Author Archives: mark ahlheim

About mark ahlheim

I am a real estate broker affiliated with Compass that specializes in developing Chicago's healthiest homes and working the bungalow neighborhoods of Chicago.

We Need a New Real Estate Disclosure

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We are bombarded with advertisements, almost daily now, about the pending rollout of cell phone’s newest iteration of service, commonly referred to as 5G or Fifth Generation.  Its proponents promise lightning fast speeds for video and data (but really, what’s wrong with our current speeds?), and its disciples hark the promises of a new age of driverless cars and the seamless integration of a cornucopia of home-based electronic gadgets and appliances which we increasingly and affectionately lump under one umbrella and label as the “Internet of Things” or even more colloquially, “The Smart Home” .

When not working as a retail clerk in a well known vitamin/ supplement department for a local Chicago grocery store, I also work as a real estate agent. And I can tell you first-hand that many of my fellow agent’s clients in my office are thinking about “smart home” technologies in their next home, if not asking for them directly. According to at least one survey (Coldwell Banker’s (Blue Matter blog, August 10, 2016), 44% of move-in ready buyers are asking for smart home technology, and that number is most assuredly higher today, almost five years later post COVID. 

And yet, despite its many proponents and the increasing demand for these “smart home” features, there is a growing group of physicians and scientists who study these matters and after years of thorough and exhaustive research, declare that the science is settled–wireless technologies are quite literally making us sick.  

Consider the following:

  • The U.S. Toxicology Program and Italy’s Ramazzini Institute have both published large studies in the last three years concluding the microwave radiofrequency radiation used to send signal in wireless systems causes tumors (cancer) and DNA damage (see the science here);
  • Lloyds of London and other major insurers explicitly exclude coverage for any claims for wi-fi related illness (Principia Scientific International, Feb 12, 2019).  Lloyd’s internal Risk Assessment Team compares wireless technologies with asbestos [Emphasis mine] in that the early research on asbestos was “inconclusive” and only later was it conclusively shown that asbestos causes cancer;
  • While appearing before Congress in 2019, representatives from the telecom industry say they have no studies that show 5G is safe and have no plans to conduct such studies;
  • French law prohibits wireless internet in pre-schools and daycare facilities and stipulates that wireless access must be disabled in elementary schools when not in use for teaching [Emphasis mine] and
  • Many Silicon Valley parents are raising their kids tech-free.  The late Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, was a low-tech parent.  (Business Insider, Chris Weller, Feb 18, 2018 and New York Times, Nick Bilton, Sept 10, 2014)

More about the Science in upcoming blog posts. In the meantime, this is a topic of supreme interest to me precisely because I am a Realtor™. Many people are surprised to find out that real estate agents are one of the few professions to have a dedicated code of ethics. It is something that the real estate profession takes very seriously with repeated trainings for new and experienced agents alike. In fact every person when they start in real estate pledges to uphold the National Association of Realtors Code of Ethics—a code whose Preamble, first established in 1924 and virtually unchanged almost 100 years later—reads like this:

“Under all is the land. Upon its wise utilization and widely allocated ownership depend the survival and growth of free institutions and of our civilization. REALTORS® should recognize that the interests of the nation and its citizens require the highest and best use of the land and the widest distribution of land ownership. They require the creation of adequate housing, the building of functioning cities, the development of productive industries and farms, and the preservation of a healthful environment.” [Emphasis mine].

No one can ever accuse Realtors of making small plans!!!! I am proud to be a Realtor™ precisely because of this clause and my profession’s decades long commitment to it.

The last portion of the Preamble which I highlighted above is rarely discussed or talked about in real estate circles, primarily I think, because we do not have to—it goes without saying and is clearly something that we in the real estate profession have taken to heart.  For example, when you are shopping for a home there are typically separate disclosures for mold and radon.  Our Illinois Residential Real Property Disclosure Report asks Sellers to disclose any unsafe concentrations of toxins like asbestos or unsafe conditions in drinking water.  Moreover, we require that Sellers disclose known information on any lead-based paints on their property, and we mandate warnings be given to consumers on the same.

