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.

Prisons and Music

    Prisoners in the US are uniting in opposition to overcrowding, brutality, and forced labor for starvation wages. Prisoners traditionally protest by defiance and disorder, riots included. Today they are organizing a national prison labor strike. This strike was the subject of an hour-long program, on On Point (WBUR-FM, National Public Radio), Sept. 28. Prisoners spoke from behind bars to air their grievances and describe their actions. Authors and analysts provided other views, while the call-in audience expressed theirs. The prisoners want an end to the overcrowding, brutality, and forced labor—which in their view amounted to a kind of slavery, the overcrowding in prisons likened to the overcrowding on slave ships. They didn’t deny that they should “do the time if they did the crime.” But they proposed reform: rehabilitation, job training, and a fair wage in exchange for the manufacturing and construction jobs they were forced to do.       

Huddie and Martha Promise Ledbetter, 1935

Aside from the issue of justice (social, racial, economic) that the program raised and to which I responded, I was reminded of the long historical association of music with prisons. Work songs and blues and ballads were collected from prisoners by folklorists such as John and Alan Lomax in the 1930s and 1940s, by University of Iowa professor Harry Oster in the 1950s, and by Harvard Junior Fellow Bruce Jackson in the 1960s, among others. The location wasn’t chosen because the guards could order the prisoners to make music; the reason to collect from prisoners was that they, particularly those who had been in prison for decades, were more likely to know the older folk music and perform it without having been influenced so much by contemporary popular music. In 1933 the Lomaxes discovered Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter), a singer and twelve-string guitar player with great musical skill and a broad folksong repertoire, in the Louisiana penitentiary. After his release in 1934, they took him on tours to perform for the music lovers who formed the beginnings of a folk music revival in the 1930s. Leadbelly had a powerful stage presence. When they took him to Harvard, where both John and Alan had studied, they made sure to seat the British ballad expert, George Lyman Kittredge, in the front row. Kittredge, or “Kitty” as he was called, had taught both Lomaxes, and had encouraged John to collect cowboy songs. Then an old man, retired, Kittredge found Leadbelly’s intensity too much to bear. “He is a demon, Lomax,” Kittredge was reported to have said, whereupon he left the concert. Demon or not, Leadbelly’s folksong legacy fills several boxes of records and tapes in the Library of Congress, and has been issued and re-issued on multi-volume LP and CD sets over the years.

Lazy Bill Lucas, 1969. Photo by J. T. Titon

    Not only did prisoners sing for collectors, but musicians sang for prisoners. Musicians performed for prisoners’ entertainment: Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” (1955) may be his best known song, and his album, “Live at Folsom Prison” (1968) remains popular. Accompanying blues singer and pianist Lazy Bill Lucas in 1970, I played guitar in Minnesota’s Sandstone Prison, entertaining the inmates. It was an interesting trip north from the Twin Cities. I’d forgotten that I had a bottleneck slide in my guitar case. In those days we made them by breaking off the necks of red bordeaux type wine bottles, then smoothing out the glass's jagged edges. I guess my edges weren’t smooth enough for the guards, who confiscated the bottleneck when they inspected us on entering. For a moment I wondered if they’d arrest me for trying to smuggle a weapon in. They didn’t.
   Another interesting part of that trip to Sandstone Prison was that the guitarist John Fahey went along, to be the opening act. I wondered how entertaining his guitar solos would be in prison. I never found out. John had flown in from California on a brief concert tour. But he'd been in a fight at his motel the night before, and was now in no condition to play music. How he got into that fight: he and his road manager didn’t know that the Minnesota state high school wrestling championships were being held at the University of Minnesota then, and that the wrestlers were staying at the same motel, the Gopher Campus Motor Lodge. The wrestlers partied all night and after John couldn’t stand the noise any more, he went into the hallway in his pajamas and told them to quiet down. Not a good idea. Even worse, he told them not to mess with him because he had a black belt in karate. Maybe he did, but he was no match for the group that pummeled him. So Bill and I and our drummer, John Schrag, did the concert by ourselves. It never occurred to me to try to collect any music from the inmates. They were appreciative, mostly of Bill, who rose to the occasion.
    Some eight years later, when I was a professor at Tufts University, I worked briefly with a teacher at Framingham Women’s Prison. Framingham is one of the western suburbs of Boston. We were teaching writing. It represented a cultural shift: instead of collecting music from a captive audience, we ethnomusicologists and folklorists began working to help rehabilitate and empower prisoners, often through music. That work has continued. A recent example was presented at the conference in Limerick, Ireland, on ethnomusicology and activism, a little more than a year ago. Andrew McGraw, an ethnomusicologist teaching at the University of Richmond, in Virginia, discussed how he worked with prisoners to establish a recording studio in the Richmond City Jail so they could explore sound and record their hip-hop tracks. So, when I heard that radio program yesterday, I thought of how folklorists and ethnomusicologists had been involved over the years with music and prisons. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that this involvement started well before the Lomaxes, possibly in Europe. Did it? And what might be the role of music in the national prison labor strike today?

