Thursday, October 23, 2008

Leaf Blowers Part Two

The costs of leaf blowers far out weigh the benefits we receive from their use. Leaf blowers cost the entire community in terms of pollution, labor, and noise. In return we get a leaf free landscape. Last year I spent considerable time trying to solve this problem on our campus and I concluded that the issue is more complex. There exists a way of allocating resources at our school that isn’t accountable to anything besides what the mystical “executive committee” decrees. The people who ask and hand out money have very little connection to those whom their services actually benefit.
In California there are several either rich or very progressive cities that have banned the use of gas powered leaf blowers. I spoke with one of the lead groundskeepers for the parks department in Berkley, which is not surprisingly one of the places on this list. She told me how there had to be a change in what people saw as aesthetically pleasing for a park. There are less grassy spaces in Berkley. If leaves aren’t picked up then they stain and kill the grass and at Lewis and Clark we love our grassy spaces but perhaps we should reconsider how many grassy spaces we need. While I agree that we probably have more grassy landscapes than we really need, I think the solution to leaf blowers is much easier than getting rid of these spaces.
At the beginning of last semester I sent a letter to the groundskeepers about my feeling regarding leaf blowers. I’ll be the first to admit that this letter was not very tactful but it got me a meeting. The meeting was pretty tense and not very productive. The school follows the city of Portland’s restrictions for what hours you can operate leaf blowers. They purchased the most efficient and quiet leaf blowers on the market. For the school this was case closed. Their job is to make sure the grounds are maintained; removing leaves is crucial to this. This however misses the larger picture of why we are paying them.
When doing a job becomes more important than the original purpose of that job something has gone wrong. We blow leaves to beatify our campus but who determines what is beautiful? If I have to endure a constant annoying noise in order to have a beautiful campus I don’t really consider that beautiful, just annoying. So what solutions exist? The groundskeeper from Berkeley also told me about a leaf vacuum they use to pick up leaves. Its a machines that you drive around which sucks up all the leaves and puts them in a bag. Having a machine like this would significantly not only reduce the pollution and noise created by our current method but also the amount of time and money we spend blowing leaves. At my meeting I asked what we pay in labor to blow leaves, no one knew the answer to this, but as anyone living on campus will tell you, that number has to be significant. It would be worth looking into whether the savings in labor would offset the cost of purchasing one of these machines.
If you in the slightest share my concern about leaf blowers I urge you to email Gabe Bishop, the head groundskeeper, and politely ask him to consider other, less noisy, faster, and less polluting ways to keep our campus beautiful. His email is gbishop@lclark.edu. Our groundskeepers have no way of knowing what the effects of their policies are. It is important that we maintain some level of involvement and communication with them. After all it is our money and our campus. How sustainable is it for our school to continually raise tuition money but not engage in practices that not only reduce our costs but make our campus more enjoyable? The answer is not very.

1 comment:

Heather-Brooke said...

I saw them using a different machine the other day. Have you seen it? What do you think?