Electricity is a biological force of life ; the invisible part of nature.
The air is full of all kinds of waves of all colors that our body feels even if we cannot see them. For more than two hundred years we have lived under the widespread belief that electricity was harmless to humans and the planet. The scientist and researcher Arthur Firstenberg destroys this conviction by telling us step by step the history of electricity as it has never been done before – from an environmental point of view – and describing in detail all its biological effects.
In an entertaining and rigorous way, the book The Invisible Rainbow tells the story of electricity from the dawn of the 18th century to the present day, making us aware that many heart diseases, diabetes and cancer, as well as a multitude of environmental problems, have been largely caused by electromagnetic pollution associated with our technological progress : the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the television, the computer, the mobile phone, the 5G network, etc.
And living beings are under the effect of this technology… Honeybees, insects, birds, whales and trees around the world, etc… their futures in danger, depend on the human race turning off and getting rid of its satellites, its antennas and the devices that are creating the demand : its mobile phones.
In a few years we have eradicated 2/3 of insects*, in a few decades 2/3 of wild mammals* and in a few millennia 2/3 of trees* !
We know that the current rate of biodiversity loss is over 100 times that of the background rate leading to the consensus that human activities are initiating the sixth mass extinction. That might sound like an exaggeration, but it is not. If we continue down the same path, we condemn our children and their descendants to a world that is increasingly uninhabitable
As the American poet Robinson Jeffers once said, let us « fall in love outwards », and may this falling in love spread like a contagion as far as possible, for time is running out for us and for the great wild planet into which we were born, and without which our lives would hardly be worth living.
Keeping your phone off allows you to absorb the environment around you and enter the present moment… Only the present is real. That’s why it’s called « present » – a gift.
More information : www.cellphonetaskforce.org
*S. Seibold et al., « Arthopod Decline in Grasslands and Forest sis Associated with Landscape-Level Drivers », Nature, 574, 671, 2019.
*See the very numerous references given in R.E.A. Almond, M. Grooten, D. Juffe Bignoli et T. Petersen, Living Planet Report 2022, Gland, Switzerland.
*T.W. Crowther et al., « Mapping Tree Density at a Global Scale », Nature, 525, 201, 2015.