BLAST: a citizen initiative to stop noise pollution

BLAST

"Ban Leafblowers And Save Our Town"

How can noisy machines help clean the world, when noise itself is a form of filth?--Ashleigh Brilliant, BLAST "leader by default"

On the evening of the Santa Barbara municipal elections, self-described BLAST "leader by default"Ashleigh Brilliant paraded about the election station. Brilliant was armed with a push broom and a victory statement reinforcing Santa Barbara's disgust for "the noise, dirt, and pollution of a device which should never have been permitted in our city in the first place." Finally, three tries at a referendum and fifteen years of work to ban leafblowers won out for Brilliant and his coalition. According to Brilliant, leafblowers are "...the least justifiable and most obnoxious technological monstrosity I can think of. And it's not really a leaf blower, it's a dirt blower. I mean, how many fallen leaves do we have to deal with?"

"A ban is a very easy law to understand," he says. "You just can't do it at all with that machine." Before the ban was in effect, Brilliant resorted to self-help measures, once physically removing the leafblower from a nearby gardener's back. One year later, Brilliant grabbed the leafblower from the gardener and repeatedly smashed it to the ground, but only after begging the gardener on bended knee to stop using the blower.

Leaf blower decibel count. LOUD!

It is no surprise that forty cities in California alone, and over three hundred cities nationwide, have banned leafblowers. There are as many ways to describe the noise that leafblowers emit as there are people who are disturbed by them. From fifty feet, gas-powered leafblowers create up to 70 decibels of noise. Most would identify with the high grinding whine we know so well, not to mention other environmental hazards created by leafblowers such as exhaust fumes and swirling clouds of airborne debris.

Leafblowers grew in popularity since the 1970's. Santa Barbara has "regulated" leafblowers for the past ten years, but the city still suffered with lack of enforcement and regulations that were not restricitve enough. At one time the city tightened existing regulations, but to no avail. BLAST was formed in February 1997, and fifty unpaid volunteers collected more than nine thousand signatures asking to put the issue on the ballot in November of 1997. In early November, 54.5 percent of voters elected to place a total ban on all leafblowers within the Santa Barbara city limits.

Some of the resources that BLAST used to quiet the neighborhoods include an official "ballot argument" stating BLAST's position, bumper sticker, an "initiative measure" containing the ordinance purpose, summary and language; and the "notice of intent" to circulate the initiative petition, containing a statement of the reasons for the ban. To view these items, click on the links from each phrase.

BLAST's pre-election opposition came in the form of the City Parks and Recreation Department, professional gardeners and landscapers, garden supply shops, and one of the nation's leading leafblower manufacturers. They formed a coalition to oppose the ban called CORE: Citizens Opposed To Radical Enactments. These parties claim that irresponsible leafblower users are the problem, and recent market innovations include leafblowers that are half as loud as the former machines. They raised more than $10,000 to further their opposition, while BLAST's campaign was so low-budget that they did not reach the threshold requiring that they report their spending. CORE members claimed that owners of commercial and office buildings will be hit hardest, where leafblowers are used on a grand scale to clean parking lots and walkways.

Money is also a consideration, with leafblower advocates claiming that leafblowers save a great deal of time and labor and contribute to the appearance of the city. Brilliant counters this by stating that if all gardeners have to compete under the same restrictive regulations, nobody will have a competitive advantage. Also, "cleanliness" has gotten out of control-- what about the need for a natural setting? Brilliant believes that it is not a matter of right and wrong: "Our opponents are just as interested in a beautiful city as we are. It's just that they have a more narrow vision of that beauty."

The ban takes effect in February of 1998, although the City Parks and Recreation Department stopped using the machines shortly after the election, beginning a process of major change for the City of Santa Barbara.

