The trees have a job: to blush their leaves orange or red and then drop them to the lawns and pavements below. If you are one of the many millions of Americans who own their homes, you may soon be faced with the question of what to do with all that foliage. Maybe you will rake your leaves into piles. Maybe you will let them decay into the ground. And maybe—just maybe—you will risk your hard-earned reputation by gusting them away with a leaf blower.
For decades now, the dust and din of blowing leaves has infuriated Americans, sometimes to the point of violence. “The gas leaf blower is by all measures, and without dispute, harmful,” a New York Times op-ed announced in 2022, summing up the new consensus. Although the blower’s squall rages and enrages year-round, pushing snow, grass, and dirt alike, autumn gives it special purpose. The very first commercial blower, from the 1970s, was touted on these grounds: “In fall, it rounds up a yardful of leaves in no time.” That makes now a perfect time for me to say what nobody else would dare to: The leaf blower—that is, the machine itself, as it’s used for blowing leaves—is a force for good.
But Americans are also right: In many ways, leaf blowers are truly terrible. They are loud, which is irritating to those far away and can damage the hearing of anyone nearby. And they’re inhospitable: Blowers hurtle dirt and debris, along with other particles, through public space; they create a gale unnecessary for sidewalks.
This is why America has witnessed a fearsome blower blowback for about as long as we’ve had blowers. In the 1980s, some homeowners’ associations and municipalities started trying to curb the things. Cities moved to ban them entirely. In 1997, Los Angeles passed an ordinance to limit their use within the city. The entire state of California now prohibits the sale of new gas-powered blowers, which is the type that The Atlantic’s James Fallows helped banish from Washington, D.C.
The more recent efforts to get rid of blowers have focused on the combustion engines used in many models. These pollute the air as much as an automobile. In recent years, an alternative has emerged in the form of cleaner, electric blowers, with lithium-ion batteries for power, that are strong enough to push a mound of dried-out vegetation to the street. But even if these new devices can solve the blower’s air-pollution problem, they do not address its many other irritations. Battery blowers can be just as loud as those that run on gas, according to Kris Kiser, the president and CEO of the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute. Testing finds that some may hit 90 decibels—that’s louder than city traffic—when they’re producing enough air pressure to, well, blow stuff. And just like the old-fashioned blowers, their blasts end up spreading dirt and dust and leaves well beyond their users’ targets.
Yet the blower’s many faults must be weighed against the elemental fact that evicting fallen leaves from your property in late October is a heinous chore, and one that cannot be accomplished easily via mulcher, mower, rake, or bonfire. A leaf blower, though, is as suited to this purpose as a toaster is to browning bread: It is a magnificent, purpose-built device for sending yard detritus from one place to another. I’ll grant that there would be certain benefits, to the Earth and to our own well-being if we could move all of our leaves by hand. The same is true of travel: Walking to another state would do far less damage to the world than flying in an airplane. But the convenience of a blower, like the convenience of jet-propelled flight, is sometimes worth the cost.
But leaf blowers, like airplanes, can be grossly overused. The problem that a blower solves so beautifully—the need for clearing leaves—is, or should be, limited in time: Several blowing sessions should suffice, sprinkled in from October to December. I submit that the case against the blower has less to do with leaves than with all the other things that people like to push around with air, at all the other times of year.
[Read: Your TV is too good for you]
In particular, it has to do with grass. Consider the “mow and blow,” a standard offering for yard work, in which a crew will trim a lawn, then blast it clear of clumps of trimmings with artificial wind. A crew that did a “mow” but not the “blow” would have to spend a lot of time collecting clippings, as well as dust and dirt, in bags and then disposing of them. That’s why gardeners in Los Angeles, who made their living from this work, were among the most vocal opponents of that city’s blower ban during the ’90s. (The city and its landscapers skirmished for years.) Even to this day, the loudest, most annoying blowing comes from this commercial work, Kiser told me. Yard-service companies may end up using four to eight blowers at a time, as early as 5 o’clock in the morning. “That’s where you get in trouble,” he said.
Demand for this noisy work is high: Some 40 percent of U.S. households with lawns hired out yard services in 2017. During the pandemic, American homeowners started doing more of their own yard maintenance, Kiser told me, and some bought leaf blowers of their own. That trend may now be over, but blower sales are still increasing worldwide, especially as new battery-equipped models become more powerful. In other words, the blowing bubble may still be growing.
[Read: How Starbucks perfected autumn]
Excessive use of blowers, not the tools themselves, should be taken as the villain here. The “mow and blow” could be extinguished, or at least scaled back. Homeowners and the people they hire ought to blow much less often, and for shorter durations. They could bag their grass, or cut it frequently enough that the clippings remain modest and would not have to be dispersed by air. This would allow everyone to save their clamor for the autumn, when the blower’s power and fitness for purpose could be fully, gloriously, and temporarily unleashed.
Some will ask why this temperance with blowing should be limited. Why not have a full-year ban instead? Why not keep our fallen leaves in place, as a habitat for bees, butterflies, and moths? For that matter, why not abandon our water-hungry yards entirely? These fights seek moral victories. But a practical solution will yield better results, because yards and landscaping are still entrenched in American life. We just need ways to tend to them that are environmentally and socially aware.
My premise is simple: Leaf blowers are for blowing leaves, and little else.
theatlantic.com