Bringing the Factory Into the Garden

I first strapped on a backpack leaf blower to clean some leaves and dust from a parking lot. No dust mask, no hearing protectors, just me and my machine. It wasn't long until a sense of futility set in. I was enveloped in ear-splitting noise, an overwhelmingly acrid smell of burnt and unburnt fuel and swirling debris. In the midst of that petrochemical-mechanical maelstrom, I could feel my mind shutting down but, just before it did, I wondered if this was a wise use of limited fossil fuels.

Until management brought in the leaf blower, several of us gardeners had swept the lot with brooms. It took a little longer and it certainly didn't get all the dust out of the cracks in the asphalt. But it was good enough and customers had no trouble making out the white lines between spaces. And we could hear the birds sing as we worked.

Eventually, management hired a cleaning service to vacuum the lot from a truck and the blower became a relic that gathered dust in the back of the shed. One night, someone climbed the fence and walked off with it.

Since then, I've spent my time on the receiving end of leaf blowers. Much of my gardening work is in Berkeley, where they're banned, yet I hear them, see them, smell them all day. Forget about the zen of gardening. There's no tranquility with a 25-pound mosquito buzzing in your ear.

When it comes to garden machinery, I'm proud to call myself a Luddite. I see little value in it. Gas-powered chain saws, lawn mowers, leaf blowers, weed whackers, edgers and hedge trimmers might be appropriate working median strips where they can harmonize with passing cars and diesel trucks to create a howling 4-lane circle of hell, but there's virtually no garden task that can't be done with simple hand tools and a little effort, with only the sound of sweat dripping on the soil. Why spend time and money at the gym when you could be outside pruning with a hand saw and raking leaves?

Since the 1973 oil embargo, there's been a lot of talk about saving energy. Some of us took it seriously. Others invented the leaf blower, which made its grand debut in a cloud of smoke some 30 years ago. Let's compare: My casual research shows that the renewable energy expenditure for an hour of gardening by a 150-pound individual is about 300 calories. Replacing that labor with an hour of leaf blowing burns about 15,000 calories of nonrenewable fuel plus whatever the operator expends. That's a lot to push a few leaves from here to there. But it's happening all around us. Every day. Over and over. Three million leaf blowers screaming across California. If a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas, imagine what those leaf blowers can do.

Out of the front end you get class-5-hurricane force wind that kicks dust into the faces of people passing by. Out of the back end you get noise and smoke and unburned gas, with particles that lodge deep in the lungs and contribute to the premature deaths of as many as 24,000 Californians each year. And what happens to the guys who stand in the middle all day and absorb that dust, noise, smoke and gas? It's unconscionable, especially when healthy alternatives exist.

Anybody who's worked in a factory knows what it is to surrender yourself to the rhythm of a soulless machine. You take the noise with you when your shift ends. The muscle-memory of eight hours of mechanized labor is hard to shake off. When they invented the leaf blower, they brought the factory to the garden.

Along with noise and pollution, these anti-social devices have another, more insidious effect.

I once attended a seminar with an Amish farmer named David Kline. One of the things he explained about the Amish that stuck with me is the way they evaluate new technologies. Rather than adapting themselves to whatever technology comes along, they evaluate each technology to determine its effect on their values. Those that promote or have no discernible effect are kept, those that threaten are rejected. But the values of family and community (including the natural community) are the standard.

Consider this Norman Rockwellian scene: A crisp, late autumn Saturday, a lawn covered with leaves. An archetypical dad brings the kids outside to keep him company while he rakes the lawn. A neighbor walks by and he stops to chat while the kids take turn throwing themselves into the piles of leaves. It's quality time.

Now, substitute a leaf blower for that rake and it's clear what's being lost. The kids stay indoors, the neighbor crosses the street to avoid the dust, the dad takes no pleasure in the task and gets it over with as quickly as possible.

It looks like things are still in the saddle and riding mankind. It seems to me a risky bargain to trade tools for machinery and sacrifice conviviality for expediency. Of course, here in the industrial age, we've been doing just that for a very long time. But the days of diminishing resources are upon us. Gas-powered things eventually will be unhorsed and leaf blowers will be silenced. But how much damage will be done before then? Until that day, we'd be wise to keep our hands off the throttle and keep in touch with our tools, our neighbors and our earth.

Ancient Greek priests used to sit under oak trees to hear the voice of Zeus as it moved through the leaves. Our neighborhoods are thick with oaks but I'm afraid these days the voice of Zeus would be drowned out by the voices of new deities: Echo, Toro and Stihl. Personally, I'm still listening for the voice of Ned Ludd.