As an example, here is language direct from a 13-page informational pamphlet published by the Environmental Protection Agency that Sellers must provide to Buyers in the state of Illinois: “FACT: Lead exposure can harm young children and babies even before they are born.”  (from EPA pamphlet Protect Your Family From Lead In Your Home, June 2003, p.1)

So as the Science is increasingly tells us that many electromagnetic fields are ultimately detrimental to our health, I believe it is time for a new mandated Real Estate Disclosure that comes with every home purchase. That is, a Disclosure that asks Sellers to disclose if they know of any electromagnetic fields within and around their home that exceed certain specified guidelines, or at least offer buyers the chance to do their own risk assessment, to perform their own EMF inspection, or waive the opportunity to do so. Just like the procedures my profession follows to inform and educate consumers about the dangers of lead paint, this disclosure should be accompanied by a pamphlet that outlines what EMFs are, what biological health effects science says they can have, and what prospective homeowners can do to reduce or mitigate their exposure.

If you agree with that (or even if you don’t!) let me know. We’re just beginning to peel away the onion here. There is so much more to this topic that far exceed the boundaries of this one post or even a series of posts. I promise that I will be expanding the conversation in the days and weeks and months ahead.

Evolution of the Mobile Phone

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In December 2006, my wife and I began a journey from Chicago to Ukraine in search of a child to adopt. Adoption was something Meg and I talked about even when we were first dating and Ukraine made sense because of the large Ukrainian community that already lives here. In our perfect world, we were looking for up to two kids, sex unimportant, age not that important, but relatively healthy as we did not feel up to the task of caring for children who had any severe physical or mental disabilities. We came home seven weeks later with THREE, all siblings who had been separated, ages 3, 4, and 7, two which spoke Russian and our youngest, our boy, who basically only knew the words ‘machina’ (Russian for ‘car’) and ‘Pampers’.

Out of necessity, we pretty much had to dive head first into parenting and doing what we could to patch together our new family. Our life was hectic to say the least. I felt like I couldn’t get my head above water to breathe for many, many years. And even now with my youngest two finishing their senior and junior years of high school respectively, we sometimes feel like we still got a long way to go, but we have no regrets on what we did or how we did it.

I tell that story because we began that journey about the same time the first truly mobile cell phones were commercially manufactured and sold, and it all happened while my attention was necessarily diverted. I recall having to call my wife on the firehouse phone when all the other guys at the house had their own private phone; I did not get my own cell phone until two-and-a-half years ago; and we finally got rid of our landline in 2020.

I was so disconnected from the cell phone world that I recall having no idea what ‘texting’ was or how anyone got an Internet connection through their phone. Taking and sending photos to friends and family? I still am often fuzzy on exactly how to do so. And using an app is not in my vocabulary.

The Evolution of the Cell Phone — A Timeline

My point is that while me and my wife were raising our kids, the use of cell phones and the proliferation of smart phones happened fast—in Jimmy John’s lingo, “freaky fast”. Though the first phone was created around 1981, there was really only a handful of users by 1990, and we can honestly say that the first truly “mobile” phones did not appear until the introduction of the second generation models around the turn of the century. It may seem like we have always swiped our cell phone screens or taken a picture to pay a bill or deposit a check, but this is an-honest-to-goodness relatively new phenomenon. Check out the chart below:

I’ll always remember the 1G phone used by Richard Gere’s character in the movie Pretty Woman which was released in 1990. So yes, while the cell phone has been around for 30 years, our reliance on it as a technological virtual assistant really only started since about the time my kids first set foot in America.

As a side note, In between the segments shown above, there were variations on the theme and subtle but significant incremental improvements made as phone technology improved over the years. For those interested, I have found a superb explanation of these changes to hardware and features and functionality, and it is best summarized here.

