SAMPLE OUTLINE
LIFE (AT LEAST TWO HYPER-LINKS)
- Air quality – particulate matter
- Wasted fuel
- Hearing damage
- Today, it’s small leafblowers. They’ve been getting bigger since they came to America in the
1970s. Soon, it will be riding leaf-blowers. Soon it will be exo-skeletons with blower nozzles
(Slippery Slope)
http://www.metroactive.com
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com
LIBERTY (AT LEAST TWO HYPER-LINKS)
- All of this wrecked health is done without my permission
- Noisy neighbor where your serenity is controlled by the laziness of my neighbor.
- Sleep for night-shift workers is disrupted. Some of these night workers perform surgery and
run nuclear power plants.
- This is a culture of waste and haste. A member of the clan of haste and waste. (Questionbegging epithet)
http://www.thedailygreen.com
http://www.nonoise.org/quietnet/cqs/leafblow.htm
PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS (AT LEAST TWO HYPER-LINKS)
Look no farther than California. They might go a little too far with ***, and ***, and ***. But even in the
land of get-rich-quick and show-me-the-money. In the golden, shimmering hills of Hollywood celebrities,
the people that Americans read about in their tabloids have given the thumbs-down to leaf-blowers.
- Alternatives: Leaf Rollers.
- Rakes.
- The rakes really take just as much time.
- Americans could use the calorie burn: they’re having health problems, they could ask their
neighbors for help. After all, with all that clean air and serene quiet, why not get outside and work
up a sweat.
http://www.ocgrandjury.org/pdfs/leafblow.pdf
http://parsec-santa.com/health/Leafblowers.html
****
WEBSITES LIST
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/11.12.98/cover/leafblowers19845.html
SAMPLE OUTLINE
And then there's the case of Robert Blum, a physician who works in an emergency
room at night and sleeps in his Menlo Park home during the day. At least he tries.
Leaf blowers often wake him up. Never mind that he's exhausted. On the subject of
leaf blowers, he is fanatical and tireless. And Blum says he doesn't usually get
involved in politics, except maybe for something really important like disarming
nuclear weapons.
Los Altos interior designer Myra Orta hates leaf blowers so much, she has made
eliminating them from the face of the earth her life's passion. In her raspy Scarsdale
accent she calls them the "tool of the devil."
Just mention the name Myra Orta and landscapers roll their eyes and put on their ear
protectors. Orta is known for her almost intuitive ability to scurry to the scene of any
place where people are considering a ban, ready to spew facts spelling out the evils of
the devil's tool, exporting the revolution.
"I have to do this for my city, for my town, for mankind," she declares. And she is
dead serious.
About 10 years ago, the proliferation of leaf blowers in her neighborhood "made
working impossible" in her home office, she says. And so she took up a hobby of
sorts: dissecting the intricacies of the leaf-blower debate, a debate which, as it turns
out, is the perfect host for the broad spectrum of social and political viruses plaguing
the late 20th century.
Most local efforts to ban leaf blowers have fallen on deaf ears.
WHEN LEAF BLOWERS were invented in Japan in the early 1970s and used as crop
dusters, no one could have dreamed of their potential to blow normally calm
suburbanites and lawmakers out of their minds. According to local agricultural tool
dealer Don Howard, who owns Gardenland in Campbell, Californians discovered
during the drought of the mid-1970s that the blowers were an effective, water-saving
alternative to hoses--what fastidious homeowners often used to clean their driveways
and sidewalks B.L.B (Before Leaf Blowers).
Within 20 years, leaf blowers had made their way into the hands of not just
professional landscapers in search of a timesaver, but also the spotless garage of Joe
Tidy Guy, homeowner. Heck, for less than a hundred bucks, those little noisemakers
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could get stubborn leaves out of pristine Zen rock gardens. They could blow stinking
gingko balls out of delicate flower beds with nary a bruised petal or broken stem.
They could send unwanted dirt sky high! With no dead grass pieces lying around, no
bird feathers, no fuzzies, no dead bugs, they could raise the bar on suburban lawngrooming standards to an all-time Disneyland-level high.
Mike Rotkin, a councilman for Santa Cruz, where a ban is currently being considered,
observes that leaf blowers have created an unrealistic standard for yard maintenance
in which errant leaves are considered a black mark on the homeowner's neighborhood
report card. "It's like cleaning house," he says. "You can never get a house totally
clean. It can always be cleaner. Well, you can never totally clean your yard either.
When you did it with a rake or broom, there was a practical limit on how clean you
could get it. Now with leaf blowers, people spend hours looking for perfection."
By 1990, as homeowners and gardeners grew heady with the tool's "yer-outta-here"
assault on small, unwanted particles of man and nature, leaf blowers were
everywhere. Orta and other homebodies in Los Altos went on the attack.
"One day, they would come to the neighborhood and blow leaves from door to door,
taking about 15 to 20 minutes at each house, four or five hours for the whole day,"
Orta recalls ruefully. "The next day, they would do the same thing on the other side of
the street."
The subject's "most foremost expert" loves to dazzle people by explaining why leaf
blowers drive people crazy. It has to do with noise, of course. But it's not just the level
of the noise, she emphasizes; it's the quality of the noise.
While manufacturers like to point out that leaf blowers are about as loud as lawn
mowers, Orta--with the backing of years of research--explains that a mower is
powered by a four-stroke engine and a leaf blower uses a two-stroke engine. So while
a mower's motor delivers a continuous hum, a blower's motor screeches and whines,
Orta says.
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1998-09-15/news/9809140204_1_leaf-blowersblower-controversy-maids
In face-offs before city councils, the defenders of leaf blowers say the machines are
indispensable. Citing the jobs they help create, the advocates also note that leaf
blowers help provide for the long-term well-being of their children.
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In a demonstration earlier this year in Menlo Park, Calif., a little boy carried a sign that
read: ``It is time for the council to stop the ignorance on all of our Mexican parents. They
need the blowers to get money to send us to college because that is the future for us.''
Old-fashioned, straw-based technology might do the job, and it may even feature the
benefit of being environmentally friendly. Yet brooms and rakes are slow. The
economics of lawn maintenance crews in this day and age demands the fastest work
possible in order to do as many lawns as possible.
That low-tech leaf blowers could be cited as essential to the livelihoods of thousands of
people in Dallas, Chicago and Los Angeles reveals a problem that goes well beyond
efficiency, aesthetics and pollution. At a time when the skills and educational
requirements for well-paying jobs are far higher than ever before, the supply of
functionally illiterate workers continues to grow.
Because the vast majority of lawn maintenance workers are Hispanic immigrants _
often illegal _ the leaf blower controversy has also become a social issue. The popular
linkage of low-skill jobs and Hispanic background is becoming more widespread all the
time. Told that she doesn't look Hispanic, one comedian on HBO replies: ``I must have
forgotten my leaf blower.''
Asked by his father what had most impressed him about his first day of school, a little
boy in El Paso replied, ``Kid maids.'' It turned out that the child's interaction with people
of Hispanic descent was limited to maids who had worked for his parents. ``Kid maids,''
therefore, were children of Mexican descent.
But in places such as Los Angeles, the issue is about local politics, pure and simple.
City Council members there recently went so far as to tout a battery-powered leaf
blower. It has to be recharged much more often than gasoline has to be poured into
garden-variety leaf blowers, but the battery model is quieter.
http://www.thedailygreen.com/living-green/blogs/green-products-services/leafblowers-55102003
http://www.nonoise.org/quietnet/cqs/leafblow.htm
http://www.ocgrandjury.org/pdfs/leafblow.pdf
http://parsec-santa.com/health/Leafblowers.html