The honey bee in the banner at the top of
this newsletter has been speaking to us for over one hundred and
fourteen years. Its numbers ever diminishing, its message ever more
urgent, it waits for a sleeping world to finally listen. “Now!” it says.
“Wake up before it’s too late, there is no more time!”
On the Isle of Wight, off the southern coast of England, Giuglielmo
Marconi built the world’s first permanent radio station. And the bees’
first warning to humanity was heard. “They are often to be seen crawling
up grass stems, or up the supports of the hive, where they remain until
they fall back to the earth from sheer weakness, and soon afterwards
die,” wrote Augustus Imms of Christ’s College, Cambridge in 1906. Ninety
percent of the bees had already vanished from the entire island. Unable
to find a cause, he called it, simply, Isle of Wight disease. Swarms of
healthy bees were imported from the mainland, but it was of no use:
within a week the fresh bees were dying off by the thousands.
The description, more than a century later, is exactly the same. On
November 19, 2019, a 5G antenna was placed 250 meters from Angela’s
house in Melbourne, Australia. “I photographed the new mast going onto
the cell tower,” she writes, “and the next day, I was in the driveway
talking to our carpenter, and we saw bees dropping on the driveway then
dying. I managed to film one trying to collect pollen, but it was
hanging upside down and could not seem to make it to the centre of the
flower, then it rolled off the petals to the ground.”
Today, two months later, their beautiful garden, full of old world trees
and plants, is silent and barren. “We have no insects -- none,” wrote
Angela last week. “Our cumquat once laden all year has no new fruit
coming. No olives on the way on our olive tree so laden last year. We
dug soil yesterday -- no worms either -- nothing -- all gone. I walked
the dog late tonight, it was dark and a poor magpie was down the street
under a street lamp hoping for a cricket I think. It was silent. I took
birdseed back but the bird had gone -- it must be hungry to be out at
night.”
In the midst of plenty the bees are starving to death. In 2009, Neelima
Kumar, at Panjab University in India, placed cell phones in some bee
hives and turned them on for ten minutes. The concentrations of glucose,
cholesterol, total carbohydrates, total lipids and total proteins rose
precipitously in the bees’ blood. After just ten minutes’ exposure to a
cell phone, the bees were not able to digest their food, or use the
oxygen they were breathing. Their metabolism had come to a standstill.
“Wake up!” say the bees.
“Wake up!” said parents with their children who assembled last Saturday
at the Church on the Roundabout in Newport on the Isle of Wight to
protest plans to turn their island into a Smart Island -- to bring Isle
of Wight disease back to the island of its birth.
Radio waves are poison to life. They penetrate skin and bones, cell
walls and mitochondria. They prevent electrons from our food from
combining with the oxygen we breathe. They give us diabetes, and heart
disease, and cancer. They disorient migratory birds, and they kill
outright tiny forms of life that pollinate flowers and have high rates
of metabolism.
In the mid-1990s, the invisible fire that Marconi had lit became a
conflagration. For the first time in human history, radio waves began to
be broadcast not only from tall towers scattered widely across the
landscape, but from the hands of men, women and children everywhere. And
in 2020 this has brought us to the brink of extinction -- not just of
bees, and not just of humanity, but of all life on Earth.
I asked, in a previous newsletter, “which do we want more: our phones or
our planet?” There is only one sane answer. I ask all of you who are
reading this newsletter to join with me in putting this world back on a
path to survival by throwing away your cell phones, now, today. Not next
year, and not tomorrow. Today. There is no other option. Tomorrow we
can deal, if we dare, with climate change. But if we are to have time to
answer that urgent call, we must first deal with this emergency. We
must extinguish this fire.
I vote for life. Do you?