Global WiFi Networks

Parallel with our adoption of cell phone technology—”adoption”, get it, pun intended—we have seen an explosion in the number of global wi-fi networks since my kids were first adopted. A group called WiGLE was started in 2001 to begin cataloging wireless networks around the world. Their purpose according to their own web site is to consolidate location and information of wireless networks world-wide to a central database, and have user-friendly desktop and web applications that can map, query and update the database via the web.

Here’s an example of what you can find on their site:

U.S. WiFi Networks since 2000

The red line on the graph shows the cumulative total of networks while the gray shows the average number of networks in operation at any one time—a giant build out since starting at a baseline of practically zero in 2000. Now how about a geographic perspective over the past 25 years:

Crazy right? My point for showing this is to make clear how recent and how immense these changes have been. Thirty years ago, there were so few WiFi networks that they simply don’t show on a global map.

I can’t say this enough—as we discuss safe healthy homes in this blog, you can see for yourself that our electromagnetic world was very different 30 years ago. I REPEAT, ONLY THIRTY YEARS AGO. And regardless of how much you think it’s deployment does or does not impact human (or insect or farm animal or plant or microbial) health, it is clear that this externality is a profoundly new variable that we really did not have to consider as little as four decades ago, but must now take it into account as we come up with new definitions of what a healthy home truly means.

Man-Made Electromagnetic Fields

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I introduced the concept of electromagnetic fields (EMFs) in a previous post. Let’s review:

  1. EMFs are a natural part of our universe. They are produced, for instance, by both the sun and the earth. They are created anywhere electricity is generated, transmitted or used. And I should note, electric signals are completely inherent to the human body. Our heart, our brain, our nerves all run on electrical impulses. In fact the clinical definition of death is the absence of any electrical signals within the human body;
  2. EMFs are all invisible to the naked human eye, except for visible light which our eyes recognize as ROY G BIV = red/orange/yellow/green/blue/indigo/violet); and
  3. EMFs can be beneficial or they can be harmful. One example of the former is the sun’s production of Vitamin D in the body leading to better immunity and stronger bones; an example of the latter is the earth’s natural meridians of energy that when corrupted by geopathic stress have been known to create dysfunction among humans and led to the creation of disciplines like Feng Shui and Vatsu that offer guidance on how to align our lives and our possessions with the most harmonious energies in nature.

Okay, what else do we need to know about EMFs? For starters, they are arranged by wavelength or (its inverse) frequency along a line known as ‘The Electromagnetic Spectrum’. Wavelengths are exactly as they sound—they are a measurement of the distance between incoming waves, completely analogous to water waves coming to shore as they travel across a pond, a lake, or an ocean. The wavelength is the distance between those waves as they pass by a certain point; their frequency is a measure of how often those waves repeat. A wave with a very long wavelength passes a point very infrequently; a wave with high frequency has very short wavelengths. They both describe the same thing just from different perspectives.

Second, Science gives a name to every segment along this spectrum. A couple of these names are self-descriptive, e.g., X-rays are, well, the X-rays we all know used by doctors and dentists to diagnose disease; the Microwave segment of this spectrum include microwaves used for communication as well as the microwaves used in a conventional microwave oven to cook our foods (and is the focus of a separate post in this blog entitled ‘Radar Range’….look it up!). The Power Line EMFs that are a part of this spectrum refer to the electricity that flows along the wires hidden inside the walls of our homes; we know the very long wavelength and low frequency EMFs portion of this spectrum as TV and AM/FM radio; and the segment of this spectrum labeled ‘Infrared’ we know as the EMFs used to create the heat we feel from a heat lamp or as the mechanism that gives an infrared sauna its therapeutic powers. And so on.

As I bring this post back full-circle from where we began, you must know that EMFs are either ‘natural’ or ‘man-made’. Since the discovery and commercialization of electricity in the latter part of the 19th century and even more so since the introduction of the Internet and wireless communications, the earth is now filled with orders of magnitude more artificial or man-made EMFs than natural ones. It is the man-made EMFs that concern us the most especially with the anticipated roll-out of 5G technologies that once approved will completely overlay our existing cell phone networks pulsing out signals and frequencies never before used for human communication within the home or tested for human safety.

