I mistakenly published my last post while still editing and finishing it. I’ll just continue and finish that post here rather than rewrite the whole thing, so go back and pick up your read from the second to last paragraph where I was inserting a new sentence that began, “In Chattanooga…..”

In Chattanooga, their ultrafast hi-speed fiber optic Internet has helped that city establish itself over the last ten years as a center for innovation and drawn hundreds of millions of dollars of investment. An article published by CNN Business recounts how Chattanooga’s network was first set up, how much faster it was (speeds of 1,000 megabits per second versus the U.S. average of 9.3 megabits per second back in 2014), and how its creation led to substantial new business investment.

And this article which was published just a few months ago, (and comes seven years after that CNN report was made), shows that investment in Chattanooga since the creation of their fiber optic network, has now been in the BILLIONS OF DOLLARS and accounts for over 40% of all new jobs created there over the past decade.

Moreover, during the COVID pandemic, Chattanooga used its smart city fiber optic network to give students free Internet access. As this article points out, Chattanooga had plenty of bandwidth during COVID for online learning and used its city-wide network to bridge the digital divide in education by providing free internet services to economically disadvantaged students. Chattanooga’s internet service is at least four times faster than typical educational access offerings from other providers and the only one that delivers symmetrical speeds for uploads and downloads. And may I again add, does so without the EMFs created by our wireless technologies.

Without going into detail, Longmont, Colorado created a similar network in their city. Called ‘NextLight”, their fiber-fast, gigabit network provides its residents similar benefits.

The point here is that as our country considers its Infrastructure needs, we have options —smarter, faster, much more secure options—than wireless and 5G. And going back to Timothy Schoechle’s Reinventing Wires report that I referenced and linked to at the end of my last post before accidentally publishing it, Mr. Schoechle provides a roadmap forward with wired fiber optic technologies that we all can follow. As he points out:

The Internet has become one of the defining technologies of the modern world. Why has America, the Internet’s creator, become one of its most impoverished users among all the developed nations in terms of the proportion of its people with Internet access and the speed and quality of that access? Why has the Internet been growing in an inefficient, insufficient, and unsustainable direction? Is wireless access being oversold? Why are existing copper phone lines being abandoned when current protocols allow them to deliver data at gigabit speed? This report seeks to address these questions and propose answers and solutions. It explores the historical forces at play, the emerging technologies that will define the future of landlines and networks, and the public policy choices and opportunities that confront us today.

The Environmental Health Trust endorses a wired broadband future for America as well and in a letter sent to President Biden calls for such, as well as a moratorium on 5G deployment. The EHT’s letter plainly states that:

[America’s] infrastructure should be wired, not wireless. We urge that wherever possible the broadband system envisioned in the American Jobs Plan rely on safer, more secure and efficient, wired connections, especially for schools and other institutions where wired connections will save money and eliminate exposures to wireless radiation, found by the National Toxicology Program to cause clear evidence of cancer.

To borrow President Biden’s own words, we can not have “[an Infrastructure] plan that tinkers around the edges” when it comes to public and environmental health. I urge you to contact your elected officials and insist that they do not support the infrastructure bill in its present form or any bill that invests in wireless technologies or incremental investments in 5G. Instead ask them to back any proposal that thinks boldly on how a new coast to coast fiber-optic network could truly revolutionize our communications without the biological and ecological impacts of wireless and non-ionizing radiation.

In April, the Biden Administration released its plan for a massive (depending-on-how-you-count-it) $2.0 to $2.65 trillion capital expenditure on new infrastructure. Known as the American Jobs Plan, it is an ambitious program to update America’s interstate highways, ports, and public utilities—an investment that in my opinion is long overdue. Unfortunately this Plan also funds an even greater number of projects that have nothing to do with the traditional nuts-and-bolts physical infrastructure that over the past 150 years have led to massive leaps in American mobility and productivity.

Instead this plan earmarks money for creating new government agencies and programs, for picking winners and losers in our economy rather than letting a free market decide those choices, directly funds workforce development and training, and offers a variety of grants and low-interest loans to do what our nation’s financial institutions are already set-up to do. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, this legislation includes investments like offering rebates and incentives to purchase electric vehicles, provide funding for climate change research and development, protect against future pandemics through “medical countermeasures”, expand home- and community-based care services for the elderly, provide additional funding for domestic manufacturing, and numerous other “non-infrastructure projects” that crowd out investments in real infrastructure projects that truly make a difference.

One of those difference-making investments from a healthy home point-of-view, would be the creation of a new nationwide network of sustainable wired—NOT WIRELESS—broadband infrastructure. That investment would center around the build-out of a nation-wide network of fiberoptic cables which would be orders of magnitude faster than 5G while being much more secure without the associated electromagnetic fields that come with 5G transmission.

We have precedence for such a project—Longmont, CO and especially Chattanooga, TN offer the best examples of local municipalities that decided to install fiberoptic in their city and reaped tremendous benefits. In Chattanooga,

As Timothy Schoechle points out in his recent research treatise published by The National Institute for Science, Law & Public Policy:

“The Internet has become one of the defining technologies
of our society. It is our central medium for commerce and communication—but more importantly—for our public discourse, engagement, and democratic governance. However,
it has been hijacked by the commercial motivations that have come to re-define and constrain the availability, quality, content, and media of high-speed access in the United States.”

