… into the midst of all this beauty, the kind of beauty that makes despair seem like only a figment of the midnight imagination, the monsters arrive.
They come in a deafening, surging swarm, blasting from lawn to lawn and filling the air with the stench of gasoline and death. I would call them mechanical locusts, descending upon every patch of gold in the neighborhood the way the grasshoppers of old would arrive, in numbers so great they darkened the sky, to lay bare a cornfield in minutes. But that comparison is unfair to locusts.
… Nearly everything about how Americans “care” for their lawns is deadly. Pesticides prevent wildflower seeds from germinating and poison the insects that feed songbirds and other wildlife. Lawn mower blades, set too low, chop into bits the snakes and turtles and baby rabbits that can’t get away in time. Mulch, piled too deep, smothers ground-nesting bees, and often the very plants that mulch is supposed to protect, as well.
But the gasoline-powered leaf blower exists in a category of environmental hell all its own, spewing pollutants — carbon monoxide, smog-forming nitrous oxides, carcinogenic hydrocarbons — into the atmosphere at a literally breathtaking rate.
This particular environmental catastrophe is not news. A 2011 study by Edmunds found that a two-stroke gasoline-powered leaf blower spewed out more pollution than a 6,200-pound Ford F-150 SVT Raptor pickup truck. Jason Kavanagh, the engineering editor at Edmunds at the time, noted that “hydrocarbon emissions from a half-hour of yard work with the two-stroke leaf blower are about the same as a 3,900-mile drive from Texas to Alaska in a Raptor.” …
Read the rest here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/25/opinion/leaf-blowers-california-emissions.html
5 responses to “The First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the Leaf Blowers”
I couldn’t agree more! Leaf blowers are the worst! What happened to rakes? That lovely sound of raking up leaves……
Thanks sooo much Tom! I’ve been cogitating on how to approach the Town of Sudbury with a proposal that leaf blowers it uses as well as those used by private landscapers be regulated as to hours of use and decibels. There was a few yrs back (1-2) a great seminar given by a group of Wellesley residents who organized into a Quiet Wellesley (or some such name) and enlisted the DPW Director in deploying electric machinery such as blowers. The panel also included the DPW of Concord. I’d love to see about forming a working group for Sudbury to investigate this and have some info I can share.
Great idea Rebecca!
Susan and Rebecca,
One quick, easy thing you can do right now is to write your support to the Select Board and Town Manager for hiring a Sustainability Director for Sudbury like many other towns like ours already have. Equipment noise and air pollution are exactly the kind of issues that a Sustainability Director could help focus the town staff to address.
I am part of Sustainable Sudbury group that is working on an article for the next town meeting to declare the climate emergency and hire an SD for that and other issues. We have a letter to the SBoard that you can sign here: http://www.sustainablesudbury.org/whatwedo/climate-emergency/ or follow the “Climate Emergency” menu above.
I also encourage you to attend one of Sustainable Sudbury’s monthly planning meetings. It may be that there are existing noise and pollution ordinances that could be enforced and/or a new article may be needed. We could use your help!
– Tom
Hi Tom, Thanks for being in touch. I just signed and sent a letter to the Select Board (or was it the Planning Board?)-whichever your link went to ! I would be happy to attend the next Sustainable Sudbury meeting. When is it? Is it on Zoom? How do I get connected?