Equinox Conservation: EMF/RF/5G/Wireless Choices that Harm or Harmonize?

by Patricia Burke of Safe Tech International Image courtesy Floris Freshman 

There are two moments each year when the sunrise and sunset are twelve hours apart, when the Sun lies directly above the Earth’s equator, and neither the North or South pole point toward the Sun. Equinoxes have long been associated with contemplating the balance between polarities, including yin and yang, darkness and light, right and wrong. Equinoxes and solstices were pivotal to human societies when the sky served as the clock and calendar and cultures were aligned with Natural Law and the Cosmic Current. The equinox occurs on March 19, 2024. Juxtaposed with the equinox, this blog is part of an on-going discussion about the need to heal the growing divide between telecommunications technology and nature and health.

When my children were young, parents began driving their children to and from the school bus stop. It started only during inclement weather, but then the habit became the norm.  Cars often sat with the engines running (although many towns have since passed anti-idling laws) with older children and parents often on their cell phones.

The change in behavior unfolded insidiously and most likely was unintentional.

But from a health perspective, families who followed the crowd adopted dysfunctional behaviors with quantifiable negative impacts on air quality. They would have benefitted more from walking together, interaction, and access to the sun and nature, rather than the unexamined comfort and convenience.  

Humans slipped in their inborn capacities and intelligence. They made unwise choices, mostly unaware or in denial.

Course Corrections in Consciousness

On the other side of the equation, there have been remarkable examples of attempts at course corrections.

Consumer opposition against Nestle’s exploded in the late 1970s when the corporation was convincing poor African mothers without access to clean water that their infant formula was superior to breast milk, resulting in infant deaths.

The Catholic Church played an enormous role in promoting the ethics underlying the boycott. Another example of engaged activism unfolded during the historical action against the Gallo wine company.

Societal Change, Sensibility, and Individual Choice

Societal norms can be changed for better or for worse.

For example, Politico’s “Digital Future Daily” has the tag line “How the next wave of technology is upending the global economy and its power structures” implying that tech is ushering in a more enlightened age. Whereas Silicon Valley historically presented itself as anti-establishment and “for the people,” the reality is that Silicon Valley has unleashed its own grotesque tsunami of consolidation of wealth and power, and abuses, including its ties with the military industrial complex.

At this point in history, a growing but marginalized portion of society is at an inflection point. Experts and consumers recognize that screen technologies, including wireless devices and infrastructure, promoted under the guises of safety, security and sustainability, are in fact none of these.

Informed advocates recognize that we have surpassed the threshold where the antidote is to wait for more tech innovation to address the social, safety, and security risks. They are calling out the entrainment, addiction, greed, delusion, and willful ignorance. The emperor has no clothes.

For the mass consumer culture, lack of insight is inherent in the devices themselves, even without virtual and augmented realities. Focus is diverted to a narrowly contained field. Users are distracted from witnessing both the inner and outer environment. Even eyesight is already being harmed.

Moore’s Law

Delusions about tech and wireless have prevailed in sustainability and carbon-based climate efforts, despite reported harm.  

One contributing principle was delineated in 1965 – Moore’s Law.

Investopedia describes Moore’s Law:

“In 1965, Gordon Moore posited that roughly every two years, the number of transistors on microchips will double. Commonly referred to as Moore’s Law, this phenomenon suggests that computational progress will become significantly faster, smaller, and more efficient over time. Widely regarded as one of the hallmark theories of the 21st century, Moore’s Law carries significant implications for the future of technological progress—along with its possible limitations.”

An implication of Moore’s law is that as efficiency and availability increases and consumer costs decrease, overall consumption actually increases.  

This creates a conundrum for efforts towards conservation.

Digitally-based technologies are not decreasing energy and resource consumption.

See The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse (2011) “[] David Owen argues that our best intentions are still at cross purposes to our true goal – living sustainably and caring for our environment and the future of the planet. Efficiency, once considered the holy grail of our environmental problems, turns out to be part of the problem. Efforts to improve efficiency and increase sustainable development only exacerbate the problems they are meant to solve, more than negating the environmental gains. We have little trouble turning increases in efficiency into increases in consumption.”

See Coal Plants Staying Online Because Ai Needs So Much Power “We Still Don’t Appreciate The Energy Needs Of This Technology.” Nationwide, the AI industry’s energy demand seems even more fearsome. According to an analysis from Boston Consulting Group cited by Bloomberg, the electricity consumption at US data centers alone is expected to triple from 2022 levels by the end of the decade. In the analysis’s summary, that’s equal to the electricity used by about a third of the total homes in the US, and about 7.5 percent of the entire country’s projected energy demand.

See: An increasingly energy-gulping digital world. The fast expansion of ICT leads to a rapid increase of its direct energy footprint. This footprint includes the energy used for the production and the use of ICT equipment (servers, networks, terminals). This direct footprint has been increasing by 9% per year. Compared to 2010, the direct energy consumption generated by 1 Euro invested in digital technologies has increased by 37%. The energy intensity of the ICT sector is growing by 4% per year in stark contrast to the trend of global GDP’s energy intensity evolution, which is declining by 1.8% per year. The explosion of video uses (Skype, streaming, etc.) and the increased consumption of frequently renewed digital equipment are the main drivers of this inflation.

When did we go so far off course?