Next up, we’ll wrap up our introductory series of posts on electromagnetic fields with a post that talks to the four types of EMFs that are most associated with detrimental health affects in humans.

Be the Adult in the Room

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A couple posts ago I featured a video produced by the Environmental Health Trust that shows children playing with and interacting with “smart speakers” within their homes at distances way closer than recommended by manufacturer’s guidelines. Simple Question: When these videos were filmed, where were the adults in the room?

Okay, it’s partially a rhetorical question—we know they were there. You could hear parents in the background and they were probably behind the camera. Moreover, I gotta presume that all of the adults in these videos were simply not aware of the recommendations given by the manufacturers to keep their distance, otherwise they would have intervened in their children’s play.

So the bigger issue is: Whose going to be there now and in the future to protect our children? Whose looking out for their health and safety? Whose going to be the adult in the room and set boundaries kids can’t cross when it comes to using technology? Is it going to be their parents? Their teachers? The government?

The answer I think is ‘all of the above’. But frankly it BEGINS with you. That’s right YOU. Yes, I am pointing my finger at YOU, the reader of this blog. Especially parents with very young kids and those trying to conceive and thinking of having children. It is up to all of us to do our part to learn more about electromagnetic radiation, make an informed assessment of the health risks involved, and for those who believe there are indeed detrimental health consequences, gain a sense of urgency and act accordingly. This blog is being written, in part, to help give you the tools and ammunition and encouragement to do that.

Kids aren’t going to act alone. They simply don’t know the dangers and who can blame them. Except for a tiny sliver of the Electromagnetic Spectrum we all know as Visible Light (think ROY G BIV, the colors of the rainbow), all electromagnetic fields are invisible to the human eye. You can’t see them. You can’t hear them. You can’t smell them. You can’t taste them. So what kid would even think twice about cuddling up to a wireless smart speaker that’s pulsing out invisible emfs at a rate of up to 5.8 billion cycles per second? An adult who knows better HAS TO intervene and set ground rules for using any and all electronic/ wireless devices in the home.

To intervene like I mention above (and that may mean being a bit of a helicopter parent); to take the time and effort to get educated on this topic and frequently challenge conventional thinking; to bring this topic up with relatives, neighbors, friends and even teachers or who aren’t aware of the potential health implications; to start doing the things we need to do around our homes to genuinely create a safe place to live and work and raise a family; and to challenge our schools and municipal governments to connect our students and our citizens through faster and more secure methods (e.g., fiber optic cables) rather than wireless, will take persistence and COURAGE—the latter which I truly believe to be the least common of human traits. I do not underestimate the challenge that lies before every person who cares about creating a truly healthy home and who sees the mitigation/ reduction of emfs in their homes as a the central tenet toward achieving that goal.

(If only the human body would react to the invisible radio frequency devices that many of us willingly or unwillingly bath in all day–you know the fields produced by cell phones, wifi routers, bluetooth devices, “smart” utility meters, your baby monitor, your doorbell and all the “smart appliances” inside our “modern” homes–the same way it does when we get, say, too much sun or forget to put on that sunscreen before heading outdoors to garden all afternoon…..we’d get sunburned without ever going outside! Or we’d turn green or blue or purple or some other color when our body was being hit by excessive levels of EMFs so we would know immediately to get out of that environment and seek protection.)

Although our bodies don’t turn green or blue or purple when faced with excessive or very concentrated everyday electromagnetic fields, as it turns out there have been many reported cases of individuals breaking out into skin rashes or becoming sun-burned red when exposed to too many emfs, especially those with a condition known as EHS or Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity. See visual examples here and here.

