The Earth is dying before our eyes. Most insects — bees, butterflies, crickets, spiders — have already disappeared, even from rainforests and protected nature areas. Titmice, sparrows, and other small birds no longer grace our yards and bird feeders. Our lakes and ponds starve for frogs and salamanders. Our forests are no longer net producers of oxygen. Our oceans may soon contain more plastics than fish.
The most surprising thing about the responses to my request for an administrative assistant was not that 154 people applied for the job, but that almost all of them called me from a cell phone. That revealed not only how much ground we have lost in the past 26 years, but the enormous obstacles looming before us in our quest for real change —change that must happen fast enough and be widespread enough to ensure that babies born today will still have a planet to live on when they turn ten.
Of the many assaults on the atmosphere, oceans, forests, wildlife, and human life, the cell phone is unique. It is unique because it is destroying the Earth faster than any other threat — faster than fossil fuels, pesticides, radioactivity, plastics, or any other assault. And because the pollution it emits — radio frequency (RF) radiation — is the only pollutant that is being spread everywhere deliberately and not inadvertently: in order for a cell phone to work when you want it to, every square inch of the Earth must be heavily irradiated at all times.
The manufacture of cell phones relies on: • child slavery in the Democratic Republic of Congo • genocide against the indigenous people of the Ituri forest • extermination of the lowland gorilla
Cell phonescontain: • dozens of toxic metals, and • hundreds of toxic chemicals
Cell phone radiation today is the cause of most: • heart disease, • diabetes, and • cancer
The 15 billion cell phones in the world, together with the 7 million cell towers, are the biggest cause of: • the disappearance of insects • the decimation of bird populations • the extinction of amphibian species • the dying of forests
These facts must become known — known to the public, to mainstream medicine, and to mainstream environmental organizations campaigning to save insects, birds, wildlife, forests, oceans, and atmosphere. And getting rid of one’s cell phone must quickly change from “impossible” to routine and widespread. The reasons for it are more compelling than the reasons so many lifestyle changes that once seemed “impossible” became routine and widespread, worldwide, during the pandemic….
….You can read all of the filed documents on the Supreme Court’s website: the petitionwe filed on October 25, 2021; the amicus briefthat was filed on November 23, 2021in support of our petition; and the list of all the amici.
We have about one and a half months to circulate these three documentsfar and wide, in orderto get publicityand widespread support from around the world, before our petition goes beforethe Supreme Court for consideration.We want the general public to start talking about our petition, so that the Supreme Court hears about it from manysources, and knows that it is important.The Petitioners are Santa Fe Alliance for Public Health and Safety, Arthur Firstenberg, and Monika Steinhoff. The Respondents are the City of Santa Fe, the Attorney General of New Mexico, and the United States of America. The Respondents have until December 29, 2021 to answer our petition.We then have until January 12, 2022 to replyto them.The petition then goes to the Court for its consideration, to decide whether or not to hear our case. Please forward the three documents –the petition, the amicus brief, and the list of all the amici. — to everyone you know.…
Dear Elon Musk, Kimbal Musk and all SpaceX Board Members, Officers, and Lead Investors,
In 1962, when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, insects were so thick upon this Earth that you could not drive a car very far, anywhere in the world, without its windshield becoming splattered with their bodies.
Ms. Carson would not recognize the world today: Windshields are clean. Birds are starving. Crops have no pollinators. A solution has been suggested for farmers: robotic bees, which are being developed at Harvard University. But that is not a solution for the world, because as the insects go, so go we.
And the world knows this. Why have millions of people joined environmental organizations? Why did Jeff Bezos just create a $10 billion-dollar environmental fund? Why are wealthy people signing up to go live on Mars and leave the Earth behind? Because our home is being destroyed, and on some level everyone knows this. But they do not know why. Yes, there are climate change, habitat destruction, and insecticides, but those cannot explain the 76 to 82 percent decline in flying insects in 63 nature preserves in Germany. Those cannot explain the 97 to 98 percent decline in crawling insects in a pristine rainforest in Puerto Rico.
If you expose honey bees to an ordinary cell phone for just ten minutes, their metabolism shuts down. Carbohydrates, fats, and proteins build up in their blood. They can no longer metabolize their food or utilize the oxygen they breathe. And since the same radiation is bathing us all, to a greater or lesser degree, everywhere on Earth, the same thing is happening to every living thing. It happens faster in bees than in us because bees have a much higher metabolism. The radiation comes from all forms of wireless technology, on Earth and in space, and it is being treated as if it is not there.
We are writing to you at this time because SpaceX is in process of surrounding the Earth with a network of thousands of satellites whose very purpose is to irradiate every square inch of the Earth. SpaceX, like everyone else, is treating the radiation as if it were not there. As if the mitochondria in our cells do not depend on electrons moving undisturbed from the food we digest to the oxygen we breathe. As if our nervous systems and our hearts are not subject to radio frequency interference like any piece of electronic equipment. As if the cancer, diabetes, and heart disease that now afflict a majority of the Earth’s population are not metabolic diseases that result from interference with our cellular machinery. As if insects everywhere, and the birds and animals that eat them, are not starving to death as a result.
