Farewell to So Many Other Fossil-Fuelized Plagues
Starving militarism and automobile supremacy of resources, while improving the quality of life of our communities, would also go a long way toward halting the ecological breakdown of this planet while the sources of many smaller-scale dangers and ills would also fade into the past. Taken alone, each might appear insignificant, but cumulatively, such culprits severely degrade the quality of life in our wildly growth-oriented economy. As just one example of something that, with degrowth, we could say "good riddance" to, let me suggest that loud-mouthed neighborhood bully, the leaf blower.
Generating wind speeds approaching those of an EF5 tornado, gas-powered leaf blowers blast out noise at 95 to 115 decibels (two to eight times louder than the safe upper limit set by federal agencies). Electric leaf blowers, while less noisy, still significantly exceed the maximum safe noise level near schools, hospitals, daycare centers, retirement homes, or anywhere else where there are vulnerable people present.
Most gas-powered blowers and other deafening lawn machinery are operated for long hours by commercial landscaping crews, whose ears are just a couple of feet from the roar. Often surrounded by other leaf blowers, lawn mowers, and gas-powered equipment, such workers commonly suffer hearing loss.
The noise of a leaf blower, like that produced by vehicular traffic and wind turbines, is rich in low-frequency sound that carries long distances, easily passing through walls. Exposure to such noise raises the risk of a range of health problems, including sleep disruption, mental stress, high blood pressure, heart ailments, stroke, and immune-system dysfunction.
And keep in mind that the substitution of leaf blowers for perfectly functional rakes is just the tip of the iceberg. Our economy is now chock-full of unnecessary products that diminish the quality of life and would be left in the nearest ditch if energy consumption were deeply reduced.
Hello Again, Night Sky
By ending profligate energy consumption, degrowth could also restore much-loved wonders of nature that the growth economy has stolen from us.
Consider the night sky. Since 2010, in cities and towns, as well as anyplace near them, "skyglow" (a bleaching-out of the night sky that hides stars from view) has been increasing at an astonishing rate of 10% a year.
This surge in light pollution has coincided with the rapid adoption of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) for streetlights and other outdoor illumination. Such LEDs produce far more light per watt of energy consumed than older light sources. Unfortunately, companies and municipalities have taken advantage of LED efficiency not by cutting their energy consumption, but by flooding parking lots, streets, billboards, sports fields, and car dealerships with even brighter light.
Most LED lighting now in use is rich in short wavelengths at the "cool-blue" end of the visible spectrum, which ensures that it will be scattered by the atmosphere more efficiently and so produce a rapid increase in skyglow. As a result, stars have all but disappeared from the night sky in cities, suburbs, and nearby rural areas.
Exposure to cool-blue light at night also threatens humans and other species by disrupting our circadian sleep-wake cycle. Among the impacts on human health are gastrointestinal disorders, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and even cancer.
A degrowth society dialing down its energy use would not only reduce light and noise pollution but achieve significant advances in environmental justice. Brightly lit industrial and commercial facilities and parking lots are all too often placed in low-income, racialized communities. As a consequence, across the United States, light pollution is more severe in neighborhoods where a larger proportion of the population is Black, Latino, or Asian.
Amid mounting ecological and humanitarian crises and with Donald Trump still in the White House for another three potentially devastating years, the vanishing of the heavens may be regarded as a problem only for astronomers and aesthetes. But such a view badly underestimates how important the starry night sky has proven to be to our culture, scientific progress, and social cohesion. It was an unalloyed good, shared freely and equally by all humanity. And it could be so again if, with degrowth, we put our cities and towns on a dimmer switch.
To be clear, the degrowth movement's not claiming that the way to prevent ecological and civilizational collapse is simply to play Whac-A-Mole by working our way through individual problems like traffic congestion or light and noise pollution. In fact, the point of degrowth is that societies should leave all such problems, including the potential disaster of climate change, in history's trash heap. We'd reap myriad benefits by deeply cutting resource use while ensuring that collective sufficiency and justice for all become the focus of our world.
Copyright 2026 Stan Cox
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