Fallows’s last point suggests, what’s bad for the environment is bad for humans, too - most menacingly, of course, for the employees of landscape services, who are exposed to these dangers all day long. ![]() 2 newsletter, the writer James Fallows summarized the emissions problem this way: “Using a two-stroke engine is like heating your house with an open pit fire in the living room - and chopping down your trees to keep it going, and trying to whoosh away the fetid black smoke before your children are poisoned by it.”Īs Mr. How loud? “Some produce more than 100 decibels of low-frequency, wall-penetrating sound - or as much noise as a plane taking off - at levels that can cause tinnitus and hearing loss with long exposure,” Monica Cardoza wrote for Audubon Magazine this year. That design also means that it is very loud, and that as much as a third of the fuel is spewed into the air as unburned aerosol. Unlike larger, heavier engines, a two-stroke engine combines oil and gas in a single chamber, which gives the machine more power while remaining light enough to carry. The two-stroke engine found in most consumer gas-powered leaf blowers is an outmoded technology. 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.” 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. This particular environmental catastrophe is not news. Mulch, piled too deep, smothers ground-nesting bees, and often the very plants that mulch is supposed to protect, as well.īut 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. Lawn mower blades, set too low, chop into bits the snakes and turtles and baby rabbits that can’t get away in time. Pesticides prevent wildflower seeds from germinating and poison the insects that feed songbirds and other wildlife. ![]() Nearly everything about how Americans “care” for their lawns is deadly. Gasoline-powered leaf blowers are invaders, the most maddening of all the maddening, environment-destroying tools of the American lawn-care industry. But that comparison is unfair to locusts. 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. ![]() ![]() They come in a deafening, surging swarm, blasting from lawn to lawn and filling the air with the stench of gasoline and death. NASHVILLE - Into these perfect October afternoons, when light gleams on the red dogwood berries and the blue arrowwood berries and the purple beautyberries on the last of the many-colored zinnias and the last of the yellow marigolds and the last of the white snakeroot flowers on the shining hair of babies in strollers and the shining ponytails of young mothers and the tender, shining heads of old men walking dogs - 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.
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