By Anna Von Reitz
Arthur Firstenberg, Author, Activist, and Caring Human Being is dead; he was relatively young and died after a long illness; he was surrounded by family and friends. His thirty-plus year career spent reporting on the effects of ever-increasing electromagnetic pollution on the environment and biological life was not in vain.
He had his first run-in with radiation sickness while a medical student at the University of California Irvine; after receiving more than 40 dental x-rays he suffered radiation sickness and never forgot the misery and debilitating effects.
Firstenberg became one of a growing number of early critics of technologies including HAARP which in one way or another, impinge on our bodies and our health and the health of our planet invisibly and silently, and with ever-increasing impact every single year.
While those benefiting from these technologies are eager to promote more and more uses and applications for them, there is comparatively little or no money being invested in studying the impact of such technologies on biological life.
Section 704 of the Telecommunications Act prohibits communities from denying applications to install cell towers, which Arthur viewed as a gross overreach of federal authority. In 2021 he led a challenge of Section 704 of the Telecommunications Act all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court; they refused to hear the case, but it remains a landmark effort in the struggle to restore local control over local environmental issues, and will no doubt be revisited in years to come.
Major die-offs of Marine Mammals have been attributed to increasing EM pollution and changes in the magnetosphere for two decades, but despite the Endangered Species status of many of these animals, nothing has happened to protect them or us from ever-increasing electromagnetic radiation and magnetic field activity in our homes, communities, and nations.
Exposure to increased electromagnetic radiation is known to cause numerous serious health effects, but we are relentlessly pushed onward to accept 3G, 4G, 5G, 6G.... with no reference to when or if this assault on the energetic environment will end.
4G, it is widely said, was sufficient to carry all needful telephone and computer-based signals at speeds well beyond the capability of humans to use and process the information transferred; we have been pressed to accept 5G and now 6G with no consideration of what this may be doing to us and to our environment for no discernible benefit.
Many researchers suggest that such in-depth and high energy blanketing of electromagnetic radiation may be causing increased birth defects, contributing to autism, and increasing the number of free radical molecules and genetic transcription errors that occur in our bodies.
Firstenberg was one of the first and most knowledgeable critics of reckless electromagnetic development, and the Voice of Conscience in the research community. If you have not read The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life, this would be a good time to do so -- and remember to silently thank this gentle forthright man and be grateful for his insights.
Publications:
The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life (Chelsea Green, 2020, more than 100,000 copies sold); Microwaving Our Planet: The Environmental Impact of the Wireless Revolution (1997); and, most recently, The Earth and I (Skyhorse, 2025).
His memorial gathering took place yesterday, March 1st 2025, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He will be missed.
"The only thing we can really do for the Earth is to stop destroying it," he wrote. "Then the Earth will take care of itself."
Granna