Toward a Sound Ecology: Activism, Community Engagement, and Ethnomusicology

    Several months ago I was invited to Limerick, Ireland, to give a plenary address in a conference for ethnomusicologists, on activism and community engagement. Community-engaged activism is characteristic of applied ethnomusicology, of course, but some who are activists in our field don’t self-identify as applied ethnomusicologists. No matter; the conference organizers wished to cast a broader net, and they therefore brought together many people whose work was unknown to each other—not just ethnomusicologists, either, but also arts promoters who’d done much to program concerts featuring indigenous performing groups. The gathering took place two weeks ago and resulted from a historic alliance between the US-based Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), and the Europe-based International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM). It was a great pleasure to meet and speak with some European colleagues whose work I’d read but whom I’d never seen before. Several old friends and colleagues were in attendance as well. While some ethnomusicologists are active members of both societies, SEM has been my only professional organization for ethnomusicology since I joined in back in 1971.
    I was impressed with many of the presentations. It so happened that Oxford University Press had a small book exhibit at the gathering where the Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology was prominently featured. Although that book was published only two months earlier, it’s already had some impact. Many of the conference attendees had seen it; and parts of it, especially my introductory essay, were referenced in several presentations. A few of the conference highlights: Angela Impey from the University of London offered a description of her work with songs that “tell the truth” in war-torn South Sudan, where music makes meaning and expresses justice. Deborah Wong, a professor at the University of California, made an appeal for “witnessing” as activism, and related her work in Riverside, with the soundtracks of police violence against African Americans. José Jorge de Carvalho, from the University of Brasilia, described a program in which indigenous “masters” (bearers of traditional knowledge) are brought to teach in his university, on a level playing field with Western professors. Such a program, limited to the arts, does not threaten the established political order; but bring in masters to teach indigenous ideas about nature, for example, and give them authority equal to Western science, and you have the beginnings of a revolution. Denise Bolduc, a member of the First Nations (Canadian) Anishnabe group, spoke about her work in promoting concerts and other performances for a broad audience. One of the phrases that stuck with me from her presentation was “blood memory,” a kind of memory that is genetic rather than cultural, and which some indigenous people invoke to provide authority for a cultural process in which they feel they have re-created ideas and practices of previous generations that had been lost to cultural genocide or for other reasons. Andrew McGraw, from the University of Richmond, spoke about his work helping prison inmates make hip-hop tracks, describing the new Richmond (VA) city jail as a highly sophisticated surveillance state. Anthony Seeger spoke about lessons that could be learned from applied anthropology, and Rebecca Dirksen spoke of her efforts in applied ethnomusicology to make a documentary film involving music and waste in Haiti, where the streets of Port-au-Prince are piled high with trash. Mark DeWitt described (and played recordings of) songs made in the wake of the BP oil spill in the Gulf Coast, meant to raise environmental consciousness. He added that the songs, while powerful statements in themselves, seemed like everything else done in opposition to the oil drilling culture to have little effect on the oil industry itself, and wondered what he, as someone supported as a university professor by the economic establishment in the region, and as someone answerable to many different and sometimes conflicting constituencies, could or should do about it. Luke Lassiter, whose work in collaborative ethnography was well known to me, and whose book on it I taught in the fieldwork seminar at Brown, talked about new developments in this area, including increased reflexivity and a broadening of the concept of collaboration. Some of the presenters referred to my published work when making a similar or related point, and one critiqued my ideas about music’s economic and cultural value. We disagreed politely and explored those disagreements in a question-and-answer session after his presentation, all of which was helpful to me and, I hope, to him.