SLOVENIA VOTES FOR LIFE, AT LEAST FOR NOW
Last Friday, while people in 250 cities
were preparing for the first Global Day of Protest against 5G, Slovenia
became the first country in the world to refuse 5G, at least
temporarily, because of objections from scientists and the public. The
Ministry of Public Administration had called a four-hour Public
Consultation on Radiation Aspects in Ensuring the Operation of 5G
Technologies. Among the speakers were Gregor Kos, president of the
political party, Za zdravo družbo (For a Healthy Society), and Igor Šajn
from Stavbna biologija Slovenije (Building Biology of Slovenia).
The four-hour meeting lasted six hours. The Minister for Public
Administration, Rudy Medved, announced that Slovenia is officially
postponing the implementation of 5G in his country “due to possible
health effects of EMFs.”
On Monday, the Prime Minister of Slovenia resigned, which means that
there will be new elections held, probably in April, and that 5G will be
the main issue for Gregor Kos’s political party in the elections. On
March 10, his party will bring in scientific experts from other
countries for an all-day event on the health and environmental effects
of 5G, which will take place in the Slovenia National Council (the upper
house of Parliament) and will be broadcast live on national television.
60 MORE SATELLITES WERE LAUNCHED TODAY
This morning, at 9:06 a.m., SpaceX launched
another 60 “Starlink” satellites, bringing the number of these
satellites in low orbit around the Earth up to 240. These are already
streaking photographic plates at observatories around the world,
although they are not even one percent of what SpaceX is ultimately
planning. SpaceX already has permission from the Federal Communications
Commission to litter our night skies with 12,000 satellites, has applied
for an incredible total of 42,000, and is now launching them, 60 at a
time, twice a month, indefinitely into the future, unless someone puts a
stop to it. If they are all launched, they will far outnumber the
approximately 9,000 visible stars, and will be brighter than all but 172
of them.
This act of global vandalism threatens to put an end to astronomy, and
to ruin the night sky forever for all of humanity, for migratory birds
that orient themselves by the stars, and for all other creatures who
enjoy life under the eternal unchanging sky.
This act of global vandalism also threatens to bring about the sudden
extinction of all or most life on the surface of the Earth, as the
12,000+ satellites will be located in the Earth’s ionosphere, and will
emit extremely powerful pulsating beams of radiation into it. The
ionosphere is a source of high voltage, charged at all times to an
average 300,000 volts. It controls the global electrical circuit which
connects every living thing -- bird, animal, tree and human -- to the
Earth and sky; the electrical circuit that courses through our veins,
which the Chinese call qi, and the Indians call prana. An eternal
circuit of life that has been gentle and unchanging for three billion
years.
The Astronomers’ Appeal, called Safeguarding the Astronomical Sky,
launched just a few weeks ago, already has 1,300 signatures of
professional astronomers from 48 countries. They are asking for the
Starlink project to be put on hold, immediately, and for all governments
to abide by international treaties -- the same treaties that are
invoked in the International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space:
The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 requires that the use of
outer space be conducted “so as to avoid [its] harmful contamination
and also adverse changes in the environment of the Earth.”
The United Nations Guidelines for the Long-term Sustainability of Outer Space Activities (2018) requires
users of outer space to address “risks to people, property, public
health and the environment associated with the launch, in-orbit
operation and re-entry of space objects.”
“THE INVISIBLE RAINBOW: A HISTORY OF ELECTRICITY AND LIFE”
WILL BE IN BOOKSTORES ON MARCH 2
The book that I published in hardcover on
Earth Day of 2017 has been picked up by Chelsea Green, the environmental
publishing house. They are publishing a paperback edition that will go
on sale on March 2, 2020. It will be available in the USA and the UK from Chelsea Green, as well as from Amazon and bookstores.
I wrote this book in order to tell a history that has never been told
before, and to explain to a stubborn world just what it is that makes
everyone’s lights turn on, and their appliances run; what it is that we
have been sending through wires and broadcasting through the air without
a thought; what it is that we are holding in our hands, giving to our
children to play with, and pressing against our heads. I wrote it to
describe to a world in peril what life was once like, and what it could
be like again -- if we wake up in time.
About 370 copies of the hardcover edition are left. They can be purchased from me until they are sold out.
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