We frequently have few telltale signs of any health problems when we are first exposed to what author Nicolas Pineault calls, “our stupid use of technology.” And even fewer of us are even aware of the potential health consequences of repetitive long term exposures to emfs which we now know are cumulative. All the more reason for anyone reading this blog to get up to speed on this topic post haste as we act to protect the most vulnerable among us—our elementary school aged kids and toddlers and infants and mothers-to-be—and to act with authority and conviction as we do so.

Why are Adolescents and Young Adults Getting Sick?

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As long as I can remember growing up as a young boy, my parents would sit me down along with my older brother Craig and my younger Sister Sue in front of our old Zenith black-and-white TV to watch shows like the Jerry Lewis Telethon for Muscular Dystrophy or the Danny Thomas Telethon for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital (the Memphis-based medical center dedicated to pediatric cancer care), and I would wonder: How do kids my age get cancer? And I wondered Why? and Why Not Me? I would get sad sometimes watching these shows as I pondered how children my age could get what I thought of as an “old-person’s” disease like cancer and it seemed so unfair to me since cancer was an almost for-sure death sentence back then.

Fast forward fifty years and childhood cancer is still very much with us. It is something I wrote about exactly 8 years ago on these pages…..go back and reference my post entitled, “Why Build Healthy—Part II“, in which I describe how cancer was an almost unknown disease at the turn of the last century, certainly way down on the list of diseases that doctors specified as the cause of death, with pneumonia and tuberculosis heading that list.

I was curious how the data squared pre-COVID and sure enough according to the CDC, the largest number of deaths in the U.S. in 2019 was due to Heart Disease, but Cancer was a close second. I thought about all this when I saw a headline somewhere on the Internet recently that according to the National Cancer Institute, childhood cancer rates are up 27% since 1975, that is in U.S. kids under the age of 19.

Increased Cancer Rates Among Young Adults

That got me thinking even more: how are these kids getting sick? And what could be causing these increases?, at which point I dug up this nugget of recent medical research: Cancer statistics for cohorts of people living in the U.S., ages 15-39—a cross section of people that medical researchers sometimes group together and call “adolescents and young adults” (AYA)—show an overall increased incidence of cancer in all AYA age cohorts (ages 15-19, 20-29, and 30-39) during the most recent decade (2007-2016).

What really stuck out to me about this research was that the increases in cancer incidence, according to the authors, was “largely driven by thyroid cancer, which rose by approximately 3% annually among those aged 20-39 years and 4% among those aged 15-19 years.” Okay call me crazy, but I have long ago adopted the practice of talking on my cell phone on speaker and if I am not at a desk or table or countertop where I can put down my phone while talking, I hold the phone up relatively flat in front of me so the bottom edge where the phone’s speaker is located is closest to my body facing my mouth and neck.

So who reading this post knows where the thyroid is located? That’s right kids, just below the adam’s apple on your neck and directly in line with that cell phone speaker/ microphone I am holding in front of me. Yikes!

I am not alone in this. We see this body posture all the time among those we interact with everyday, especially when walking around outside and when shopping in places like grocery stores and big box home improvement stores.

Colorectal Cancer Rates Quadruple in Young Adults

I got an email last month from our friends at the Environmental Health Trust that I finally had a chance to look at yesterday and today. Headlined “Colorectal Cancer Rates Quadruple in Young Adults, Sperm Counts Drop” with the subtitle, “Skyrocketing Colorectal Cancer and the Great Sperm Decline: Could it be Related to Cell Phone Radiation?”, it certainly got my attention. Especially as it contrasted the rising rates of colorectal cancer among young adults in their 20s to the dramatic drop in colon cancer rates among people age 60 and older living in mainly industrialized countries around the world.

It was a striking contrast and it made me ponder…..where do a lot of young women “wear” their cell phone when shopping or socializing? Answer, especially if wearing jeans: Rear Pocket. Where do a lot of guys keep their phone when going out for business or for leisure? Answer: Front Pocket.

