This would make me happy.
Nearly everything about how Americans "care" for their lawns is deadly, but these machines exist in a category of environmental hell all their own.
...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.
This particular environmental catastrophe is not news. 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. 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."
Margaret Renkl (continues)
This particular environmental catastrophe is not news. 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. 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."
Margaret Renkl (continues)
This is probably just one of thousands of really scary things we do to our world. I suspect that most of us are generally unaware of the consequences of many of our actions ever day. I for one am alarmed by growing extinction rates and the rapid degradation of biodiversity. At the same time I am not sure what to do about that and what exactly I am doing to contribute to the problem. We can't all be scientists. That's why we need leaders who, like Montaigne, are good listeners and are eager to listen to scientists and others who really know what they are talking about.
ReplyDeleteReminder that Lawns are a hold-over of English Feudalism. At a time when the masses owned nothing but the clothes on their back, and had to work on the land of the Lord in order to eat scraps, English Lords maintained pristine plots of useless land in order to demonstrate their opulence. Only a Lord could own a large "lawn," because only they had large swathes of land, and only they had an abundance of serf manual labor to maintain it. Nowadays, Americans and many other groups try and maintain their own little feudal bragging plot, demonstrating that they are not a "serf" but a "Lord." The richer one is, the larger the lawn. A sign of wealth in modern day America is hiring a lawn-maintenance worker.
ReplyDeleteMichael Pollan has written smartly about this. Down with suburban lawn-ism!
Delete"Second Nature: A Gardener's Education" -- https://www.google.com/books/edition/Second_Nature/3zUqfDxvl48C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=second%20nature&pg=PA62&printsec=frontcover&bsq=lawn
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