In part, via trauma-based, uninformed choices regarding cell phones, broadband consumption, and infrastructure, powered by regulations that expressly prohibit protecting health and the environment – to facilitate economic growth.  

This is an extinction paradigm.

September 11 and Cell Phones

Media depictions of Sept. 11 (including a phone call made from an airplane) were one factor that translated directly into consumers seeking a sense of safety and control – by having cell phones where they could reach anyone, anywhere, and any time.  (The trauma of school shootings also contributed.)

The fear-based consumer shift was not accompanied by scrutiny regarding the safety of the technology for human health or the environment, and consumers held an unfounded presumption of safety.

Broadband Usage: Pandemic Trauma and Hollywood Writer’s Strike

On February 13, in his blogpost “Another New High for Broadband Usage” Doug Dawson of CCG Consulting reported Openvault’s statistics for combined upload and download usage in the United States from 2018 to 2023.  He wrote, “The average U.S. broadband customer used 54.3 more gigabytes per month than a year earlier. That alone is a pretty amazing statistic – 54 gigabytes is a lot of usage in a month. With roughly 120 million broadband subscribers, this equates to over 6.5 billion more gigabytes of data used each month than just a year ago.” []Open Vault always includes other interesting statistics in its quarterly reports:

The average upload usage per household grew to just over 40 gigabytes per month – up from 15 gigabytes at the end of 2019.

6% of homes now use over a terabyte of data per month.

Median household broadband usage is 423.7 gigabytes – half of homes use more broadband than the median, and half use less.

OpenVault showed the differences between residents and businesses for the first time. The average residence used 652 GB at the end of 2023, while the average business customer used 345 GB.”

Power brokers, ranging from environmental groups to liberal politicians, who identify with conservation goals, have ignored the costs, and in fact continue to enable the dramatic curve in increased broadband demand.  

Written Word, Voice, or Video? Who cares? Who Counts?

This increase in screen time was insidiously ushered into the mass culture during the pandemic, when many other alternative activities were limited, and when family members began using multiple independent devices.

A colleague noted, “In terms of consumption, a page of text is the equivalent of a mosquito; an image represents a fly; and video is the equivalent of a jumbo jet.

5 kilobytes (0.005 MB) for 1,000-word text web page

150 kilobytes for (0.150 MB) 800 x 1000 pixel jpeg image

150,000 kilobytes (150 MB) for HD/1080p ten minute Youtube compressed video

300,000 kilobytes (300 MB) for 4k/2160p ten minute Youtube compressed video”

More Data and Video Necessitates More Infrastructure

The article Cell Tower Range: How Far Do They Reach? explains. “On average, the maximum usable range of a cell tower is 25 miles. While the typical coverage radius of a cell tower is 1 to 3 miles and in dense urban environments, a cell tower usually reaches 0.25 miles to 1 mile before handing off a user’s connection to another nearby cell site. [] . However, people began using their cell phones for more than just phone calls, specifically, for applications like texting, mobile internet, and e-mail – all of which used more data than voice services. As a result, the radius that a cell tower could theoretically cover was still 5 miles, but only people in the first 2.5 miles could receive enough spectrum and thus, cellular service to their phones.”

Will the tide turn?

Course Correction Example: Zoom Galleries 

When and how does corrective social change unfold? When awareness translates into action.

Last week, I participated in a zoom call with over 100 participants, featuring a presentation followed by Q and A. Every person in the gallery had their camera turned off, except for the presenter and the moderator.

Earlier in the month, I was invited to participate in another group zoom call.  For this gathering, every participant was required to turn their camera on.

Both groups express intentions around problem solving, community, environmental stewardship, and supporting human rights. But the first group has already pivoted away from the unexamined, unconscious and grotesque video, screen, and telecommunications consumption that was fueled by the pandemic’s trauma.

The other group is fearful of infiltration and remains unaware of the burgeoning implications of screen-based telecommunications, 5G, and wireless technologies.  It is not intentional or malicious; the group is simply mirroring the dominant culture’s lack of awareness of cultivated demand for constant screen connectivity that was intensified during the pandemic.

Smart Meters and 5G

Quantifiable harm from new wireless technologies became apparent when utilities began rolling out the next generation of smart meters around 2009, Harm was reported from both PLC and RF applications,

With the wireless industries increasingly in control of the media’s message (note the impact of industry advertising). society ignored the carnage. Industry ridiculed those reporting health harm.

The deployments continue, with the very real risk of stranded assets for ratepayers and taxpayers, because the technology is not safe for all users in all circumstances.

Another wave of concern about telecommunications technologies exploded a decade later when 5G began to be installed in front yards and neighborhoods to support autonomous vehicles and remote surgeries, and to enable the US to win the race against China for 5G.

The informed opposition was halted during the pandemic by 3 factors:

1. The pandemic artificially inflated the demand for connectivity.

2. The pandemic stopped the growing protest movement. (Global protest days against 5G began in early 2020 and were the brainchild of Dorotea Radoš Čulina of Croatia, Tanja Katarina Rebel of the U.K. and other colleagues around the world. Read the history here.)

3. Advocates identifying the risks associated with 5G were widely portrayed in the media as low-intelligence, right leaning, irrational arsonists fueled by Russian disinformation.

How did so many fall so easily for this narrative?

This equinox, get yourself, and this Earth free.

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