Coupled with the finding from the previous study that I mention and link to above, “rates increased for cancers of the colorectal and uterine corpus in the group aged 30 to 39 years old”, one sees an increasing amount of empirical evidence that points to a causal effect between cell phone microwave radiation, how we use that technology in our daily lives, and human cancers. These trends ought to concern us enough to (1) pause and ask serious questions of our public health officials about the safety of our wireless systems and (2) decide what changes we are willing to immediately make in our own personal lives to better protect ourselves and loved ones.

Rising Cancer Rates Linked to Cell Phone Use?

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I bought my first cell phone just over two-and-a-half years ago. That was long enough ago that when I got the phone, it actually came with a paper pamphlet that provided instructions on how to use it! I am geeky enough to read some of that stuff and when I did I recall seeing way down in the very fine print there were some warnings about usage and EMF exposure.

You can find the language that pertains to these topics on your cell phone. On my own iPhone (an i5), I find it by going first to <Settings, then <General, then <Legal & Regulatory, then <RF Exposure. The paragraphs that are included under this last heading mostly talk about how my iPhone was tested to meet all regulatory limits for radio frequency (RF). It defines the Specific Absorption Rate (or SAR) which refers to the rate at which the body absorbs radio frequency energy, And it ends with the advice: “To reduce exposure to RF energy, use a hands-free option, such as the built-in speakerphone, headphones, or other similar accessories.”

These fine print warnings have been nicely summarized in the following video produced by the Environmental Health Trust:

You’ll note that manufacturers who are quoted in this video frequently specify humans should not get within 20 centimeters of their devices. For the metric challenged, that’s about 8 inches.

What this video makes obvious—something we know by simple observation—is that many kids and their parents are not following these guidelines. That’s not the kids fault…..they do not know any better and parents are often in the dark on these topics themselves.

So in my mind, that begs a question: do we have any evidence that cell phones and other man-made electronic devices like the modems and routers that power our household wireless systems negatively affect human health? The short answer is we do.

More in a future post.

Our Polluted Indoor Air

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Before diving back into our discussion about electromagnetic fields, I thought I would back up for a moment this morning to talk briefly about the poor indoor air quality we generally see in a typical American home. I was prompted to backpedal and take this short diversion after reading an unsolicited email I got this morning from a real estate inspector I do not know. It read in part (and as you read below, for those who are not familiar, the acronym HVAC is contractor-speak for Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning):

Subject Line Title: Do Dirty Air Filters Impact Your HVAC System?

Their Answer: Yes! Dirty and clogged air filters waste money on energy costs and cause damage to your HVAC system.

#1 reason for HVAC system failure? Dirty air filters.

#1 reason for dirty air filters? YOU!

Now there are a lot of things I don’t do very well in my life, but changing out the air filter on our home furnace is not one of them. I am pretty religious about changing it out as the seasons change and almost always opt for the “cleanest” filters on the market. Beyond that, I have also been known to get our ducts professionally cleaned every two or three years. But even with that, our home still gets quite dusty, and that is one reason I long ago decided that the healthy homes I would some day develop would be based on something other than the traditional gas forced air system we see in practically every new Chicago home. (More on that in future posts).

But I digress….the main takeaway from above is that air filters do matter; that homeowners play a big part in keeping their own home healthy; and what is implied but certainly very true: our indoor air is simply not very clean. The Environmental Protection Agency explicitly recognized in a report originally published in 1987, that the concentrations of some pollutants are 2 to 5 times higher indoors than typical outdoor concentrations. And of course to make matters worse, a 1989 Report to Congress documents that Americans, on average, spend approximately 90 percent of their time indoors.

Now think about it, those numbers are from 1987 and 1989—long before any widespread Internet, before cell phones, before wireless, before the explosion of big screen TVs and home gaming systems, before any online learning– and since then our new homes have gotten considerably “tighter” with fewer air exchanges as building codes have mandated greater energy efficiency. Moreover, COVID has forced us to lockdown within our homes for unprecedented periods of time.