No I am not kidding.  I actually think there are a few parallels between shopping for a sunscreen and shopping for a conventional home in 2021.   Yeah, I know, it sounds crazy, but stick with me here while I explain…

Sure there are a gazillion differences.  Sure one costs about ten bucks while the other costs at least $100K (and obviously much more depending on where you live).  Sure one you lather all over your body and quickly dispose of while the other you live in for (in some cases) many years and typically invest a lot of your hard-earned money, blood, sweat, and tears, if not emotions and memories, to make that house a home.  And sure the process for buying each is completely and utterly different.

And yet, what struck me as I began to consider the content for this post was how similar I believe many people feel and how they react as they approach the purchase of each of these two items.  

Similarity #1:  We Buy Both (at least in part) For Health and Well-Being

No doubt people buy sunscreen to live happier, healthier lives; to help protect their body from skin cancer and what is now almost universally accepted to be the damaging rays of the sun; and let’s face it at the end of the day, many buy to simply   look and feel better about themselves.  The sun as we have talked about in previous posts is a natural source of EMFs that in lower doses can be healthful and beneficial.

In a similar way, some buy a home to gain their own happiness and peace of mind derived from simply having a permanent protected shelter over their heads, or from the pride of owning your own property, or from the freedom that goes with the chance to express your personality or pursue your interests or avocation or simply to gain a measure of privacy one could not get in a rental space.   

Both purchases are driven, again at least in part, by the desire to be or stay healthy.  

Similarity #2:  Despite Similarity #1, we are Generally Clueless About What’s Inside

Well, not completely clueless, but I’ve seen that Sunscreen Stare in my store many a time; that MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over) Look when reading a sunscreen label; that helpless confused “How do I Know if this is a Good or Safe Sunscreen?” Look.  Hey I get it, reading the ingredient list for most of today’s sunscreens is night and day from the ingredient list of say a Kind Bar or a box of Annie’s vegan Mac and Cheez.  It’s seems next to impossible to know what is really inside a bottle of sunscreen—filled with so many mutli-syllable chemical sounding ingredients—unless you have done some research and are fairly knowledgeable.  

But the same can be said when shopping for most conventional homes–especially if they are new or pre-construction—which don’t even come with an “ingredient list” one can read.  Who knows what chemicals are inside, behind the walls, under the floors?   We walk into a pretty showroom, handed a slick marketing brochure, shown virtual floor plans, offered samples of the final finishes, maybe even tour a model home, and yet are we ever completely sure of what we are buying until built?  

Some homes are given a score for energy efficiency (called a HERS rating), but no comparable score for health exists.  Some homes’ air quality is scored according to EPA’s Indoor airPLUS certification standards, but the program is relatively new and only voluntary.  And we know that though a few products have been banned from home construction—lead and asbestos comes to mind—there are literally thousands that have never been evaluated for prolonged human exposure safety.

By comparison, within the past year, the European Commission has published preliminary opinions on the safety of three organic UV filters called oxybenzone, homosalate, and octocrylene..  It found that the levels of two of them were not safe in the amounts at which they are currently used, and proposed a concentration limit of 2.2 percent for oxybenzone and 1.4 percent for homosalate. 

Similariy #3:  Both come with a Score that is Supposed to Be an Automatic Indicator of What You are Getting for your Money.

In the Sunscreen industry, the SPF or Sun Protection Factor is there so consumers can at a glance more easily compare efficacy of different sunscreen brands—the bigger the number, the more minutes one can stay in the sun protected .  But in my last post I mentioned that SPFs can also lure consumers into a false sense of safety that realistically keeps consumers longer in the sun than would have otherwise occurred.  

Moreover, the EWG reports that SPF scores are subjective based on human observations and testing methods.  One Proctor & Gamble study in particular highlights the potential for variability in SPF.  When P & G tested a competitor’s SPF 100 product at five different labs, the results varied from SPF 37 to SPF 75.  A 1.7% difference in light transmission yielded an SPF measurement of 37 instead of 100.

In the Homebuilding industry, HERS (Home Energy Rating System) is voluntarily used to score homes from 0 to 150.  A score of 100 means that the home being rated is average in energy efficiency, compared to other newly built homes.  A score of 0 means it is a Net Zero Energy home that uses no net energy.  And a score of 150 means the home being scored is 50% less efficient than a standard new home.

Hey, numbers in both cases are helpful but neither tells the whole story and in fact, really only tell a small part of the story.  In both cases, more information is required and needs to be conveyed with greater precision for consumers to make better informed choices.

I’ll leave you with this one nutrition tip direct from my dermatologist that I often pass along to my natural food customers.  She says that Niamidicide taken in 500 mg doses twice a day can prevent skin cancers when obviously other common sense precautions are taken.  It is part of my personal summer regiment of vitamins.