The Santa Fe Review

It is cause for celebration when someone lives to be 90 and remains intellectually vibrant and politically alive. Yet it was sad to read that Stewart Udall has died. Shortly after I moved here in the early 1990s, I interviewed him for a piece I was writing for the New York Times about Indians and environmentalism. (This was when Pojoaque Pueblo was threatening to open a nuclear waste dump if it didn’t get its way on tribal gambling.) A few months later, when Fire in the Mind was published, I sent Mr. Udall an invitation to my book party — he lived just up the hill — and was delighted when he appeared at the back door. Here was the former Secretary of Interior under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, a man who had expanded, through sheer force of will, the National Park System and helped push through the Wilderness Act, and he was standing in my kitchen offering a toast before heading home to watch a football game.

Once or twice, on his walks around the neighborhood, he dropped off an envelope addressed “Hon. George Johnson” with information about a story he thought deserved attention. He also gave me an inscribed copy of The Myths of August, his book about the fallout — figuratively and literally — from America’s conduct in the Cold War.

In another epic standoff, he was instrumental in dissuading the actress Shirley Maclaine from building a mansion near the top of Atalaya Mountain. A few years later when an investment banker, Paul Tierney, sued the City of Santa Fe for denying him permission to build on another hilltop (the site of the old Talaya Reservoir above Camino San Acacio), I took my Times colleague James Brooke to meet Mr. Udall. Jim, a national correspondent based in Denver, was writing about the controversy and I figured Stewart would have something interesting to say. As the three of us stood on a ridge behind the Udall compound, off Camino de Cruz Blanca, the former Secretary lamented how ostentatious trophy houses were springing up in defiance of Santa Fe’s modest ways.

“Vail, Aspen, Telluride, Jackson — those are communities with different histories,” he said. As he looked northwest toward the Tierney hill, he noted that it was as prominent as “a prow of a ship — the last hillside site within the inner city. For him to do this right in the middle of the city violates everything that Santa Fe is about.”

It was a losing battle. Mr. Tierney prevailed in his lawsuit and sold the lot to Tom Ford, whose mansion, an even bigger one, is almost complete.

Related Posts:

Part 1. A Stroll Along Shirley Maclaine Boulevard
The Battle for Talaya Hill

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

The New Mexican’s Tom Sharpe has done a reasonably good job this week untangling the issues in the proposed new telecommunications ordinance, but I winced when I saw that he was planning to devote a full day of his series to the “health effects” of electromagnetism. The paper has embarrassed itself before by taking wild assertions from self-proclaimed experts at face value and doing little or no fact checking. We get much of the same this morning.

Before approving publication of the story, an editor should have insisted on a prominent paragraph noting that the majority of biophysicists, epidemiologists, and research oncologists who have studied the matter find no reason to believe that the low-level microwave radiation from cellphones or wifi is worrisome. But it’s Mr. Sharpe’s second article that is so dreadful that I feel like using it this spring at our Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop as an example of how not to cover a complex issue.

After giving a fringe group an open mike, the New Mexican had a responsibility to focus on what the science really says. Instead we get a profile of a local “healthy home” consultant, Daniel Stith, who concedes that his evidence about the supposed dangers of wifi (and a slew of other things) is “more anecdotal … versus some kind of study.” We also hear from someone named Vicki Warren, who teaches courses on “electrosmog” and is allowed to go on for seven paragraphs reeling off misinformation that could have easily been checked.

It is not enough to counter all of this propaganda with some quotes from a Motorola spokesman. This “he says, she says” approach is lazy journalism that creates the false impression that science is simply a matter of opinion, and that there are two equally weighted sides to every story.

Related Posts:

Electromania at City Hall
Electromania, Part 2
Electromania, Part 3

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

After I wrote last month about the misrepresentations of the electrophobes (please see Electromania Part 1 and Part 2), I heard from Bill Bruno, the Los Alamos physicist who is a leader in the fight to banish all things wireless from within the city limits. I asked him to give me his best shot, the five or so papers that present the strongest case for the health hazards of cellphones and wifi. I wasn’t interested in petitions by concerned citizens or anecdotal cases (the child screaming in the night when the wifi is switched on) or conspiracy theories, but solid, peer-reviewed science.

He referred me first of all to Salford 2003, which I wrote about here last month, and noted that there was a followup study involving more rats. The problem again is whether the “dark neurons” that were reported really represent brain damage and whether they were caused by microwaves or by scooping the rats’ brains out, slicing them like baloney, and infusing them with chemical stains for observation under an electron microscope. In a review article, the  researchers themselves note that while one laboratory in Turkey got similar results, three others in the United States, Japan, and France have failed to replicate the experiment. Other studies from the Salford lab have suggested that microwave radiation may cause leaks in the protective blood-brain barrier. But the findings are called into question by the puzzling conclusion that lower levels of microwaves appear to produce more leakage than higher levels do. Other studies have found no effect at all.