Anyone willing to bet that both numbers reported by the EPA back in 1987 and 1989 are higher—maybe much higher—today than they were 30 years ago?

So it is not surprising that a survey among consumers conducted by Green Builder Media last December found their number one concern to be good air quality. In fact Millenials and younger generations increasingly view good indoor air quality as a fundamental homeowner right.

One company that gets this is Velux, the skylight people. I have four Velux skylights in my home and they have performed flawlessly since first installed almost fifteen years ago. They are a feature that truly differentiates our home from our neighbors. They make a solid, high-quality products and I have specified them for my new healthy home designs.

Anyway, Velux makes the case for better indoor air and for constructing homes that follow bau biology principles, while also very nicely showing how we got into this predicament, with a brilliant video they produced a couple years back. They achieve more in those 160 seconds than whatever I might achieve through a series of blog posts that talk to the same topics.

In short, we have to start building differently. We have to start living differently. You can begin by going home and changing out that air filter that has been tirelessly working all winter long! Then sit back and watch the movie, think critically about what’s being said, and let me know what you think.

I dare you to watch it just once.

Natural Electromagnetic Fields

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I mentioned in my last post that when it comes to healthy homes, there is an 800-pound gorilla in the room that very few acknowledge as a threat to our collective health. That gorilla has a name, and its name is “Electromagnetic Fields” or EMFs for short.

EMFs come from both man-made sources and from natural sources. Both can be a source (pun intended) of wellness and both can be a source of sickness and disease. I’ll discuss natural sources of EMFs in this post; the artificial man-made ones in posts that follow.

SCHUMANN RESONANCES

The sun as a for instance, is a natural source of electromagnetic fields, some of which we see (visible light), and some of which we don’t (e.g., infrared light). Our exposure to the sun’s natural electromagnetic fields can be good for us (e.g., indirect and lower levels of sunlight triggers Vitamin D production in the body, which in turn is an important factor in things like bone density and immune protection). But too much sun is of course bad—overexposure will burn the skin and even cause DNA damage to our cells.

Sit outside on a sunny Lincoln Park bench along the lakefront in Chicago on a frigid January day and tilt your head up toward the sun and close your eyes. Even with outside temperature in the 20s, you’ll feel the sun’s radiation penetrating, warming and soothing your whole body—who among us doesn’t know how wonderful that feels. But sit on that same park bench and repeat that act in the middle of July and chances are you’ll begin to feel the burn sooner than later and quickly retreat to find some sunscreen or some shade.

Beyond the sun, we also know that the earth has its own natural electromagnetic field known as the Schumann Resonances. These forces are generated and excited by the earth’s own lightning discharges. Here’s an animation showing this phenomenon. Today, Schumann resonances are recorded at many separate research stations around the world and some scientists suggest that we can gauge global warming trends by regularly monitoring and measuring them.

HARTMANN & CURRY LINES

Finally, let’s not forget the natural magnetic field lines that emanate from the earth’s north and south poles which, after interacting with solar radiation, create a network of grid lines named after their founders Dr. Ernst Hartman and Dr. Curry. These lines of geopathic stress can be found using dowsing rods, and as the linked content makes clear, some of history’s most sophisticated civilizations located their settlements and situated their most prominent civic and religious buildings according to earth’s energies that produce these grid lines. It’s a fascinating read for those who are truly interested.

As a couple other examples: the Chinese, with their Feng Shui philosophy, were the first people to establish a real code of conduct for creating homes in harmony with their natural and geographical environment. And the traditional Indian system of architecture known as Vastu Shastra uses elements of design, layout, measurements, ground preparation, space arrangement, and spatial geometry that make for a harmonious life.

Applying all these ideas to our modern age, especially to anyone who works in commercial real estate or even those who are casual observers of our built environment but are skeptical of these methods, don’t we all know of a commercial building in our community that regardless of type of business, of visibility, of how relevant or attractive the concept, or even of the amount of capital invested, flat out fails EVERY TIME there is a new tenant or owner? How’s that possible? Interesting, eh?

