Ted Rueter isn't joking about possibly moving to New Zealand. And if he does go, it won't be the frenzy or the expense of living in the U.S. that drives him away. It will be the leaf blowers. Americans now own more than 90 million of the infernal things, he says, each of them making the job of lawn clearing much easier--and much, much louder. Rueter, a onetime political-science professor at UCLA who is head of the advocacy group Noise Free America, already fled Los Angeles to get away from the leaf-blower blight, only to move to New Orleans and find the problem just as bad there. "Everywhere has turned into leaf-blower hell," he says.
It's not just the blowers that are driving Rueter daft. It's the boom cars--those high-decibel, low-frequency speakers on wheels that cause your windshield to buzz and your eardrums to pulse when they pull up next to you at a stoplight. It's the car alarms too, as well as the barking dogs and the banging garbage trucks and the screaming airplanes and the roaring highways and the plaster-cracking sound tracks in action movies that shake the seats not only in the theater where an action movie is being shown but in the one on the other side of the multiplex wall where some people are trying to watch a Merchant-Ivory film, if you don't mind. It's the explosion of ambient noise that seems to be everywhere, costing more and more people not only their sleep and their sanity but increasingly their hearing and health as well.
According to the National Institutes of Health, more than 10 million Americans already suffer some permanent noise-induced hearing loss. The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) reports that some 30 million are exposed to daily noise levels that will eventually reduce their ability to hear. One in eight children between the ages of 6 and 19 already have some degree of hearing loss, and adults who are going deaf are doing so earlier and earlier. "The greatest increase [in noise-related hearing loss] occurs for people 45 to 64 years old," says Dr. James Battey, director of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. "This is almost 20 years younger than we would expect."
And it's not just our ears the noise is hurting. It takes sounds in excess of 85 decibels (db) to damage hearing, but noise at less than 75 db may be linked to hypertension, and that at just 65 db leads to stress, heart damage and depression. Think the noise in your environment doesn't rise to that level? Think again. A ringing telephone can reach 80 db; a hair dryer hits 90 db; an ambulance siren can top out at an excruciating 120 db. "Noise pollution is truly a public health threat," says Representative Nita Lowey of New York, who has reintroduced a bill in Congress to turn down the volume. "It's critical," she says, "that we work to diminish the impact [noise] has on our communities."