In the next paper Mr. Bruno cited, Arnetz 2007 (The Effects of 884 MHz GSM Wireless Communication Signals on Self-Reported Symptoms and Sleep), volunteers took turns wearing a helmet-like contraption that held a microwave transmitter a few inches from their heads. Subjects who were exposed for three solid hours to microwaves of about the intensity of those emitted by a cell phone took six minutes longer to fall asleep than the control group, which received a “sham” exposure. They also experienced an average of 8 minutes less of the deepest kind of sleep, called stage 4.

It’s curious that anyone could sleep at all under such circumstances. The paper refers obliquely to “sleep initiated one hour after exposure” without saying what did the initiating. Sleeping pills or a hypnotist’s dangling watch?

The second part of the Arnetz experiment is even murkier. About half of the 71 subjects considered themselves electrosensitive — they blamed cellphone emanations for various health complaints. But the study found that they were no more likely to experience headaches from microwaves than from the sham exposures. Confusingly, the nonsensitives did report more headaches. The authors don’t supply the numbers, making the outcome impossible to judge. During the exposures the subjects were also given memory and performance tests and questioned about their moods. These results were not reported, presumably because they weren’t significant.

The third paper on Mr. Bruno’s list was Bise 1978, which reported that extremely low intensities of radio waves and microwaves — far below what existed even back then in urban areas — caused “temporary changes in brain waves and behavior” in 10 subjects. The experiment, which has gone unreplicated now for 32 years, was done by William van Bise, a researcher into the paranormal who might have served as a model for Walter Bishop, the mad scientist on the TV drama Fringe. During the early 1990s an eccentric R.J. Reynolds tobacco heir apparently invited Mr. van Bise and his wife, Elizabeth Rauscher, to use his estate in North Carolina as a research center for something called “psychotronics.” (The story appears in bits and pieces scattered around the Web.) They were joined there by Andrija Puharich, a champion of the psychic Uri Geller, who claimed to bend spoons with his mind. All were evicted after their benefactor died.

The rest of what Mr. Bruno presented me with didn’t involve cell phone radiation but rather the lower frequencies from power lines and broadcasting stations: Historical Evidence That Electrification Caused the 20th Century Epidemic of “Diseases of Civilization” by Samuel Milham has been countered in a rebuttal by Frank de Vocht, a lecturer in Occupational and Environmental Health at the University of Manchester, who called the work “fatally flawed.” A study from Finland reported that TV and FM radio signals focused by a reflecting wall caused spontaneous hand movements in a few subjects. Finally Mr. Bruno mentioned the work of Martin Blank, an associate professor at Columbia, who has reported that low frequencies might induce a stress reaction in cells. Again this is a controversial view.

So we are still at square one with a minority of much-disputed reports suggesting that a whole range of electromagnetic radiation might possibly have subtle biological effects, which may or may not be harmful. If your aim is to dismantle the wireless communication structure of the planet, including radio and television, along with the worldwide electrical grid, that is not very much to go on.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

Saturday morning on the Dale Ball Trails, as I kept to the edges to avoid the Cerro Gordo mud, I looked down and saw a rifle shell sitting in the snow. Back at the trailhead parking lot I’d noticed an empty six-pack left by Friday night partiers (16-ounce cans of Bud Light, the calorie counters’ choice) and I wondered if they had been out here shooting in the dark. Picking up the shell I saw that the inside was a little rusty. Maybe it had washed down from the hills, an artifact of an earlier time.

This is the stretch of trail that starts at the hairpin turn on Cerro Gordo Road and follows an arroyo north toward the Cerros Colorados subdivision with its lonely streets of million-dollar second homes. But the area used to be a semi-urban wilderness. A few hundred feet up the trail from the parking area is one of my favorite historical attractions: an old blue-and-white car — a Studebaker? — mired in the sand and riddled with bullet holes.

It seems like that should be a metaphor for something — Santa Fe’s city government or Tuesday’s mayoral election. But I can’t quite get my head around it. Campaign season here has been such a mush. The New Mexican reported this morning that the incumbent, Mayor David Coss, maintains a commanding lead. And judging from the campaign finance reports, he is set to raise a record amount of money — from developers and environmentalists, from realtors and historic preservationists, from Chamber of Commerce bigwigs and neighborhood activists — from people with conflicting interests and visions that cannot possibly be reconciled. Mr. Coss is the champion of the Living River and the Living Wage with big support from the Santa Fe Area Home Builders Association, the Thornburg and Zeckendorf dynasties, and the labor unions. So just whom and what would I be voting for?

The mayor’s strongest contender, Asenath Kepler, has received money in smaller bundles from an odd assortment that includes real estate attorney Kurt Sommer and Sagemaya Dandi, the squatter who lives in a tent in the woods above upper Canyon Road. She also has the support of former mayor Debbie Jaramillo. (Ms. Kepler was her city attorney and, as a favor, helped the mayor’s husband fight an income tax evasion charge.) But there is a decidedly right-wing cast to her support: New Mexican columnist Gregg Bemis, the Friends of Capitalism, madhatters from the  local Tea Party, and, as the Coss campaign has eagerly pointed out, the Santa Fe Republican Women and the Republican Party itself. This is supposed to be a nonpartisan election, and in person Ms. Kepler doesn’t seem at all like an extremist. But a good shorthand for a person’s core beliefs about property rights, gun rights, and the role of government in a just society is their party affiliation.

