"Clothes dryers pose hazards both direct and indirect. They might not seem as menacing as lawn mowers, but dryers are a leading cause of house fires, accounting for more than 15,000 blazes, 400 injuries, and 15 deaths a year. When not bursting into flames from lint buildup — and now I'm returning to the business at hand — a clothes dryer contributes, on average, 1,369 pounds of carbon dioxide a year to the atmosphere. More than half of all of the electricity that flows into our houses powers electrical appliances. After the refrigerator, the clothes dryer is the biggest consumer, using about $1,500 of electricity over its 18-year lifespan. (I'm assuming you've already got the memo about the significant energy savings offered by washing clothes in cold water rather than hot.) Nationally, 3 percent of all household electricity goes to running clothes dryers. If we did nothing else but scrap them all, we could shut down a couple of coal plants.

"Let me say that another way: In the midst of a global crisis, we are pumping carbon into the air in order to accomplish something — evaporation of water — that happens anyway. If you let the lawn sit overnight, the grass will not be shorter in the morning. Without inputs from somewhere, dinner will not get cooked nor houses heated. But wet clothes, happily, require zero assistance from the energy sector.

"The drying system that Jeff invented for us is probably not nearly as sleek and unobtrusive as whatever the Italians do, but it has charms of its own. During the six weeks of the year that we call summer here in upstate New York, the clothes go out on a traditional flapping clothesline, as do, all year long, the sheets and towels. For most of the year, however, the laundry is hung on a series of retractable cords suspended over the stairwell, like the strings of a violin. During the winter, we hang laundry before bed. As the wet clothes dry in the draft flowing upward, they humidify the air in the bedrooms and prevent Elijah from coughing. Thus, I don't have to run an electric humidifier, which would further draw power from the grid. The moist air also allows me to keep the thermostat lower. In the morning, each kid is in charge of putting his/her own clothes away. Since we use hangers rather than clothespins, most things go right into their closet. Including pajamas.

"Hanging laundry cannot stop global warming. The process that clotheslines — and reel mowers and compost piles — begin, however, is the denormalizing of fossil-fuel ways of living. They are daily reminders that we urgently need new choices within new systems. They are harbingers. They signal our eagerness to embrace much bigger changes. They bear witness to our children that we are willing to exert agency, that we are not cynical, that we respect their right to inherit a habitable planet. And they put the neighbors on notice.

"The acquisition of new personal habits and new skills can change our thinking. It compels us to ask new questions. If all food scraps in the United States were composted, how much natural gas could we save? (Natural gas is the raw material for synthetic fertilizer.) What if homeowners associations encouraged, rather than forbade, clotheslines? (Project Laundry List is working on this.) What if all family homes and apartments had clothes-drying closets that doubled as humidifiers? What if landscaping services offered carbon-neutral lawn care? What if student athletes mowed their own playing fields with fleets of reel mowers as part of warm-ups?

"Another world is possible. Creating it requires courage."