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TODAY Thursday 8 January 1998 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Leaf Blowers, Old Cars, Class Conflict

Two days ago the Los Angeles City Council upheld a local ordinance banning gasoline-powered leaf blowers within 500 feet of a residence.

Both the LA Times and the NY Times covered the acrimonious hearing that preceded the vote. From them we learn that the prohibition on gas blowers came from a textbook example of democracy in action. Citizens from some of the better-heeled precincts -- particularly citizens who are at home during the day -- had organized themselves into a lobby to seek relief from what they described as a near-constant assault of high-pitched engine whine. Over the last ten years, commercial gardeners have tended to rely on the blower machines for jobs heretofore handled by rakes and brooms. The neighborhood activists gathered petitions, pressed politicians, and won passage of the prohibition about 14 months ago.

Gardening contractors were slow to organize, but they protested effectively enough so that enforcement of the ban was postponed until a reasonable punishment could be agreed upon by the City Council ($100 fine, as it turns out). The vote two days ago was on the question of approving the ordinance-with-fine package. It passed. Only a mayoral veto can stop it now.

And a veto is precisely what the gardening outfits want. A better approach, they say, would be to compel manufacturers to produce a cleaner, quieter blower. A flat prohibition means either that leaves and other detritus will have to be removed through unpleasant toil or that jobs will be lost. Both of those burdens will by borne by Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, who constitute the great bulk of the gardening workforce.

Ouch. Here's another situation when the enviro point of view seems to prefer white people aesthetics to the economic well-being of brown and black people. Double ouch.

Of course, the well-heeled citizens are entirely right about the awfulness of the leaf blowers. They pollute the air, they gobble energy, and they make a terrible racket.

But lots of things pollute, gobble, and make rackets, but since we've agreed that their utility outweighs their nuisance, we allow them. Trucks, for instance. A judicious approach to the gas blower question might be to ask whether the interests of the neighbors in peaceful occupancy of their abodes outweighs the interests of other neighbors in exercising private property rights through maintaining lawns and driveways with the best available equipment and the interests of the laborers in making a living and loosening the bonds of disagreeable toil.

Appoint me Czar of All Los Angeles and I come down on the side of the haughty white snobs. Officially, I would say that peace and quiet matter, and it shouldn't be assumed that living in a city forfeits your right to them. There's no noise worse than the noise of an unmuffled two-stroke internal combustion engine, leaf blowers to motorbikes. Set maximum noise levels and ban the operation of any machine that can't operate below those levels. I would try to make it up to the Mexican-American community by having a big municipal tree-planting campaign where they'd get most of the jobs. Unofficially, I would say that the whole mania for getting rid of leaves and needles and little rocks is extremely crazy anal nouveau riche bizarre nonsense. The aesthetic is deplorable and the ecological sensibility nil. If you plied me with a few drinks, I'd then worry aloud about whether the cops -- most of whom love all varieties of machines -- would ever wholeheartedly enforce the ban anyway.

Then I would have to do something about the old cars. People who look into air pollution tell you that ten percent of the cars in any given locality emit fifty percent of the air-contaminating emissions. It has seriously been suggested that government purchase of old heaps would be the most cost-effective way to reduce emissions below the new levels mandated by the Clean Air Act. Naturally, old cars are driven mostly by people without much money which, in Los Angeles, means a lot of Latinos and African-Americans. Ouch again. Who's going to pay for bringing these beaters up to the new standards? As Czar, of course, I'm going to operate a vast fleet of public buses and mini-vans powered by compressed natural gas and driven by neighborhood recruits in snappy uniforms, but sooner or later I'm going to have to grapple with the competing interests of clean air and social equity (as embodied in the ability to drive a private automobile in a society that punishes you if you don't). Suggestions welcome.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

For a non-human, but comparably complicated set of enviro/ethical dilemmas, look into the question of Animal Protection. Ron Kroese, a veteran of farms and farm policies, tells you where to look on the Web for a range of data and opinion.

 

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