As I mentioned yesterday in another Erie, Pa. note, I’ll try to send out some reports on still-functional local-level activities around the country. This one is an update on the D.C.-area campaign to hasten the (inevitable) shift from grossly polluting, and nuisance-generating, old-tech leafblowers and other lawn equipment, to the dramatically cleaner and quieter electric alternatives coming onto the market. We’ve been doing a lot, with a minimum of public notice, in the past few months. These updates:
- In the innocent days just before the national election, Councilmember Mary Cheh, who has been leading these efforts in DC, held a committee hearing on accelerating the shift. Courtesy of the DC government, here is the video, which begins with an intro by me.
- In our Atlantic-family publication CityLab, David Dudley has a very good piece on the damage done by ambient noise, and why various aspects of “convenient” technology have gotten out of control and what could be done about it.
. - Adrian Higgins of the Washington Post also has a very good piece about the underappreciated effects of omnipresent urban noise. Eg: “There is a weird human phenomenon at work here: Sound is far less irritating to its creator than to its recipient. Erica Walker, a doctoral student at Harvard University’s Chan School of Public Health, seems to have hit on one reason for this: Recipients of nuisance noise have no power over it.”
. - More on noise and the city, from NoiseAndTheCity.org
We’ll have a real web site up soon on this theme. Onward, city by city.