Black Dot Diary

It’s autumn and that means it’s time for my annual rant about the gas-​powered leaf blower.

I really, truly do not under­stand why these things exist. They churn out smoke and fumes. They spoil the silence of a Sun­day morn­ing. From my point of view, they are not even all that effec­tive: I could rake the leaves in less time than it takes the guy down the street to make sure every speck of tree detri­tus is blown into a neat lit­tle pile (which the wind then blows around again anyway).

Dr. Andrew Weil has cap­tured the argu­ment against leaf blow­ers incred­i­bly well. I encour­age you to read his arti­cle because it details some very sound rea­sons for ban­ning these idi­otic instruments.

So here’s my plea to munic­i­pal­i­ties — at the same time you are ban­ning idling cars (a good idea, by the way) put a ban on the most inva­sive of the power tools — leaf blow­ers. You may find there is a large “silent” major­ity wait­ing to applaud you.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 4th, 2009 at 6:12 pm and is filed under Community, Environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.