Reductio ad absurdum

Blowing leaves is perhaps not the way to manage the organic matter that needs to be embedded in that soil the temporary owner is trying to destroy by monocropping homogeneous “grass”, I’ll hope that generally makes collecting organic matter to waste wrapped in individual virgin plastic bags obsolete itself. Groundskeeping could do with a 21st century ecological update… we even had the native plants movement in the 80s

I dunno, what about mulching it in sítio?

Leaf blowers are also futile in wind.

> Blowing leaves is perhaps not the way to manage the organic matter that needs to be embedded in that soil

You're doing your own reductionism. Not all leaf blowing is to collect leaves for disposal in plastic bags (and I'm 100% for using leaves as mulch where they fall on beds, and also with not having lawns). Leaves need to be blown out of gutters, drains, and ditches - otherwise the road will start being eroded. Leaves need to be removed from paths and patios, otherwise they will stain the concrete, let moss grow, and make the surface slippery. You try doing that by hand on 8-10 properties in a day, on minimum wage, without health insurance (the situation of most landscape maintenance workers in the US) - and then tell me that banning leaf blowers is a good idea.

Leaves on the lawn can easily be mulched in place and used to build up organic matter, as you point out - but that too requires a gasoline engine powered machine. The call should be for banning lawns, if that's the concern - not banning leaf blowers.

(I should also mention that if you don't live somewhere with a real winter or dry season that causes heavy leaf fall, your situation isn't representative.)

How did landscape maintenance workers perform that task before leaf blowers?

You didn't have trees in lawns, basically. Look at the pictures of old English manors - there would be hedges next to grass lawns but the trees were few and far between in the lawns.

The areas of the garden with trees would be a different thing.

I don't know about England, but trees were common in American lawns since long before leaf blowers existed.

They didn't.

The standards to which we maintained things were far, far lower in the past because doing so was much more laborious and therefore expensive.

It works seem that those lower standards have no significant adverse effect. They only impact trivial stuff like aesthetics.

You couldn't slip on wet leaves and expect to sue the property owner back then.

How did people cope before cellphones existed? It's the same as my original point - it's a nonsense question. If you want to create additional work for people by doing it in a less technological manner, focus on the served in the society rather than underserved, who are trying to get a leg up in the economy.

I was a landscaper for several years before college. We mostly serviced estates in the country or with very large lots. I used both a backpack blower and handheld. I understand the efficiencies gained by their use in some instances. I also know that on the smaller residential lots that a big backpack blower was overkill. A rake could have sufficed more often than not. In the case of other equipment; a lawnmower can’t reasonably be replaced with a scythe, it will not produce adequate results, a weed eater can’t be replaced for the same reason. A rake can produce adequate results with only a bit more work. And in cases where a blower is “necessary”, it doesn’t need to be used to chase every damn leaf for two hours on a residential property.

I am not morally opposed to leaf blowers, just the noise that is foisted on everyone else by their use. I couldn’t go down to my garage and rip the throttle on my two stroke motorcycle for two hours once a week without getting the police called on me, yet the leaf blowers have become normalized. It’s nuts.

50% of the time my neighbor's maintenance company spends with leaf blowers is chasing individual leaves across the yard and through shrubbery (not exaggerating). They'd save themselves time if they just bent down and picked up the damn leaves with their hands. Or -- novel idea -- left the last couple leaves anyway, because just as many more will accumulate 30 minutes after they leave.

Fully agree. Leaves happen. I'm just pointing out (apparently in a too sarcastic manner) that the technology is the best we have right now for clearing a lot of leaves within a ton of manual labor (raking leaves over a large area is a decent workout). Banning a technology when its overuse is due to poor landscape planning is a knee-jerk reaction that doesn't address the underlying thing that's really causing the frustration. I.e. we'd all be better off if houses had gardens designed with lower maintenance requirements in mind.

> 50% of the time my neighbor's maintenance company spends with leaf blowers is chasing individual leaves across the yard and through shrubbery

Neighbor here blows for 2-4 hours regularly, carefully hitting every sq in of the lawn. Most of that time is spent blowing clean grass, with the nearest leaf (there are only a few to begin with) being a doz yards away.

The point is exactly that leafblowers do not represent a technological improvement: they have too many downsides, and accomplish too little. No one is arguing that all technological progress is bad. Rather, in the specific case of leafblowers they represent a detriment, and should be used infrequently-to-never.