Get The Facts - Electro-Pollution

GET THE FACTS ELECTRO-POLLUTION

Building healthy homes begins with maximizing the use of natural unadulterated building materials, keeping their chemical load low when finishing, and designing for healthy indoor air quality. I talk about these topics in previous sections. Building healthy requires much more though, including all the factors that define my healthy homes as given in my Quality Standards. One of those—mitigating Electro-pollution—is so important that it merits its own Flip-page magazine on this web site. As I have pursued the idea of building healthy over the past 16 years, and as I have more critically considered what exactly makes a home healthy, I am now convinced more than ever that the most important component to a healthy home is the mitigation of electromagnetic radiation, or as some call it ‘electro-pollution.’ Most builders and those working within the field of Building Science dismiss this notion—or frankly aren’t aware of recent scientific research that unequivocally shows the biological effects electromagnetic radiation is having on human and environmental health. In my own development work, I strive to bring electromagnetic fields down to “ALARA levels”— that is “As Low As Reasonably Achievable”—and hope to become the standard against which other Chicago-builders measure their work. What makes me so adamant that electro-pollution is our biggest impediment to building truly healthy homes? Because I have studied Building Biology and met dozens of people who suffer the ill effects that often accompany Electromagnetic Sensitivity; because I have a fireman wife whose EMF exposure on the job is high, and sure enough, is beginning to experience many of the same symptoms; and because COVID and its aftermath has made us collectively—or at least me personally—suspicious of Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Government, Big ANYTHING. In that light, many are beginning to question the motives of the body that regulates our electromagnetic spectrum—the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)—a group Harvard University has called the “most captured regulatory agency” in Washington. The FCC has no expertise in public health, regularly seems to put the interests of Big Telecom above those of the public interest, and is a group that the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled in August 2021 was “arbitrary and capricious” in its recent decision to retain their 1996 safety limits for human exposure to wireless radiation. In addition, the court held that the FCC failed to respond to “record evidence that exposure to RF [Radio frequency] radiation at levels below the Commission’s current limits may cause negative health effects unrelated to cancer” and the agency demonstrated “a complete failure to respond to comments concerning environmental harm caused by RF radiation.”