From the BLAST web page, archived on the NPC (Noise Pollution Clearinghouse) Quietnet website. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Noise Pollution and the EPA: Celebrating Earth Day

Planet Earth: the "blue marble" photo.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day and Earth Week. The NASA “blue marble” photograph of Earth, taken from space, was published two years later. The photograph gave us a new perspective. It showed once and for all how all Earth’s creatures were bound together on a journey through the solar system, bounded as we were by Earth’s fragile biosphere.

Hazardous chemicals. Wikimedia Commons.

Environmentalism in 1970 was all about curbing pollution of the commons: air, water, soil. The villains included atomic waste, pesticides, toxic metals, automobile exhaust, sewage, factory smokestacks, plastics, and so on. We were intent on making Earth a healthier place for humans primarily, but also for other species, especially endangered species. In response President Nixon set up an environmental council and, following their recommendations, asked Congress to set up a federal agency to monitor the environment, to organize and coordinate federal programs and to assist states, and to issue guidelines and regulations, all to reduce pollution. Seven months after the first Earth Day, the Environmental Protection Agency was established.

Industrial noise pollution. Wikimedia Commons.

The EPA soon became concerned with noise pollution as well. Although local governments had long enacted noise ordinances, the 1972 Noise Control Act gave the EPA authority to regulate noise associated with construction and transportation. The EPA began to work with aircraft manufacturers, airlines, and airports to reduce engine noise and re-route takeoffs and landings to avoid the most heavily populated areas. In 1979 the EPA established a new noise label program to give home products like vacuum cleaners, shop tools and chainsaws decibel ratings, indicating those to which prolonged exposure was unhealthy. I recall when I bought my first chainsaw in the early 1980s that I also purchased noise-canceling headphones. Coordinating efforts through the EPA Office of Noise Abatement and Control, the EPA also got Congress to establish the 1978 Quiet Communities Act. 

One of the most important things the EPA did in its early days was to encourage scientific research on the psychological and physiological effects of noise pollution. In 1978 the Noise Abatement Office published a helpful pamphlet, Noise: A Health Problem. It summarized research on the effects of noise on hearing loss, heart disease, special effects on children and the unborn, intrusion at home and work, sleep disruption, and mental and social well-being. Among its conclusions were the following:

*Noise can cause permanent hearing damage, and people with hearing loss suffer discomfort and social isolation.

*Noise produces stress that contributes to heart disease and other illnesses.

*The fetus is not fully protected from noise. Noise may threaten fetal development.

*Noise may hinder language development in children.

*Noise hampers work efficiency.

*When sleep is disturbed by noise, work efficiency, health and well-being may suffer.

*Noise can cause extremes of emotion and behavior.

*Noise can obscure warning signals, causing accidents to occur.

In 1981 the Noise Abatement Office published a lengthy and still very useful Noise Effects Handbook: A Desk Reference to Health and Welfare Effects of Noise. Whereas Noise: A Health Problem was aimed at a popular audience, the Noise Effects Handbook included data from scientific research and made a convincing case for the harmful physiological and psychological impacts of noise pollution.

Pittsfield, Maine. Photo by Jeff Titon

Although funding for the Noise Abatement Office was stopped by the Reagan Administration in 1982, as the federal government gave over noise abatement responsibilities to state and local governments, the Noise Control and Quiet Communities Acts were never rescinded. They remain in effect today, although they are unfunded and unenforced. Meanwhile, a great many state and local citizens groups and NGOs organized in opposition to noise pollution. Among them were HORN (Halt Outrageous Railroad Noise), and BLAST (Ban Leafblowers and Save our Town), a Santa Barbara, CA organization. The next blog entry shows how BLAST became a model for citizen activism through the ballot with petitions, bumper stickers, and other measures. When a majority of the citizens of Santa Barbara voted in favor of the ban in the November, 1997 election, it took effect the following February.

A sound way to think about novel coronavirus protein structure

MIT composer and engineering scientist Markus Buehler has created a musical composition based on the patterns in the novel coronavirus' spiked protein structure. The music, which sounds to me a little like a serene composition for gamelan, can be heard here. A story in today's Washington Post goes into more detail. Buehler hopes that this sonic way of perceiving the protein structure may help medical researchers understand the virus in a new way and may aid in finding ways to fight it.

