As leaves now belatedly flutter to Earth after a long-delayed and virtually non-existent fall foliage season here in New England, an all-too-familiar cacophony pierces the air from one of the planet’s most hideous, unnecessary contraptions: the leaf blower.

Since I last ranted about these noisy, polluting and ultimately inefficient machines a number of town and state governments – mostly in California, but one in our own Nutmeg State – have sought to ban or at least limit their use.

Though for the most part such efforts have fallen, quite literally, on deaf ears, a few voices in the wilderness rise above the penetrating din.

“Their screech, their whine … they just drive people crazy,” Gretchen Biggs, an environmental lawyer who helped pass what is believed to be the only municipal leaf blower ordinance in Connecticut, told the Associated Press. The Greenwich-based organization known as CALM, short for Citizens Against Leaf Blower Mania, has been advocating such laws for more than a decade.

Last year it finally managed to persuade the Board of Selectmen to impose a watered-down ordinance restricting the use of leaf blowers to one per parcel, regardless of size, and limiting their use to 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday, and 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday, Sunday and holidays. Despite CALM's efforts, though, Greenwich balked at imposing an outright ban on the use of leaf blowers from April 15 until Oct. 15, which to my mind would have been as useful anyway  as banning the use of snow blowers during July and August.

Elsewhere, dozens of communities in California, where some homeowners seem to regard manicured lawns and gardens as critical as indoor plumbing or electricity, nonetheless have adopted not just restrictions but year-round prohibitions. Residents there apparently agree that you needn’t sacrifice serenity to attain a leaf-free lawn.

I repeat a challenge I’ve made in the past: I can clear a lawn or driveway of leaves faster and more completely using a rake or broom. Plus, I’ll do it quietly and get some exercise to boot.

I don’t have a lawn, but I do have a network of trails around our house that I use for walking and also as routes between the forest and the wood sheds. These paths have grown thick blankets of moss, making them ideal for strolling or for rolling a wheelbarrow full of firewood.

I know this sounds borderline obsessive-compulsive, but each fall I rake these trails, a process that takes the better part of a week, and then use the leaves for mulch around the seedlings I plant each spring. It’s my arboreal version of the circle of life.

Usually I’m well into my raking cycle by the end of October, but most leaves are still clinging to the trees now during the second week of November, thanks in part to an unusually warm fall. Some oak leaves are still green.

This hasn’t stopped the leaf blowers, though. While riding my bike the other day I paused to watch one man with a backpack blower who chased a handful of leaves all the way down his driveway and onto the street. He then repeated the process a dozen times, taking about 15 minutes to move less than a bushel a distance of some 20 feet. The next gust, of course, carried most of these leaves right back to his driveway.

Oh well.

I wish more people felt as I do and avoided using a machine that generates wind speeds of more than 200 mph, blasting not just leaves but also dust, mold, pesticides, animal feces and anything else in the line of fire. Manufacturers, who have introduced quieter and more efficient models, evidently don’t expect such a consumer revolt, and plan to sell 4 million leaf blowers this year.

A good-size tree, incidentally, may have a quarter-million leaves.

I’m not sure how those numbers relate, but sadly, they likely will add up to a lot of noise in the coming weeks.