Trees have one job: to blush their leaves orange or red, then drop them onto the lawns and sidewalks below. If you’re one of the millions of Americans who own their home, you may soon be faced with the question of what to do with all that foliage. Maybe you’ll rake your leaves into piles. Maybe you’ll let them decompose in the soil. And maybe – just maybe – you’ll risk your hard-earned reputation by chasing them away with a leaf blower.

For decades now, dust and the sound of blowing leaves have exasperated Americans, sometimes to the point of violence. “The gas leaf blower is in every respect, and indisputably, harmful,” said one New York Times editorial announced in 2022, summarizing the new consensus. Although the blower’s gust rages year-round, pushing snow, grass, and dirt alike, fall gives it a special purpose. The very first commercial blower, dating from the 1970s, was praised on these bases: “In autumn, it picks up a meter of leaves in no time. » This is the perfect time for me to say what no one else would dare say: the leaf blower, that is, the machine itself, as it is used to blow leaves , is a force for good.

But the Americans are also right: In many ways, leaf blowers are truly terrible. They are loud, which is irritating to people far away and can damage the hearing of anyone nearby. And they are inhospitable: blowers blow dirt and debris, along with other particles, into public spaces; they create unnecessary strong wind for the sidewalks.

This is why America has witnessed a dreaded blowback for as long as we’ve had blowers. In the 1980s, some homeowners’ associations and municipalities began trying to curb this situation. Cities have decided to ban them completely. In 1997, Los Angeles passed an ordinance to limit their use within the city. The entire state of California now prohibits the sale new gasoline fans, the type that The AtlanticJames Fallows helped ban from Washington, D.C.

Most recent efforts to get rid of blowers have focused on the combustion engines used in many models. These pollute the air as much as a car. In recent years, an alternative has emerged in the form of cleaner electric fans, with lithium ion batteries for power, which are powerful enough to push a mound of withered vegetation to the street. But while these new devices may solve the blower’s air pollution problem, they don’t solve its many other irritations. Battery-powered blowers can be just as loud as gas-powered ones, according to Kris Kiser, president and CEO of the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute. Tests reveal that some can reach 90 decibels, louder than city traffic, when producing enough air pressure to blow stuff away. And just like old-fashioned blowers, their explosions end up spreading dirt and dust far beyond their users’ targets.

Yet the blower’s many faults must be weighed against the basic fact that blowing dead leaves from your property at the end of October is an obnoxious chore and one that cannot be easily accomplished via a mulcher, a mower, rake or bonfire. A leaf blower, however, is as suitable for this purpose as a toaster is used to brown bread: This is a wonderful device specially designed to send yard trash from one place to another. I agree that there would be some benefits, to the Earth and to our own well-being, if we could move all our leaves by hand. The same goes for travel: walking to another state would do far less damage to the world than flying. But the convenience of a ventilator, like that of jet-powered flight, is sometimes worth the cost.

But leaf blowers, like airplanes, can be grossly overused. The problem that a blower solves so well – the need to clean the leaves – is, or should be, limited in time: several blowing sessions should be enough, spread from October to December. I submit that the complaint against the leaf blower has less to do with the leaves and more to do with all the other things people like to move with air, at all other periods of the year.

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These include grass. Consider “mow and blow,” a standard offering for yard work, in which a crew mows a lawn and then clears it of clumps of clippings with artificial wind. A crew that did a “mow” but not a “stroke” would have to spend a lot of time collecting clippings, along with dust and dirt, into bags and then disposing of them. That’s why Los Angeles gardeners, who made a living from this work, were among the most vocal opponents of that city’s ban on leaf blowers in the 1990s. (The city and its landscapers skirmishes for years.) Even to this day, the loudest, most annoying blast comes from that commercial work, Kiser told me. Site service companies can find themselves using four to eight blowers at a time, as early as 5 a.m. “That’s where you get into trouble,” he said.

Demand for this noisy job is high: About 40% of U.S. households with lawns used gardening services in 2017. During the pandemic, U.S. homeowners began maintaining more of their own yards, Kiser told me , and some have purchased their own leaf blowers. . This trend may now be over, but blower sales continue to increase around the world, especially as new battery-equipped models become more powerful. In other words, the bursting bubble could get even bigger.

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Excessive use of blowers, not the tools themselves, should be considered the villain here. The “mow and blow” could be extinguished, or at least reduced. Owners and the people they hire should blow much less often and for shorter durations. They could bag their grass or cut it frequently enough that the clippings remain modest and don’t need to be dispersed by air. This would allow everyone to save their clamor for the fall, when the power and skill of the blower could be fully, gloriously, and temporarily released.

Some will wonder why this temperance with the breath should be limited. Why not impose a year-round ban instead? Why not keep our dead leaves in place, as habitat for bees, butterflies and moths? Besides, why not completely abandon our water-intensive construction sites? These fights seek moral victories. But a practical solution will yield better results, because gardens and landscaping are still ingrained in American life. We just need ways to take care of them in an environmentally and socially responsible way.

My principle is simple: leaf blowers are for blowing leaves, and nothing else.