Fetus Origami, Endocrine Disruptors and You...

a Report from VPIRG Environmental Action Conference

I enjoy going conferences. It’s like an intense college immersion experience, minus the binge drinking and the tests. At the Vermont Technical College on Nov. 15th, VPIRG held their annual Environmental Action Conference. This Vermont’s biggest and best environmental conference, a sort of bio-regional Bioneers Conference. I came away with a head full of ideas of ideas that I’d like to share.

The highlight for me was learning from keynote speaker Sandra Steingraber, author of the book Living Downstream: An Ecologists look at Cancer and the Environment. She said so many interesting things and here are some.

- The human fetus is folded together as with origami, flat sheets of tissue folding into the emerging body. The fetus starts growing head first, then downward, and center first and then outward. So if the baby has webbed feet, the toxic exposure was likely in the 11th week, when the outer stuff had started.

- The worst time to get hit with toxins is when you are really, really, really small. “Exposure during the opera of embryonic development can multiply exposure effect,” Steingraber said. After implantation on the womb wall, the egg is very vulnerable and after conception too.

- We should be thinking about pollution from the human rights perspective, Steingraber said. We have a right to live in a world without getting cancer. We have a right to be fertile and have children if we want them. We have a right to not get poisoned by Roundup’s Atrazine, no matter how much it would impact the economy to take it off the market. Lawyers from the Vermont Law School are pursuing this, and articulate this view in an article (available on-line) called “Law for An Ecological Age.”

- There is a massive movement to protect people from chemicals. Here are some resources in that movement. A blog called Nontoxic kids. A ‘Safe Cosmetics Campaign”. An European Union program called REACH, which will document all the chemicals that are on the market. Also, check out Rivernetwork.org, the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, and the Alliance for Clean and Healthy Vermont.

- Canned food is a major source of exposure to Bisphenol-A (pronounced: biss-fee-n’all-A). The cans are lined with a plastic that contains the Bisphenol-A and it leeches into the food. I always knew canned vegetables were nasty! Now I know they contain a “endocrine disruptor.”
Endocrine disruptors happen because the body mistakes certain chemicals for natural hormones and then everything gets out of wack. The body uses hormones to get jobs done, in minute amounts, parts per trillion. When we take in tiny microscopic chemicals from the canned pineapple or the old Nalgene bottle, our bodies get confused.
In an issue related to endocrine disruptors, girls are getting their breasts about 3 years earlier than they used to, at 10 years old instead of 13. The menstruation start times are about the same, only a month ahead of where they were in 1970. This long window between breasts budding and menstruation is not good. Girls are at risk for breast cancer later in life because the body has a long window of increased estrogen levels connected to the breast development, but without progestrerone, a menstrual hormone that balances out the effects of the estrogen.

- Steingraber compared the economy and the environment as twin ecosystems with many parallels. Both were global and integrated. “Only there are no bailouts for the environment if we hit a major tipping point.” She said her 7 year old child ran into the room saying “the Dow dropped 500 points” not knowing what that meant. Perhaps we don’t mourn the ecosystem’s decline as much because we don’t have metrics to count it. We need numbers that document the rise in carbon parts per million, so that TV anchors can grimace and say “the Carbon Index rose today to a new high of 388 parts carbon per million today, making our air the most carbonated since the Age of the Dinosaurs.”

- In an exciting note from the activist perspective, the California environmentalists have found a delicious, elegant leverage point upon industry. California legislators passed a law that says companies must say on the label if there is something in the product that is illegal in Belgium. Companies have to identify everything that doesn’t meet the higher standards of the EU. Thus, they will probably just start importing products safe for the European market rather than relabel. They might just do the switch all across the country, thus bringing America into de facto harmonization with the E.U.’s more sensible and stringent laws! Brilliant!

Last minute criminality by the Bush FCC on cell towers

Here’s a good way to spot government mischief. Watch for announcements on the days of really big news. For example, on election Tuesday, Nov 5th ‘08, the FCC announced a major change in the regulation of the wireless spectrum.

“Federal regulators on Tuesday approved the largest ever expansion of wireless Internet access, unanimously backing a controversial plan to allow a new generation of devices to use the empty airwaves between television channels to go online” reports the LA Times.

High tech industry call this plan “wi-fi on steroids”, essentially allowing really strong cellphones to be embedded in your computer, that then allow wi-fi access everywhere. The park, the subway, the car, the mountain top, at the bottom of the ocean, no place will be inaccessible for computing pleasure, and everyplace will be equally basking in the waves of cell tower radiation.

This is not good. This is the Bushites administration conspiring with industry for a last gluttonous orgy of regulatory irresponsibility before slithering off. Cellphone towers are cancer causing now. This plan will expand cell tower use, prevalence, and wattage. Essentially, our world will become ever more radiated by the bouncing waves of ever more electronic devices.

The FCC ruling was opposed by TV industry groups, because they said the wireless internet traffic would interfere with TV signals. Theater and concert promoters also complained that there might be interference between a concert-goer’s I-phone and the performer’s wireless microphone. Reasonable concerns. A far bigger concern is that wireless technology causes cancer. Therefore it should be contained and not expanded into new horizons of electrosmog pollution.

Cell towers create electromagnetic radiation, a.k.a. electrosmog pollution. Billions of digital ones and zeros in pulsing waves enter a biological world. Biological life evolved technologies to gather information from waves. Insects use their antenna to gather information from the environment. Bats fly by radar by picking up waves. And now, suddenly, humans are sending vast, unregulated, strong waves into the ecosystems. Increasingly, we’re getting negative feedback.

Here are three snapshots from the emerging story that scientists are recognizing that wireless technology is unsafe. First, the european Interphone study is documenting the link from cellphones to brain cancer. Second, the firefighters unions no longer allow cellphone towers atop firehouse because towers increase cancer rates. Third, the honorable Rep. Dennis Kucinich recently held congressional hearings on cellphone safety, and heard testimony from doctors and cancer victims on the subject.

I have been tracking the issue for a few years now. And it is largely the same story. Citizen’s groups and a few government regulators chasing the runaway train of an unhealthy but widely adopted technology. But the facts are coming in. Cellphones will eventually be widely understood to be as cancer causing as cigarettes. In 20 years, no sane person will give one to their children.
In the meantime, I encourage people not to use cellphones or wireless laptops (especially around me), and to keep track of the issue by reading the online journal www.microwavenews.com.

Cellphone technology was let onto the market without sufficient health tests or regulation. Now cellphones are widely adopted, but this doesn’t mean they are compatible with human biology. It was a great mistake to let this seductive technology out of the box, and humanity will probably suffer huge increases in brain cancer because of it. I think all cellphone towers should be torn down. Cellphones should be turned off permanently and properly recycled. The companies that have gotten rich on this unwholesome technology should pay for a fund to cover the tab on brain cancer patients in the years to come.

I’d like to close with an elegant quote that summarizes the issue well, from Lewis Mumford, who wrote “Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.”

We should say no to a wi-fi planet. I’m no technophobe Luddite. I love the idea of the internet as humanity’s central nervous system. But I want it to be wired. Wireless technology is simply unsafe.

May the communications industry take responsibility for the biological impacts of wireless radiation. May we live in a world where we can ride the bus without being radiated by our neighbor’s e-mail. May we develop an advanced human civilization that keeps technology in harmony with biology.

Theo Talcott