Early on
October 6, 2020 at 5:29 a.m. Mountain Time, SpaceX launched another 60
satellites, to join their fellows racing through the ionized layer of
air that protects us and gives us life. At about that time, a good
friend of mine here in Santa Fe was awakened by a severe nosebleed. That
evening, I told the grocery clerk at the checkout counter that I was
feeling unusually tired. “So am I,” he said.
There are now 738 satellites operating in the Starlink constellation.
Except for what they can do for us -- connect us faster and faster with
billions of people and machines -- everyone pretends that they are not
there, that we can continue to punch holes in the air with impunity,
burn prodigious amounts of fossil fuels, fill up the stratosphere with
black soot, litter the night sky with moving lights, and alter the
invisible electric field that connects us with the sun and stars and
circulates through our bodies from birth until death.
In recent weeks, on the coast of Australia, record numbers of whales
committed suicide by beaching themselves. In Botswana, hundreds of
elephants suddenly collapsed and died. Here in the southwest, from
Nebraska, to Colorado, to Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, to northern
Mexico, millions of migrating birds have fallen dead out of the sky,
emaciated, starved to death because there are no insects to eat.
Our house is burning down and no
firefighters come. The source of the flames is unacknowledged, unseen.
It is there, in the air, speeding from phone to phone, antenna to
antenna, satellite to satellite, filling atmosphere, earth, and seas,
penetrating bones and disrupting nerves of every animal, bird, insect,
and tree.
And it is not because we are horrible people. It is not because of a
conspiracy to destroy the world. It is because the phones in our hands
demand it. On April 11, 1862, Henry Brooks Adams, grandson of the sixth
American president, wrote, “I firmly believe that before many centuries
more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have
invented will be beyond his strength to control. Someday science may
have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit
suicide by blowing up the world.”
That day is here. It is up to us to put out the fire, not just to
protest and march and blame other people. We cannot stop the earth from
burning down until we stop shooting flames from our fingers wherever we
go. It is the people without cell phones who are going to lead the new
environmental movement, to lead the way to a sustainable future.
Other technologies pollute inadvertently. Pesticides are intended to
kill pests; the fact that they escape into the general environment is
unintentional. Nuclear waste is not intended to go everywhere. Plastics
are not intended to end up in the ocean. But with cell phones, the
pollutant -- radiation -- is the product. Cell phones cannot work unless
every square inch of the environment is irradiated. Once this becomes
acceptable, nature is no longer of value.
This newsletter will be devoted to two of the engines of science that
are beyond our strength to control, that have the existence of the world
in their power: cell phones and plastics -- unless we wake up and stop
using them.
IT’S NOT LIKE WE DIDN’T KNOW
If Neil Armstrong had brought a cell phone
to the moon in 1969, it would have appeared from earth, at night, to be
the brightest object in the universe in the microwave spectrum. In the
daytime, the sun would have been brighter, but at night, the cell phone
would have outshone every star.
There is a reason cell phones are outlawed in Green Bank, West Virginia,
home of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory: even a single cell
phone, even from miles away, would blind the radio astronomers there and
make it impossible for them to see the stars. Astronomers measure radio
waves in units called janskys. A typical star shines at 10 to 100
janskys. The Sun shines at about 500,000 janskys. When you hold a cell
phone against your head, you are pumping energy at the rate of about
100,000,000,000,000,000 janskys into your brain.[1]
If we are going to save this planet, we have to be able to think and
reason. And we have known since 1975 that microwave radiation damages
the brain. In that year, Allan Frey published his ground-breaking
article, “Neural function and behavior: defining the relationship.”[2]
In a study on rats, he found that low-level microwaves -- one hundred
times lower than what people’s brains are exposed to from their cell
phones today -- damage the blood-brain barrier. This is the anatomical
barrier that keeps toxic chemicals, bacteria and viruses in your blood
from entering your brain. It is also the barrier that maintains the
inside of your head at a constant pressure and prevents you from having a
stroke.
At least twenty laboratories in many countries confirmed Frey’s work
over the years. Finally, in 2003, neurosurgeon Leif Salford, at Lund
University in Sweden, proved the obvious: that disrupting the
blood-brain barrier causes brain damage. He exposed rats to a cell
phone, once for two hours, at very low power, and sacrificed them fifty
days later. Two percent of the exposed rats’ brain cells were damaged or
destroyed.[3] He later exposed rats to a cell phone, again at very low
power, for two hours once a week for a year, and found that they were
cognitively impaired.[4]
And in 2020, a study has been published showing that the same thing
happens in humans. A team of scientists at Heidelberg University in
Germany used MRIs to examine the brains of 48 young adults between the
ages of 18 and 30. They found that the more hours per day their subjects
habitually spent on their smartphones, the less gray matter they had in
their brains and the less brain activity was detected.[5]
DITCH YOUR PHONE AND JOIN ECHOEarth
My newsletter of May 20, 2020 reported on
the formation of an organization for people who do not own cell phones.
