Working in my home office, in the otherwise pleasant SF suburb of Redwood City, has turned hellish. In small and large increments, the ambience of my neighborhood has been transformed from relative tranquility to a noisy purgatory by hordes of gardeners with lawnblowers (blowing dust and dirt into air and into the street for public clean-up), kids on gasoline-powered skateboards, second-childhood adults riding mini-motorcycles, SUVs and service trucks lumbering (and almost colliding) on narrow residential streets, and aircraft of all types flying low overhead.

The resulting cacophony's destroyed for me the of pleasure of working from home. Suburbia may not be as hustle-bustle as the Big City -- San Francisco still takes the local cake for chaos, creative and otherwise -- but Redwood City's 24/7 noise quotient is now so high, there's no delight in keeping the windows open on an otherwise beautiful summer day. The constant noise spoils everything.

As the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse states so well, "Polluting the commons is not a right. Our effort to reduce noise pollution is similar to other efforts to reduce pollution and reassert our collective stewardship over the commons. Whether the issue is second-hand smoke, elevated mercury levels, or ground level ozone, the strategy is to protect the environment and our health and well-being by creating an ethic of the commons." Unfortunately, in America the notion of the commons has always been more respected in the breech. There is no appreciation for our need for quiet nor policy that protects this vital and fast-disappearing environmental resource.

Complaints about noise to my city council go unanswered. Cities plan for cars, homes, and offices, not auditory quality.

It turns out that there's even a law on the books, passed by the CA Legislature in response to reverse racism (and payoffs from gardening companies), that prohibits cities from banning leaf blowers except through lengthy and ineffectual processes. The reason given for this blatant skewering of the public interest is that banning leafblowers hurts job prospects for the Mexican immigrants who make up the gardening army that descends on suburbia each day. A ban would limit their employers' number of customers served, etc., etc. Hey, remember the broom? If you really want to help, Sacramento, how about extending to these workers health care and driver rights, rather than promoting air and noise pollution benefits to their workplace exploiters?

Bring back the Japanese-American gardeners who did it all by hand, and with a big smile, too. I'd pay a premium for that type of caring.

In Europe and Japan, where quality of life and auditory hygiene go hand in hand, operating noisy appliances is a crime. It should be here, too, not just because noise hurts the ear and can cause hardness of hearing, and not just because noise contributes to accidents -- but because noise pollutes the suburban experience. It's driving away people like me, who cherish a return to quieter times -- times that existed as recently as 25 years ago, before Hitachi and its ilk started promoting leafblowers, powered skateboards, and the like. Funny how the exporters of this offensive technology don't tolerate it at home. Funny.