As I was driving down one of the beautiful streets in Dubbo last week, with autumn leaves dropping from the trees, I noticed one house as being particularly clean and tidy. I immediately thought of the work this resident must have put in to their general yard and house upkeep. Several days later I was driving down the same street and saw a resident from the house out on the driveway with the ubiquitous leaf-blower. This resident was making his place look fantastic – by blowing dirt and leaves from their yard onto the street and onto the yards of his neighbours. Some leaves stayed in the same yard, but were just blown to areas unseen.
This got me thinking: is the leaf-blower the problem or is the leaf-blower just a symptom of the society we currently live in? When I was a young boy growing up in leafy south Dubbo, a regular autumn activity was raking, sweeping, and collecting leaves from the garden and driveway. The leaves would be used as compost or put in the rubbish. The thought would never have occurred to me to rake the leaves together and then drop them on the neighbour’s lawn or on the street. But this is exactly what happens in yards all over the world when a leaf-blower is pull-started into action. What used to be some gentle exercise with a useful outcome for the leaves has now turned into a lazy exercise of moving the problem somewhere else.
My guess was that leaf-blowers must have been a fairly recent invention, as I certainly can’t remember them existing when I was growing up (I am talking about the mid-70s and early 80s here), but a little bit of research shows that they date as far back as the 50s. They were originally sold as a chemical spray, but consumers removed the chemical dispensing components and started using just the blower. They started being sold in higher volumes in the US in the 70s – actually marketed as leaf-blowers – gained widespread popularity during the 80s, and reached over a million sales annually in the early 90s.
The time of this explosion of popularity in the leaf-blower is a microcosm of the wider view of society that the best way to deal with a problem was to inconsiderately blast it away and make it someone else’s problem. As a fan of Douglas Adams, I enjoyed immensely his science fiction series Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The third book in that series, Life, The Universe and Everything, was published in 1982 and introduced the concept of an invisibility field known as a SEP (Somebody Else’s Problem). The theory was that a SEP field relies on a person’s natural predisposition not to see anything they don’t want to see. It is a very clever dig at society and I agree entirely with the concept. Adams concludes his explanation of the SEP filed with, “Professor John Wettlaufer (of Yale University) has apparently observed that it is very important for physicists working outside the mainstream ‘to have a genuine interest in learning about someone else’s problem.’ However, he admitted that ‘not many people want to do this’.”
One of my only disappointments in my nine years on Council is seeing how prevalent the NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) syndrome is. It is interesting that the earliest use of the acronym is traced back to a similar time. In 1980 it was used in the Christian Science Monitor but is probably more commonly used in development and land-use circles now. During my time on Council there have been numerous occasions where I have received a call or email from a resident who starts the conversation with: “I am not against [insert project name] in principle but…” and usually goes on to tell me how it is in the wrong location or another location would be better or any of a number of other reasons. When the truth finally comes out, the reality is this person simply lives near [insert project name]. One of the great challenges for councils and governments across the land is to balance the greater need of society against the specific individual needs of one resident. This balance is not easy and, with strong indicators in society like leaf-blowers showing that most people are just happy to move a problem away from themselves, it is an area that councils often receive extreme criticism (from the few people near any development).
Tell me if you think the NIMBY concept is alive and well or if you think people in our society are becoming more tolerant of minor inconveniences at mayor@dubbo.nsw.gov.au.
Clr Mathew Dickerson
Mayor of the City of Dubbo