Humans have started to incorporate their intelligence into machines and will be left standing on the sidelines as fools, with their machines ultimately coming back at them. — Rudolf Steiner (GA 202)
If adequate precautions and controls based on a fundamental understanding of the biological effects of electromagnetic radiation are not introduced in the near future, humanity will enter an age of environmental energy pollution comparable to the chemical pollution of today. The US government recognized this as early as 1971. Do we need to add another dimension to the sustainability debate?
The cause of the bird deaths could be seen from afar: the nature reserve in the shifting sand dunes had become the concentrated site of 318 actively operating 4G antennas. From here, they transport their high-power frequency load into the world; the Internet’s backup system has one of its base camps here. The antenna masts are located half a kilometer to 8 kilometers apart and emit between 1,000 and 2,000 watts of radiation power. In the period between April and June 2022, 46 new radiation giants were erected.
So far, this question has probably only interested the experts. The main thing is that it works: one push of a button is enough to get the ‘”juice” flowing. The absence of electricity became history when the use of candlelight came to an end around 1860. Alessandro Volta, Michael Faraday, and Heinrich Hertz discovered the physical foundations of electricity. Today, our everyday electrical life can be defined easily: the electrical potential difference is measured in volts, the current in amperes, and the frequency of the alternating current is given in Hertz. These invisible electrical magnitudes keep growth-driven society going, because without electricity (and its continuous increase), there is no growth.
Invisible Pollution
We live in an electromagnetic ocean, in a magnetosphere: the earth’s magnetic field is 45,000 kilometers (= 7 earth radii) away from the earth and provides us with a protective shield against the sun’s electromagnetic storms—eruptions which are from time to time hurled from the sun into space. One consequence, for example, is the bioelectricity that can be measured in us humans and forms the basis of numerous diagnostic procedures such as an EEG (electrical activity of the brain), EMG (electrical activity of the muscles), and ECG (electrical activity of the heart). Typical research questions in bioelectricity include the mode of action of mobile phone radiation on organisms and cells, occupational diseases caused by ionizing radiation, and the biological effects of electromagnetic fields on insects.
In electrobiology, the measurement of body current density—a key concept from the new type of electromagnetic vulnerabilities—has been at the center of attention for several years. What is it about? Since all living organisms contain electrically charged molecules, the movement of the internal electrical body currents is affected by external alternating electrical and magnetic fields. Calculating or measuring the body’s current density is a way to determine the actual body load. In fact, field exposure can be found everywhere. Each of us is surrounded by electrical fields and our organism itself works with electrical impulses to control every vital function.
New Sustainability
It has been proven that using a mobile phone does not cause brain tumors. But we need to consider what is working in the background to make the “mobile phone world” work at all. It is electromagnetism that the “world of push-button technology” uses to awaken electrical life to serve us. There is nothing natural about artificially generated physical and technical electromagnetism, and yet it is on its way to becoming the carrier of an electromagnetically charged civilization. It is seen as a savior, a prospect, and is highly political. Human beings have their eyes for colors, and their ears for sounds; in the case of magnetism, people see that a magnet attracts iron, but they do not see what magnetism is in itself. With electricity, we perceive the effects of light and heat but not the electricity itself. What would the world look like if we could perceive electricity and magnetism directly, but not light, colors, sounds, and so on? There is an electromagnetic world alongside us, but also within us: we drive it forward, but we are not prepared for the unintended consequences.
Why is there no commission of inquiry in the Bundestag, the German parliament, to clarify the consequences and side effects of the accelerated path to an electrical future? “Pollution from magnetism” will be part of the signature of this new era, even if there is no sign of this yet in the dialogue around environmental policy. Neither the German federal ministry for the environment, nor the Wuppertal Institute, nor the Öko Institute in Freiburg have yet conducted research into these new challenges—the “classic” climate issue dominates the discourse. This will have to change. A new dimension must be added to the sustainability debate: the electromagnetically charging present.
Energy Transition?
A civilization growing ever more electrical can be seen as an epoch that prompts us to look for new guiding principles: might tenderness and even beauty become the new stars of the scientific worldview? This is what Christiane Haid, head of the Goetheanum’s Section for the Literary Arts and Humanities, proposes. She proposes a utopia of the future, speaks of the “morning gateway of beauty,” and explains: “Thinking about beauty in the current world situation means envisaging perspectives for a possible path into the light. The world situation is connected at a deeper level with the question of beauty. It is the peculiar nature of beauty not to understand it as a quality to be attained in the material sense, but to see in it a power of the human being to transform the world, that is, to develop creatively towards beauty.”
This rejects the transhumanist illusion that humans will, in principle, be inferior to the increasingly intelligent machine world. “Because where there is danger, there is also the other possibility: that we wake up in the dead end we have built for ourselves and start to understand ourselves as human beings and radically redefine ourselves.” So writes Jens Göken in his book Die Maschinenkultur und die Anthroposophie als ihre Gegenbewegung [Machine culture and anthroposophy as its counter-movement]. Utopian thinking seems to be indicated again. It’s about impulses for renewal that provide a solid basis for identifying a sustainable, humane, and spiritual culture, worldwide.
Translation Christian von Arnim
Photo Marti Sami from Unsplash