It is called ECHOEarth and it stands for End Cellphones Here On Earth.
My newsletter of June 18, 2020 reported that Collectif Dring Dring in
France had joined forces with ECHOEarth. Our
joint mission is “to liberate humankind from the mobile phone. Physical
and mental health, freedom, privacy, ecology, relationships... The
mobile phone is a poison for each of these elements.” Anyone who does
not own a mobile phone can join ECHOEarth here: https://www.echoearth.org/sign-here (in English) or here: https://www.echoearth.org/signez-ici (in French).
So far 1,250 people from 67 countries have joined ECHOEarth. We have only just begun. Please join us to save this planet.
PLASTIC, PLASTIC EVERYWHERE, NOR ANY DROP TO DRINK
“Plastic is choking our oceans and destroying our planet,” said an article in the June 2019 issue of Adidas
magazine. It went on: “Plastic is everywhere you look. It’s in food
packaging, electronics, cars, toys, credit cards and clothes. Plastic is
also everywhere you can’t look. It’s littering uninhabited beaches
3,000 miles from the nearest human being, killing off the plankton that
produce our oxygen kilometers beneath the surface of the ocean, and
clogging the gullets of albatross chicks in the Pacific. Plastic is also
moving through your body, your bloodstream, your organs and those of
the people you love.”
There is now more than a ton of plastic littering our planet for every person on Earth, says that article.
And when plastic bottles and bags break down, they don’t disappear: they
turn into what is being called “microplastics,” which can persist for
hundreds of years and are filling up our air, water, and soil. According
to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature,[6] a large
portion of the microplastics in our environment come not from what we
ordinarily think of as “plastic,” but are fibers from synthetic clothing
that wear away in our washing machines and end up in our rivers and
oceans, and particles from automobile tires that wear away on our roads,
wash away in the rain, and also end up in our rivers and oceans.
According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, at the present rate of
accumulation, there will be more plastics by weight than fish in our
oceans by the year 2048.[7]
It was estimated that between 5 and 13 million metric tons of plastic
entered the oceans in 2010, and it was projected that this would
increase to between 100 and 250 metric tons per year by 2025.[8] All
that plastic does not just float on top of the water, it is mixed
throughout the ocean and even has been getting deposited in sediments on
the ocean floor. A study from Australia that was just published on
October 5, 2020 analyzed deep-sea sediments hundreds of kilometers from
the Australian shore and found up to 13 fragments of plastic in every
gram of sediment they analyzed.[9]
And the world’s plastics are not just ending up in the oceans. We are
also breathing them. Scientists at King’s College sampled the air on a
nine-story-high riverside rooftop and estimated that an average of 771
particles of plastic were falling from the air everyday onto every
square meter of London.[10] Janice Brahney, from Utah State University,
collected both air and rain samples in national parks and wilderness
areas of the United States, and found that an average of 132 particles
of plastic were being deposited out of the atmosphere everyday on every
square meter of protected U.S. western lands. Many of the particles were
small enough to have been transported hundreds or thousands of miles
from their place of origin.[11]
A team of German scientists found incredible amounts of plastic even in
snow in the Swiss and Bavarian Alps, and in the Arctic. Arctic snow
contained an average of 1,760 particles of plastic per liter of snow,
with one site containing over 14,000 plastic particles per liter. At one
site in the Bavarian Alps there were 154,000 particles of plastic in a
liter of snow.[12]
Cell phones are made of plastic. We throw them away by the billions.
UPDATE ON OUR FEDERAL LAWSUIT
On December 21, 2018, I organized and
funded a lawsuit against the City of Santa Fe, New Mexico; the State of
New Mexico; and the United States of America, to restore the
constitutional rights of the people of the United States. We are
challenging the constitutionality of a City ordinance, a State law, and
Section 704 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
These laws, and laws like them all over the world, effectively mandate
the placement of antennas on the streets and sidewalks in front of homes
and businesses, while depriving injured people of any means of protest,
or any remedy for their injuries.
These laws violate:
-
the First Amendment Right of Freedom of Speech;
-
the First Amendment Right to Petition the Government for Redress of Grievances;
-
the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment Right not to be deprived of Life, Liberty or Property without Due Process of Law;
-
the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment Right not to have property taken without Just Compensation.
On May 6, 2020, the District Court
dismissed our complaint, and we immediately filed an appeal in the Tenth
Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. The case is Santa Fe Alliance for Public Health and Safety v. City of Santa Fe, Case No. 20-2066. Oral argument has not yet been scheduled.
This is the only case of its kind in the
United States. Section 704 of the Telecommunications Act prohibits
States and local governments from regulating cell towers on the basis of
their health or environmental effects. This is a vitally important
lawsuit. Donations are always welcome.
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