Novel Coronavirus Spiked Protein Structure

Coronavirus soundscape - an ecocentric perspective

Hairy woodpecker. Photo by J. Titon

 What is the new soundscape of the novel coronavirus? In the built environment I hear less noise. Less noise from traffic, from shops, restaurants, factories. In the mix of traffic noise, more from work trucks and emergency vehicles with sirens; less from cars. More prominent in the spring soundscape now are the songbirds, singing away at dawn and through the day, staking out territories, looking for mates to build nests, and raise new broods. The human sounds, called anthrophony by soundscape ecologists, have diminished. More prominent now is biophony, the sounds of animals, and geophony, the sounds of wind, rain, thunder, and the like. Scientists tell us that songbirds find their acoustic niche in the soundscape so they can communicate with the least amount of interference from other sounds. Those who dwell near highways have evolved to sing in a higher-pitched range than others of their species who dwell far from highways. With less highway noise for a while, those birds will find less interference and be able to communicate better. Every morning at dawn I hear a pair of woodpeckers drumming their song, one closer and louder, the other farther away and softer. While human life seems to be in a mostly suspended state, it is comforting to hear the songbirds.

Musical Sustainability and the Novel Coronavirus

Coal miner, West Virginia. Wikimedia Commons.

While musicians throughout the world respond to the COVID-19 pandemic with new songs and virtual performances and concerts meant to express solidarity and hope, musical and cultural sustainability is yet at great risk from the novel coronavirus. As I’ve written here before, as the last century drew to a close, arts policy had settled on a strategy of marking outstanding musical traditions as cultural heritage worthy of preservation and encouragement, and marketing these traditions so that they would become economic engines, wittingly or unwittingly transforming them into commodities in the process. International arts policy emanating from UNESCO considered the greatest threats to musical traditions to be modernization and development that would cause cultural drift and the abandonment of traditions by succeeding generations. Alan Lomax warned in the 1970s of what he foresaw as “cultural greyout” as a result of Western media dominance throughout the world. I became aware of environmental threats as well, such as those from floods, mine cave-ins, and earthquakes, after working with communities in the mountains of Virginia and Kentucky. When I began thinking about sustainability it occurred to me that economic threats, such as regional overdependence on single industries such as fishing, or coal mining, to the communities that sustained musical traditions, could put a population out of business in short order, causing out-migration, cultural dispersal, and disruption of musical as well as cultural traditions. I don’t know that any of us in the world of public folklore and applied ethnomusicology in the US envisioned a threat to musical sustainability from a pandemic.

Now we know. And we know, also, that the most experienced and wisest tradition-bearers in those communities are the elders and by virtue of age and health conditions, therefore among the most vulnerable in those communities. A recent newspaper article highlights the risk faced by Kentucky coal miners, where black lung disease, on the decline until a resurgence in the 1990s, compounds the likelihood of death from COVID-19. Although mining now employs less than ten percent of the population of Appalachia, in some areas such as southeastern Kentucky a majority of the elder population were coal miners earlier in their lives and one in ten now suffer from black lung, while the area has a higher incidence of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes—all conditions of comorbidity with the virus. A retired coal miner, Jerry Coleman, said “A lot of people don’t understand coal mining and the damage it’s done to our lungs. Now that everyone is phasing out coal, they’re all forgetting about the poor old coal miner.” Making things worse, rural hospitals in the coal mining region of Appalachia, like rural hospitals all over, have been closing due to lack of funding, and in some areas the nearest hospital is an hour or more distant. “Nobody knows what this virus is going to do when it gets to this area,” said Jimmy Moore, a 74-year-old black lung patient in Shelby Gap, Kentucky, who spent 22 years in the mines before retiring in 2000. His 51-year-old son, he said, has an even more serious case of black lung. “It’s probably just going to wipe us out.”