Dirty Laundry

I always get a wee bit nervous whenever an article quotes or cites me. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, I get my red-face on. Here’s a nice little bit from the Washington Post’s travel section. To be frank, when Juliet told me that she wanted to write an article on this, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what her angle might be, even though this is exactly what she told me she’d write. Here are the relevant passages:

Benjamin Hale, an environmental studies and philosophy professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, was attending the December climate talks in Copenhagen when he noticed something odd about his three-star hotel: It kept giving him fresh towels, even though he was hanging up the ones he’d used in accordance with the hotel’s advertised policy of allowing guests to reuse towels as a conservation measure.

“I kept wondering, why are these towels getting washed? Because I’m trying, I’m making an effort” to reuse them, recalled Hale, who stayed at the Copenhagen Strand Hotel when delegates from 193 nations gathered in the Danish capital to debate how best to save the planet. “It’s become this unfulfilled promissory note.”