Springtime is here.  It’s time to open the windows, let in the fresh air, and hear those sounds of spring: chirping birds, chittering squirrels…and buzzing leaf blowers?!? 

While March goes out like a lamb, landscapers are roaring up their equipment, blasting our neighborhoods with the unbearable whining of 90 mile-per-hour air. Let no soil microbe remain! And did you notice that birds are getting louder? Finding themselves in an ever-increasingly noisy world, studies show that birds are chirping louder to find their mates, warn one another about predators, or check in on their little ones in the nests. Birds’ stress hormones, too, more studies show, are increasing in tandem with the ever-increasing noise made by humans. Mine too, birds, mine too. 

A few years ago, I had the notion to escape the 5-hour daily worship of leaf blowing in my neighborhood by heading to the sprawling, green, Haverhill NECC campus. I soon discovered, however, that NECC outdoes my neighborhood not only on the level of noise pollution from landscaping equipment, but also on daily longevity: some staff and faculty have commented to me that they hear the buzzing and mowing up to 8 hours each workday. 

You may have been affected by this noise pollution, too: when a mower starts up mid-class, making it hard to hear, or when you are trying to cross campus, only to be blasted in the face with leaves and soil particles, from equipment 30-feet away. I have learned that chilling outside anywhere on campus for some springtime reading is out of the question, putting all that beautiful green space to waste. And I have learned that the only time there is peace on campus is in the dead of winter, when the leaves are trapped under a blanket of snow and so cannot be forcefully dislodged from their rightful resting places and blasted into the next ZIP code. 

I wonder how we got so far from letting spring be spring, letting nature be nature. I yearn to return to the type of spring when the only buzzing you could hear is from the bees collecting their first batches of pollen. I hope that NECC will someday come to the conclusion that noise pollution affects us all and to implement a solution that keeps our campus not only scenic but also peaceful.