It’s Time to Throttle Leaf Blowers

For years, I have assumed that the leaf blower was a creature born wholly of Southern California. After all, it seemed so. What other place is so suited to having its lawns blown than the eternally dry, snowless landscape of the south?

But when I set out to prove this, I found I could not. The origins of the leaf blower, like those of the machine gun or the electric chair, are shrouded in historical and convenient mystery. No one will admit to knowing who invented the leaf blower, or when.

What we do know is this: Southern California--or the city of Los Angeles, at least--now has a chance to kill it. So if we did invent the leaf blower, thereby incurring a significant and shameful debt to society, we can square things. This is an opportunity we should not let slip away.

This month, City Councilman Marvin Braude introduced a measure that would make gasoline-powered leaf blowers illegal if they produce more than 60 decibels of sound. Because most leaf blowers shriek their terrorizing whines at volumes 10 to a hundred times that level, the Braude measure would effectively end their evil hold on our neighborhoods.

And more. As the lawn maintenance industry--it is a great error to refer to these people as “gardeners”--knows all too well, Los Angeles is the big enchilada in the leaf blower war. If Los Angeles drops the hammer on the leaf blower, other cities will quickly follow. And pretty soon, the war will be over and the blowers will be finished.

So this struggle over the Braude measure is important. It means something. It’s also an opportunity for Los Angeles to prove that once, just once, it can lead the way back to a civilized way of life. And perhaps it will give us a good answer when we are accused, as we often are, of inventing freeways, of inventing smog, of inventing movies such as Die Hard II. We can say, yeah, all that’s true enough. But we also killed the leaf blower.

Don’t expect it to be easy. Even now the lawn industry has its minions doing their work in City Hall. Four years ago, they managed to kill a similar measure that received unprecedented public support and the endorsement of the City Council’s Public Health Committee.

Here was their argument: The lawn industry could not survive without gasoline blowers. The industry had grown up with the blower and must have it or die.

This is an argument we hear often these days. As the supporters of the late Big Green initiative often reminded us, the apple industry once said it could not survive without the pesticide Alar. It did survive, and so did the apples.

What would really happen if gasoline blowers were banned? Simple. The industry would switch to electric blowers that produce about one-tenth the noise of gasoline blowers. This switch would cost the industry money and produce some inconvenience as maintenance people learn how to locate outlets for their new machines.

And in some rare cases, the service companies might be forced to use rakes and brooms, resulting in a somewhat higher charge for those whose lawns were swept rather than blown.

And that would be the sum of it. In exchange for those costs, we would have returned to our neighborhoods a sense of peace and quiet that has not been present since the first blower showed up 15 years ago.

OK, I suppose this issue does not rank up there with Saddam Hussein. Here’s what it is: one of those small brutalizations that we are so good at inflicting on ourselves, that make life just a little uglier every day. And sometimes even the nights. Once I woke up in a Sacramento hotel in the middle of the night. A man was blowing the parking lot next to my room at 2 a.m. I’m sure everybody could match this episode with a blower story of their own.

And why are these brutalizations, once created, so hard to end? Beats me. I know that the last time blowers came up in the City Council, the lawn industry lobbyists found sympathetic ears in the offices of Councilmen Howard Finn, David Cunningham and Gilbert Lindsay.

Please note that all three of these men are now gone. Finn died. Cunningham resigned. Lindsay is incapacitated by a stroke.

It’s hard to say how sentiment will shake out in the present council. But this just may be the time to strike. Let’s take back the neighborhoods. Bust the blowers.