ugly alternative and nothing good comes of the hopeless.

For five years I have been running a small nonprofit whose credo reads: Project Laundry List uses words, images, and advocacy to educate people about how simple lifestyle modifications, including air-drying one’s clothes, reduce our dependence on environmentally and culturally costly energy sources. The fact that six to ten percent of residential energy gets sucked up by the electric dryer drives our agenda. This seemingly insignificant factoid is motivating hundreds of people to evaluate what is important to them.

For the last three years, a pun-filled newsletter called Hanging Out has emerged from my home computer every quarter. We update people on our “Right to Dry” campaign, which seeks to undermine those absurd taste police requiring people across America to take down their clotheslines. We instigate participation in National Hanging Out Day (April 19) and inform people about appliance standards rulemakings at the Department of Energy.

“Become a member for the price of a roll of quarters”, we say, “and you get a miniature clothespin to wear on your lapel as a ribbon of the simplicity movement. Donate enough and you will become a member of the Dirty Laundry Society.”

In 1995, while a sophomore at Middlebury College in Vermont, I invited Australian anti-nuclear activist, Dr. Helen Caldicott, to speak at a peace symposium that I was organizing. Dr. Caldicott’s speech had a profound influence on my future. She said, “If we all hung out our clothes, we could shut down the nuclear industry.” That planted the seed which has sprouted into Project Laundry List.

Our approach is unobtrusive, but provocative. There is no finger pointing at the Maytag man for we preach that the enemy is us. We are causing people to say, “Hanging out my clothes is something that I can do for the environment.” Legislators in Vermont are thinking about appliance standards and solar rights because of our work. All of these things are making Project Laundry List increasingly successful.