So should I vote for the third candidate, Miguel Chavez, who has raised hardly any money (the few donors whose names stand out include former Councilor Karen Heldmeyer and her husband, Russ Mosteller, and William Herrera, the retired dentist who sold the land on which the new Super Walmart is being built)? Mr. Chavez is as sincere and decent a man as I can imagine finding his way into politics. But unless the polls are horribly mistaken he hasn’t a chance.

The City Council races are even harder to get worked up about. The incumbents in Districts 3 and 4 are running unopposed, either because their constituents universally love them or because they have given up on the process altogether. District 2, where I live, is rallying behind Councilor Rebecca Wurzburger, forgetting how her votes have encouraged a construction industry Gold Rush on the formerly historic east side and the legalization of vacation rentals. Her challenger, Stefanie Beninato, hasn’t been able to make much of an impression. The only real contest is in District 1 where Russell Simon, an intelligent young candidate with real, actual ideas is taking on Chris Calvert, who has a Master’s in Public Policy from Berkeley with undergraduate degrees in Conservation of Natural Resources and Aeronautical Engineering but works, for some reason, as a mail carrier. A third candidate, also a newcomer, is Doug Nava, a state tax examiner.

Once inside the voting booth I’ll probably pull the lever or check the box for Mr. Coss and for Ms. Wurzburger’s doomed opponent. Then we’ll all wake up Wednesday morning with everything pretty much the same.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

Scientific truth is cumulative, and no single experiment can be taken as more than a clue. To be believed it must be replicated and stitched into the expanding web of knowledge. The journals are littered with isolated observations that turned out to be wrong.

In the comments section of the New Mexican story mentioned here yesterday, William Bruno, the anti-wireless activist, apologizes to the City Council for flying off the handle during the Tea Party-like chaos at Wednesday night’s meeting. Then he refers to four studies he takes as support for his views on the dangers of wireless technology:

	I really could not contain my anger [he wrote] when the NewPath

	lawyer said they "wanted to be good neighbors." How can you be a

	good neighbor and install something that alters people's EEG

	(brainwave rhythm, see W. Bise 1978), causes headaches in

	literally a third of the population (Hutter 2006), causes sleep

	loss and nausea (Santini 2003)? . . .

(NewPath is the company that has applied for a franchise to install a system of small wireless antennas in town.) Further down, in response to another comment, Mr. Bruno writes:

	You don't know the risks. All we have is data showing that cell

	phones AT LEAST double your risk of brain tumor. In experiments

	on mice, EVERY mouse had brain damage (Salford 2003) when exposed

	to cell phone levels of microwave radiation for just two hours .

	. .

Citation dropping, like name dropping, is a quick way to draw attention to yourself and your arguments. But what do the studies actually say? I couldn’t find an online version of the first one (Bise W., “Low power radio-frequency and microwave effects on human electroencephalograms and behavior,” Journal
Physiolo. Chem. Phys. [1978], 10[5]:387-398) probably because it is almost a third of a century old. Anyway, it is not too surprising that the electromagnetic field emitted by your cell phone might affect the shape of the electromagnetic field emitted by your brain.  But is that dangerous? A research group at the University of Ottawa’s McLaughlin Centre for Population Health Risk Assessment methodically examined several studies, concluding that there were no persuasive signs of harm. The excellent FAQ on the group’s website should be read by our city councilors before they let themselves be blinded again by pseudoscience.

The other three papers Mr. Bruno cites are readily available on the Web. The Hutter study, he says, shows that wireless communication technology “causes headaches in literally a third of the population.” What it really found  is far less alarming. First of all, the subjects were not cell phone users but people living near cell phone towers. After interviewing 365 of them, the researchers concluded that there was a greater-than-chance possibility that those exposed to higher levels of electromagnetism experienced more frequent headaches. Other research has found no such correlation.

In Santini 2003 French scientists mailed a questionnaire to volunteers and concluded that those who said they lived near cell towers were more likely to complain of sleeplessness, nausea, and other malaise. But again other studies contradict this. The University of Ottawa’s McLaughlin Centre provides some perspective: When you step back and look at the full body of research, there is no obvious link between headaches, amnesia, chronic fatigue, or other subjective symptoms and cell phone technology. Not for cell phone users or for those living near a transmitting station.

Finally there is Salford 2003 in which researchers exposed 32 rats to cell phone frequencies and then cut open their heads. They found what are known as “dark neurons,” which they interpreted as brain damage. The researchers conceded the difficulty of determining whether the effect was caused by cell phone radiation or by the trauma of what amounted to a brainectomy. In fact neurotoxicologists question whether dark neurons are really a sign of brain damage or just an experimental artifact.

Subtleties like these are beyond the ability of local governments to resolve. That is why the Telecommunications Act of 1996 doesn’t allow fears of health effects to be used as a reason for municipalities to block wireless technology that meets federal standards for the emission of electromagnetic waves. You can question the standards, but I’d rather have them decided in Washington than at Santa Fe City Hall.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

Related post: Electromania, Part 1