In an opinion column in today’s New York Times, writer Margaret Renkl, whose latest book is Graceland, at Last, writes about what obsolete gas-powered machinery has done to human, animal, and plant-world welfare, and to the overall state of the environment.

Sample:

They come in a deafening, surging swarm, blasting from lawn to lawn and filling the air with the stench of gasoline and death. I would call them mechanical locusts, descending upon every patch of gold in the neighborhood the way the grasshoppers of old would arrive, in numbers so great they darkened the sky, to lay bare a cornfield in minutes. But that comparison is unfair to locusts.
Grasshoppers belong here. Gasoline-powered leaf blowers are invaders, the most maddening of all the maddening, environment-destroying tools of the American lawn-care industry.

Very much worth reading in detail. Congratulations and thanks to Margaret Renkl.

By the way, below you see the online headline for the column. The Times editors assumed all readers would be aware that the line is taken from a famous comment in Shakespeare’s Henry VI: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”