May 31, 2017 @ 11:00pm
by Stephen J. Dubner
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For a lot of people, a lawn is the perfect form of nature. Even though, let’s be honest, the lawns we like don’t actually occur in nature. Even though the process of producing such a lawn is full of the most unnatural activity. Even though this unnatural slice of nature requires so many inputs — the water, the fertilizer, the weed-killers, the mowers and trimmers and the leaf-blowers, the fuel to power all this machinery, the fuel to power the trucks to transport the people who run the machinery … all in pursuit of the perfect lawn.
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In Boston, Walker helped compile a citywide noise report, which mapped, among other things, “leaf-blower annoyance levels.” A lot of places have banned leaf-blowers or restricted their hours — especially the noisier, gas-powered models. Walker was interested in the relationship between noise and public health in a city like Boston.
WALKER: Sleep disturbance is the direct relationship between sounds and negative health.
The World Health Organization suggests that daytime noise levels shouldn’t exceed 55 decibels. Walker wondered how leaf-blowers registered, even if you weren’t the one blowing the leaves.
WALKER: We see that even when you move 400 feet away from the point of operation, you’re still getting sound levels in excess of what the World Health Organization recommends. But then we also learned that these leaf blowers have a strong contribution from the lower frequencies. It has an ability to travel very long distances and penetrate through the walls. It’s really hard to mitigate. We see in the epidemiological literature that low-frequency sound is creating negative health effects above and beyond high-frequency sound.
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Leave the clippings on the lawn, for God’s sakes. Don’t put them out on the curb because the clippings break down and they return nutrients to the soil. I would argue, consider stopping the irrigation. Brown’s not so bad.
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STEINBERG: The next time your lawn — if you’re worried about this — turns brown, go out there, get down on your hands and knees and look at the grass. It’s not dead. If you have a horrible drought, okay, I get it. But if it’s not, when it appears to be brown, it’s actually dormant. You’ll see a little bit of green where the blade meets the soil. The individual plants, most of them, are still alive.
I don't water my lawn, and I leave the grass clippings there. When there was a drought with almost no rain for 3 or 4 months, the grass turned brown, so dry it crunched when I walked on it. But when it started raining again, it turned green quickly.
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