Sunday, April 12, 2015

The Unnecessary Expense of Fighting Nature


Is nature our friend or enemy? The answer to that question has significant consequences not only for Princeton's landscape and quality of life, but also for its municipal budget.

This past week I awoke to the plaintive groan of leaf blowers somewhere in the neighborhood.

Slight digression: Have you ever noticed how machines fill our world with sounds reminiscent of sadness and anger? I had long been aware that my brain has to do extra work to filter out the background noise of planes, cars and other machines. But I didn't really think about what emotion those machine sounds might be carrying until my dog started reacting to the sounds certain trucks or cars make as they pass by on busy Harrison Street. Some must sound angry to him, as he responds as if challenged. A leafblower fills the neighborhood with a groaning sound, as if letting the world know the perpetual burden it must carry. Machines are basically slave substitutes, and the sounds they make reflect all the onerous chores we expect them to do. 

Oftentimes, we don't hear the sadness, whining or anger in the sound, because there is a positive association we have to the sound of machines: work is getting done. It was only through my dog that I was able to hear the actual sound, rather than the association we have with the sound. That positive association may not be very strong, though, when it comes to leaf blowers. The only small comfort to be found in their drone is that one lives in a neighborhood prosperous enough that neighbors can afford to hire landscapers. Fortunately, in our neighborhood, the noise has thus far been rare.

Back to the storyline: The sound, it turned out, was emanating from the small park behind our house, where a crew was blowing last fall's leaves into piles, then raking them onto tarps and hoisting them up into a truck. The cluster of white oaks had kept its leaves all winter before releasing them this spring. In years past, the leaves were simply mowed back into the lawn, avoiding all the bother and extra racket of blowing them in piles and then hauling them out of town. The old system worked fine. Though physical work is admirable, why do work that in past years was found to be unnecessary?

I actually went over and asked one of the workmen, and the response perfectly conveys a prevalent opinion, one that drives much of the landscaping in town, public and private. There were too many leaves, he said. Removing them should make the grass better, and there was a concern that varmints might use leaves under the trees as a hiding place.

For years, decades really, the Princeton Environmental Commission has been making the opposite case, that Princeton yards are not made better by depriving the soil of the nutrients and organic matter the leaves contain, and that wildlife is a good thing, to be invited into the yard rather than feared. Back when I was a member of the PEC, we wrote a manual about how to utilize leaves rather consider them a nuisance.

The case, it seems, is very strong. Leaves are our friends. It's the rejection of them, by piling them in the street and launching fleets of trucks to pick them up and haul them out of town, that is dangerous, polluting, and unnecessarily time-consuming.

For years the environmental side of town government has made this case, and yet there remains an entrenched belief, even in municipal departments that could be modeling a more nature-friendly approach, that leaves are like dust in a house--a sign of neglect and a lodging for pests.

The view of nature as enemy can be expensive. To export leaves from a tiny park required five workers, three trucks, and two hours going on three or four, counting leaf disposal.

At the recent Princeton Environmental Film Festival, perhaps the best film was Inhabit, about the permaculture movement. It was all about working with nature rather than against it. To work with nature, one must study its ways. Its complexity, which many people find intimidating and inconvenient, becomes a source of endless fascination.

But park maintenance largely involves keeping nature at bay. Grass grows. Leaves and sticks fall. Nature's growth energy is a constant inconvenience that must be suppressed or whisked away with machines. Many people view their yards the same way. There is satisfaction in cleansing a yard of all its loose organic matter, leaving a clean, uncluttered expanse of grass. But the irony hangs in the air, mixing with the fumes of the leaf blowers, that in suburbia we surround our homes with nature, have parks with nature, and yet even the simplest of nature's processes--that nutrients taken from the ground should be returned to the ground--is fought against.

There is promise that this can change, that ecological principals so long expressed can finally become integrated into the daily work of maintenance, both residential and municipal. It will take communication, persistence, and ultimately a change in culture, so that culture begins working with nature, for mutual benefit.

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