Leaf blowers = evil

Spring-tine rake. Low-tech and effective.

This is a miscellaneous rant, because there's not much to do in the garden at the moment. It's been too frosty recently, and there's now a couple of inches of snow over everything.

So, compare two instruments for sweeping up fallen leaves. The old-fashioned spring-tine rake, and the electric or petrol-driven leaf blower. I believe that the differences in these two tools illustrate many of the serious errors in our society's attitudes towards the environment, sustainability and human labour which are quite likely to lead to the collapse of civilisation.

The technology for making a rake has been around for about 3000 years, when wire was invented. Rows of wires are supported by a simple frame - pieces of metal with holes in them, also very low-tech, and attached to a stick - possibly the lowest technology tool there is. Rakes are simple, easy to produce and use, robust, and effective. Leaf blowers are constructed from dozens of plastic and metal parts, all of which are precision engineered, which has a high environmental cost. They cannot be made using simple metal- and wood-working skills, and all but the simplest repairs will require new parts sourced from the original manufacturer.

The first point of comparison is clearly in the rake's favour in terms of the environmental impact of construction, use, and maintainance.

The second point of comparison is in use - they do similar, but not identical tasks. The aim of each is to move leaves off lawns, but the action of the rake draws leaves towards the user, resulting in a pile which can be easily taken up and put in a wheelbarrow to take to the compost heap, or into sacks for rotting down as leafmold. The leaf blower blows leaves away from the user, and it is less easy, if not impossible, to make a tidy heap of leaves using one. Leaves are transformed into litter, to be whooshed away onto someone else's property, or the public street. By using a conceptually poor tool, a valuable resource is turned into a problem.

Bosch leaf blower. Worse in every respect.

Thirdly, the leaf-blower panders to the dangerous delusion of convenience - the idea that anything that reduces the expenditure of human muscular energy is a good thing, almost irrespective of the cost. In this case, the cost is in far higher environmental impact, and the transformation of a resource into a disposal problem. This is not worth paying for the highly questionable benefit of reducing the gentle exercise involved in raking to mere ambling about holding a gizmo.

Developing leaf blowers was thus a totally misguided project, giving a higher environmental cost, to do a worse job, of less benefit to the user and the land so managed.