It happened without really being noticed. It’s
as if someone declared a new standard for suburban landscapes, no leaves
allowed, and over time nearly everyone fell into line. There’s hardly a home—or office building--where
clearing the leaves has not become an expensive, polluting, unhealthy and ear-splitting
exercise. Our yard care practices are subverting the very qualities of
life—clean air, quiet and good health—that suburbanites supposedly treasure.
People
used to just rake the leaves off their lawns to keep the grass from getting
smothered, but left the leaves in shrub beds and borders. This natural mulch
kept the plant roots warm in the winter and discouraged weeds in the
spring. By summer, the leaves
had decayed into the dirt,
renewing the fertility of the soil.
A perfect system of sustainability, this natural cycle was free, used
no energy except burning a few calories and caused no pollution.
But in the next few weeks as the autumn leaves fall, do-it-yourselfers
and paid crews will be out there with blowers roaring, damaging the
hearing of their handlers--who rarely wear any ear protection--and polluting
the air. They blast every last
leaf not just off lawns but also out of shrub and groundcover beds. Then in the spring, homeowners pay
for mulch, dyed a uniform color, to spread on the achingly bare beds.
One result of this mania
for neatness is the pollution of the air right in our residential neighborhoods. An Orange County,
California Grand Jury studied the pollution caused by leaf blowers in 1999 in
order to issue recommendations to municipalities and other government entities.
They found that “exhaust pollution per leaf blower per hour is the
equivalent of the amount of smog from 17 cars driven one hour and is localized
in the area of blower usage.”
Furthermore, they found
that the high-velocity air jets whip up about five pounds per hour per
blower of particulate matter “composed of dust, fecal matter, pesticides,
fungi, chemicals, fertilizers, spores, and street dirt which consists of lead
and organic and elemental carbon.”
Experts
agree that asthma is worsened by, and maybe caused by, particulate matter in
the air. Every time you use a leaf
blower, or let a landscaping crew do so, you are contributing to the asthma,
allergies and other breathing problems suffered by your own family members and
those of your neighbors.
And
by the way, the Orange County grand jury also found that clearing leaves the
old-fashioned way, with rakes and brooms, took just 6% more labor time than the
blower method.
The
bottom line is that Long Island’s home and business owners are unnecessarily
spending money, polluting the air and disturbing the peace in pursuit of an
unnaturally neat vision of a landscape. Let the leaves stay in your flower and
shrub beds, and use a rake to clear the lawn. Work with nature, and we’ll all
breathe better in the quiet.
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