Arthur Firstenberg passed away earlier this year. However, his work and his words must live on. He is most known for writing—and being an activist—on the health impacts of electromagnetic radiation. And he tackled other critical issues.
He authored the books “Microwaving Our Planet: The Environmental impact of the Wireless Revolution,” “The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life,” and “The Earth and I.”
“The Earth and I” was published in January.
Firstenberg, at 74 died, in Santa Fe, New Mexico in February.
In the opening pages of “The Earth and I,” Firstenberg writes: “The deterioration of our environment is rapidly becoming an emergency. Pollution, deforestation, and species extinctions are accelerating, and the earth’s life support systems are failing. The very survival of earthly life is in question. Yet this is not due to any lack of awareness or education or for want of individuals organizing to protect our world. There is no lack of scientists studying the situation. There is no end to the steady flow of environmental books into our bookstores, and environmental courses into our schools and universities. We are all more or less aware of the problems and their apparent causes and no one wants them to continue, yet not only is our environment not improving, it is deteriorating more quickly than ever.”
He quotes Rachel Carson from her 1962 landmark book “Silent Spring” that exposed the deadly dangers of DDT and other insecticides: “Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life.”
And he quotes in 1862 historian Henry Brooks Adams, whom he notes was the grandson of U.S. President John Quincy Adams, writing: “I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world.”
“The difficulty, I think,” writes Firstenberg, “is not so much in finding alternatives, but in making decisions. And while the immediate causes of our troubles are known, the deeper roots are clouded with confusion. There is wide disagreement, for example, about the role of economics, for example, and little understanding of the causes of overpopulation. Most importantly, are we in control of our technology, or is it, as Henry Brooks Adams implied, in control of us?”
His first of 35 information-rich chapters in “The Earth and I” provides history, including that of the “Industrial Revolution…usually dated from the invention of the steam engine in England in the early 1700s.” And he continues: “Warfare was still a fact of life, and it remains so today, when we wage our battles with warships, submarines, tanks, aircraft, missiles, bombs and chemical and biological weapons. Our most sophisticated technology is no longer used for hunting animals at all, but instead for hunting each other.”
In the book’s chapter, “Living on the Edge,” Firstenberg writes: “After World War II there came into being a new medical disorder caused by the wholesale poisoning of our living environment. ‘Environmental illness,’ it was called, or ‘twentieth-century disease’….And in the twenty-first century the disease has become a pandemic. The toxins and electromagnet fields have become impossible to escape. But people are so mesmerized by the way of life woven by those toxins that they do not even acknowledge the connection.”
“The marketing phrase Americans used to hear after World War II, when the
chemical industry was still in its infancy, was ‘Better Living Through Chemistry,’” he notes. “It gave us such seemingly useful items as insecticides, synthetic fertilizers, antibiotics, detergents, synthetic fabrics, and plastics. The chemical industry is now grown up to be a tyrant, ruling every aspect of our lives, and it has gone absolutely wild. Over 50 million different chemicals have been created, and more than 350,000 of these are on the market. They are in your food and your water as deliberate additives….Your clothes are dyed with them. Your bed is permeated with them….You clean your floors and your oven with them….”
“We are now playing with our life force without respect for life,” says Firstenberg. “In the past century, especially in the last few decades, we have blanketed the earth with so many new powerful and violent electromagnetic fields….”
Firstenberg continues: “Environmental levels of ionizing radiation have been increased by the explosion of more than 2,000 atomic bombs [in atmospheric nuclear weapons testing], and by the by-products of the nuclear weapons and nuclear power industry. Unlike other electro-magnetic pollution, this radiation will not go away instantly when we turn off the power. We have managed to sterilize or lethally contaminate fair-size chunks of the earth…Nuclear power stations dot the surface of the globe….”
“Ionizing radiation causes cancer. But so does non-ionizing radiation, which is emitted by every wireless device and every radio antenna,” he writes. He speaks of, “Our cell phones, upon which we rely to make us safer, and around which our social and professional lives have become structured,” and how they “emit powerful radiation, and they control, require, and create the infrastructure that makes them work: the cell towers, antennas and satellites that, together with our phones, are strafing the earth with bullets of radiation, day and night, year in and year out.”
Of plastics, “They are themselves pollutants, containing as they do poisonous and cancer-causing chemicals that continually ooze out of them. And the microplastics that they shed and break down in our water, our air, our soils, and our bodies.”
“Insecticides, herbicides, fungicides….they all have one purpose only—to kill life,” writes Firstenberg. “Biocides are everywhere. Our farmland is saturated with them, and therefore our groundwater, rivers, and lakes are contaminated with them.”
Firstenberg offers many actions that need to be taken.
He ends “The Earth and I” by declaring that, as for an “addiction….to give one up usually requires recognizing that the dysfunction and disease it is causing are threatening one’s life. That has been part of the purpose of this book, to document the disease and connect it home to its causes. The book has also searched below the surface, both inwardly and outwardly, among our sciences and our cultural institutions, for clues to a better understanding of our place in the ecology of the world.”
The founder of the Environmental Health Trust, Dr. Devra Davis, said of Firstenberg’s death: “The world has lost a pioneer who leaves an invaluable legacy.”
Tributes to Firstenberg have come through the years from Dr. William Morton of Oregon Health Sciences University who has said Firstenberg’s “work is absolutely essential.”
Chellis Glendinning, Ph.D. and author of the book “When Technology Wounds,” has said: “Firstenberg is a pioneer in the sense that Rachel Carson was a pioneer.”
Teddy Goldsmith, founder of The Ecologist magazine, has said Firstenberg’s “cause is a most important one….You mustn’t give up.”
Gar Smith, long editor of Earth Island Journal, said: “He is one of my valued contributors and a personal hero.”
In addition to his books, Firstenberg wrote articles for The New York Times, Mother Jones, Earth Island Journal, The Ecologist, Village Voice, Utne Reader, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Daily News, among other publications.
As an activist, he founded and was president of the Cellular Phone Task Force and administrator of the International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space.
Born in Brooklyn, New York to survivors of the Holocaust, Firstenberg graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell University and attended the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine, but injury by what he attributed to an x-ray overdose cut short his medical career.
Firstenberg was a resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico starting in 2005. The newspaper Santa Fe New Mexican reported that “people—some from overseas—have appended their condolences to an online obituary, remembering him.” Comments, it said, included: “What a shining light to the world you were; trying to help save mankind, along with the planet and all of its creatures.” Another person wrote: “Your devotion to the welfare of all of us is endlessly appreciated. We honor your life and memory as we continue your good work.”
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Karl Grossman is an award-winning journalist, host of the nationally aired TV program “Enviro Close-Up with Karl Grossman.” The author of seven books, he is a full professor of journalism at the State University of New York at Old Westbury where every semester he teaches a course in Environmental Journalism.