    The one who was critical objected to my point (made in this blog and elsewhere) that music should not be considered intellectual property or bought and sold in the marketplace. Of course, I’m not the only one to feel this way, nor was I anywhere near the first to say so. But I’ve argued that music has personal and cultural values that ought not be confused with exchange value in the marketplace, yet value and values are brought into tension and compromised when music is bought and sold. My critic raised the common objection that musicians needed to make a living and ought to be paid for their music, artists for their art, and so forth. Oddly, most of the musicians he discussed were amateurs whose main income wasn’t from music; but still, there are those whose is, and why shouldn’t they have the right to be paid for it? In the economic systems prevailing in developed nation-states, of course this makes sense; musicians are laborers and should be paid for their work. But I envision a different economy, one in which making music is as natural as breathing or walking, and where it is not labor at all.
    The presentation closest in concept and spirit to my plenary talk was by someone who was entirely unfamiliar to me, Professor Chad Hamill, of Northern Arizona University. It came at 8:30 in the morning, and the conference room was only half full, which was a pity. Chad is of both Native American (Spokan Indian) and non-Native ancestry, and has his doctorate in ethnomusicology from the University of Colorado. His spoke about indigenous adaptation in the era of climate change, but began with a portrait of Spokan life in the natural world pre-European contact. Translated into my terminology it was a world of relational being, knowing, and doing, anchored in sound. Chad explained how in this Spokan world song bound humans to (and in) nature, linked to a sacred geography centered in the Spokane River. Today that river is polluted and dammed, and the salmon no longer run, all in the “photochemical haze” of the colonial legacy. Yet they are fighting all of this in the courts and gradually obtaining justice. He and I were able to speak about our common interests at times during the conference, and afterwards. I was reminded of the efforts of the Penobscots in Maine to restore the Penobscot River, efforts that are being rewarded as pollutants are outlawed, dams are being undone and the river is renewing itself. In that effort these Native Americans are joined by non-indigenous people who are conservation-minded, many of them sportsmen and women who would otherwise be on the right wing of the political spectrum.
    My plenary lecture came in the evening, after supper, and closed out the events that same day. It was fitting for Chad and me to bookend the day by speaking about nature, culture, and music within an environmental activist framework. I explained my current work in ecomusicology as it moves toward what I’ve been calling a sound ecology, or a new ecological rationality based in sound and presence, one that encompasses a sound community and displays a sound economy. These ideas have been gradually coming to me out of my concerns with music and sustainability, economy and ecology, nature’s economy, music, heritage and tradition, the sound commons, applied ethnomusicology, and so on as readers of this blog will understand. They had their first expression as music and sustainability in 2005 in my Nettl Lecture, at the University of Illinois, and then again at the SEM conference in 2006 in Honolulu, on a panel I organized on sustainable music—those papers were published in a 2009 issue of the world of music. Since then, they’ve been influenced profoundly by Thoreau’s writings, or at least by my interpretations of them, as they bear on ideas of presence, co-presence, and a critique of economic man, the business mentality that underlies the global corporate capitalism that turns music and art into intellectual property (and where traditional arts are given the value-added status of heritage) and fuel for the creative economy, cultural tourism, and so forth. I must emphasize that my critique is not directed at capitalism per se, as so many others’ is today (e.g., Thomas Piketty, Naomi Klein). Rather, it is directed at what underlies contemporary neoclassical economics and capitalism, namely “economic man,” the assumption that humans are capitalists and traders by nature.
    Gradually I am bringing my ideas of a sound ecology to publication; two essays on Thoreau will be published very soon, one in Current Directions in Ecomusicology and the other in the inaugural issue of Sound Studies. The keynote address that I gave at the CSTM conference last June should appear in an issue of Ethnologies within a year or so. I also have a publication that will appear on sound and climate change, more of a personal essay, in Antioch College’s environmental journal, Whole Terrain, later this year. All of this thought on music and sustainability inches toward a larger, comprehensive publication that will bring the ideas on sound, presence, co-presence, community, economy, and ecology together.