We write to you today to ask you to halt the Starlink project because it is so destructive. Although the satellites are a few hundred miles high, even the tiny levels of radiation that will reach the surface of the Earth are higher than levels from solar storms that have been correlated with beachings of whales — whales that live in oceans which until now have hardly been subject to manmade radiation at all. And the satellites are being located in the Earth’s ionosphere, which controls the global electric circuit that we all evolved with, and that travels through the bodies of all living things on its way from sky to Earth, through Earth and oceans, and back up to the sky during thunderstorms. We pollute this circuit with billions of electronic frequencies at our peril.
We ask you to halt this project and sit down and meet with us, and with our scientific colleagues, and with our colleagues from the astronomical community, who have just formed the Safeguarding the Astronomical Sky Foundation (SASF). The sky belongs to everyone. The consequences of filling it with thousands — potentially tens of thousands — of disposable satellites are many:
radiation
visible pollution of the night sky
interference with astronomy & meteorology
rocket exhaust, contributing to ozone depletion and climate change
ground and water pollution from intensive use of increasingly many spaceports
accumulating space debris
continual deorbiting and burning up of aging satellites, polluting the atmosphere with toxic dust and smoke
ever-increasing likelihood of collisions
increasing risk of the Kessler syndrome
Do we really want to build learning gardens at our schools, that will be pollinated with robotic bees? Do the oceans and Antarctica and all rainforests and wildlife preserves really need the Internet? Do the immutable stars in the unchanging heavens really need competition from ten thousand or more moving lights? We believe in something better. For us. For our children. For insects and for all of life.
We await your response.
Sincerely,
Arthur Firstenberg, Scientist & Author, The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life, (2020)
“Given that no one can opt out of continuous exposure to wireless radiation, the industry is, in effect, conducting an “experiment” on our children and on all global citizens without informed consent — a breach of the 1947 Nuremberg Code 8, and of the United Nations’ International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.”
Three letters that may prove useful for public outreach.
1. Open Letter to the United Nations from Stop 5G International 2. Response Letter to the EU signed by 72 Organizations Dedicated to Protecting Public Health 3. Letter to the United Nations and World Health Organization from Professor Olle Johansson.
Do you know about the safety and privacy concerns of 5G (Fifth generation cellular technology)? Do you know why other municipalities and countries have stopped 5G? Come find out how 5G affects you, your family, the environment and our economy.
Please join Sharon Noble of Stop Smart Meters BC, Dan Blair of No 5G, Nova Scotia and me this Saturday, April 25 – the 5G Global Protest Day – as we discuss the biological and environmental effects of 5G and how we can mobilize across the country to rally for safe technology.
Where & When: On Zoom this Saturday at 11:00 am Pacific time, hosted by Transition, Wolfville, Nova Scotia. This will be a bi-coastal event.
This will be an interactive event. To join us, please register here:
I have been entrusted with the International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space, but I find myself bewildered — bewildered by the devastation around me; by the destruction of the cathedral of life into which I was born; by the silencing of the songs of the fifty million other species with whom I was raised; by the failure of my fellow human beings to care or to notice. How can they not miss their brothers and sisters? How can they not miss the magnificent symphony? How is it possible?
“The oceans are dying,” wrote Jacques Cousteau in 1970. “Can anyone believe it is possible,” wrote Rachel Carson in 1962, “to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life?” “I have seen too much,” said microwave researcher Allan Frey in 1969, explaining why he did research on animals and not humans. “I do not feel that I can take people into these fields and expose them and in all honesty indicate to them that they are going into something safe.”
Yet here we are half a century later: there will soon be more plastics than fish in the oceans, the world uses four times more pesticides per year than in 1962, and five billion people are holding open sources of microwave radiation in their hands.
The Earth is burning, yet no firefighters come. In the face of certain catastrophe, everyone is going about their business as if everything is fine, as if by magic the synthetic fibers in our clothing and the rubber tires on our automobiles will stop becoming microplastics in the sea; as if the few insects left in the world will magically escape the pesticides that we apply to our lawns and the radiation from the cell phones into which we speak. Everyone is still going about their business as if everything is fine. Isn’t it time that we stop? And since the most immediate threat to life comes from our cell phones, isn’t it time to throw them away?
….
Aworldwide organization needs to be created, whose members do not own cell phones, whose purpose is to end the use of cell phones on Earth.
For most people this seems like an impossibility, but that is because they do not remember that only 25 years ago almost no one owned a cell phone, and that young people did not get cancer, diabetes, heart attacks and strokes like they do today. And the air was full of butterflies and birds, and the streams were full of tadpoles and frogs. It is because no one has explained to them what radiation is. No one would willingly use a radioactive phone, but that is essentially what everyone is doing. Radio waves and gamma rays are only two ends of a continuous spectrum; they are essentially the same phenomenon and have the same disastrous effects on our bodies and our planet.
The train that we are on is a train to nowhere. On either side, through the windows, can be seen insects, and birds, and frogs, and if we listen we can hear them buzzing, chirping, and croaking.
Please contact me if you would like to participate in the creation of an organization that will get us off this train.