After Santa Fe

James W. Day, © Univ. Press of Kentucky
Courtesy Jean Thomas Collection, U. of Louisville

    I'm slowly catching up on various fall events where music and sustainability was thematic--this time, the annual conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), which took place in Pittsburgh last November, in the week following the AFS conference. I stayed in Santa Fe a few extra days, and caught up with an old friend, Steve Green, who lives there and works as an archivist for the Western Folklife Center. We had three long breakfasts filled with talk that went through to lunch every day, there was so much to talk about. He's been researching and writing a major book about the events surrounding the promotion of folklore in the early part of the 20th century, focusing specifically on the folkloric entrepreneur Jean Thomas and the fiddler she promoted, James W. Day, whom she cast as the character "Jilson Setters." In the 1920s she toured Day to standing room theater crowds in New York and London, as he represented something about an older, and surer, America than the culture appeared to many at the time. Steve is an indefatigable researcher who understands how to ferret out archival evidence like no one else I know, and over the years he has accumulated a treasure trove of information on these people and this cultural moment.
    I was sorry to leave Santa Fe, a city impressive for its scale and its food, not to mention the collision of cultures there. I'd toyed with the idea of not attending the ethnomusicology conference this year, because I'd already planned so much traveling; but I received two invitations to do things there and decided I ought to go. The President of SEM had asked me if I was planning to come, because the Society wanted to give me an award; and I'd also been asked by the Graduate Student Section to be the discussant for a forum on applied ethnomusicology, which they wanted to explore both as a field in itself and also as an area for possible employment after obtaining their degrees. I assented, but with the caveat to the students that I felt anyone who wanted to "do" applied ethnomusicology would be better served if their motivation was a sense of social responsibility rather than concerns about employment. Music sustainability as cultural policy is one aspect of applied ethnomusicology.
    Many applied ethnomusicologists do think the field offers, or should offer, employment opportunities outside of the academic world. This is correct, although more academics practice applied ethnomusicology than those holding non-academic jobs. Yet, the defining characteristic of applied ethnomusicology isn't the place of employment, but the nature of the work: putting ethnomusicology to practical use in helping to enhance the quality of people's lives. Today, as it has developed in various parts of the world, applied ethnomusicology usually involves some kind of activism and advocacy, an intervention into a community, almost always in partnership with people in those communities, for the common good. Over the years I've formulated this in various ways; my latest one is for the Introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology, which is due to be published later this year. At the SEM conference, I spoke about these things, and was pleased that the forum speakers addressed those issues and for the most part didn't do what many had done in the past, namely, speak autobiographically about their own career path in applied ethnomusicology outside the academy as an alternative kind of employment.  As I said at the forum, for most people "academic" is the alternative path. Many people in my generation (and later generations) entered the academic world as an alternative to employment in the business world, and the phrase "ivory tower" suggests that the general public views academia as alternative to the mainstream. Applied ethnomusicology puts it back into the mainstream in service to cultural equity and social justice.
    One other thing happened at this conference that I must not forget to remark on, and that is that I was able to acknowledge publicly my debt to Alan Kagan, who taught ethnomusicology to me when I enrolled in his graduate seminars at the University of Minnesota nearly fifty years ago. Long retired but still active, Alan embodied dedication, both to his field of ethnomusicology and to his students. His office was always filled with students; and if one wanted to see him to talk about one's research, or perhaps about something that was going on in seminar, one had to wait with other students outside for a long time, because Alan always saw each student one at a time and gave them more than their due. At the conference last fall, SEM gave me an award recognizing lifetime achievement in research and teaching. I'm grateful to the Society for that. The award carries with it a free, lifetime membership in SEM. After receiving this award, presented to me by two professors whose doctoral dissertations I'd supervised a couple of decades ago, I said I hoped to keep that membership a long time; and then I acknowledged Alan Kagan as my own teacher. He was there in the audience--this was at the end of the conference when everyone was gathered in a hotel ballroom--and he stood up to a long round of well-deserved applause.