So I ask: if in ancient times, humanity fully grasped the relationship between the earth and the state of health of living things, shouldn’t we at least begin to explore some of the same concepts when designing and developing a healthy home for you? One person who I have met and I know to be an expert building biologist on the topic of geopathic stress and who can surely help with this task, is Mr. Michael Schwaebe. He lives and works in California, and his contact info is here. Just scroll through the names until you find Michael’s name.

Okay, fair enough. Enough history and talk about ancient cultures for the day. I hope we’ve begun to establish that EMFs are a natural part of our world (such as the sun) and that ancient civilizations took seriously the notion that human health is deeply connected to nature and to the vibrations of the earth. In a future series of posts, we’ll begin to tackle how our artificial man-made sources of EMFs are increasingly associated with modern chronic disease and recognized as the most prevalent—if not the most underreported– health danger in our homes and our daily lives.

The 800 pound gorilla

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There is an eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room when we talk about healthy homes and part of the problem is that no one—and I mean practically no one—is talking about it. When we hear about healthy homes in our COVID pandemic world, we typically hear about things like air purification, water quality, anti-microbial surfaces, and “lifestyle-enabled floor plans” (whatever that means) that we are told help occupants reduce or even eliminate their stress and thereby live a longer, healthier life. (Is it possible to really ELIMINATE stress?)

In the same breadth, I hear many real estate pundits dictate that “a healthy home” must enable “Connected Living” (I guess they mean greater bandwidth for enhanced working and schooling and shopping from home), must be “Resilient and Self-Sufficient” (which can mean everything from onsite power production like solar photovoltaics to onsite food production like having a garden or simply having a pantry or an even bigger pantry so we can store more food), and must provide greater connections to nature through balconies, terraces, and gardens or by installing bigger windows to increase the views to the outside.

And while some of the items in the last paragraph are honorable goals worth pursuing, they don’t always make a home necessarily ‘healthy’ (a topic for future blog posts) or, when it comes down to it, only have a scant connection to health. Instead our public discourse about topics like these and the mainstream or social media coverage that inevitably follows, really only distracts us from having a serious discussion about those aspects of today’s home building and home living that DO significantly and detrimentally affect our health—like that 800-pound-gorilla— and stops us from having an even bigger conversation about what we should do about it.

Let’s start that conversation in my next post. Until then, I’ll leave you with two references that may spark curiosity and interest as well as provide some context to my next post.

In the meantime, it’s a beautiful sunny afternoon and we’ve been locked down forever…..I’m taking my kids to the zoo (smile!)

Making Toast Too

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Like one of my earlier posts entitled Snowed In which deserved its own postscript entree, my Making Toast post also has a flip side that is related and worthy of discussion and deserving of its own follow-up post. Here it is…..

Turns out the invention of the toaster, in and of itself was (to borrow one of my favorite phrases from high school math) ‘necessary but not sufficient’, to revolutionize breakfast.  It took two products to make this happen.  They were related to be sure—so much so that today they seem joined at the hip—but independent inventions nonetheless.

The invention that really made a difference?  Any guesses? The answer was the first mechanical bread slicing machine.  It’s hard to imagine a world without the phrase, “That’s the greatest thing since sliced bread!”, but before Otto Frederick Rohwedder’s 1928 invention, prepackaged pre-sliced bread simply did not exist.  And without it, it is easy to think that the toaster would have never been as popular or as ubiquitous as it has become.  

Okay, so what again does this have to do with healthy green building?   While the modern kitchen—with its emphasis as much on entertainment and socializing as it is on chopping and sautéing —is largely a testimonial to modest incremental changes like the toaster and the Hoosier, modern building practices and materials are generally the result of disruptive technologies that were game changers in the industry from the get-go.  These disruptive innovations dramatically improved performance or decreased a homeowner’s costs to maintain (think first aluminum siding and now Hardie board), or greatly reduced a contractor’s time to finish (think drywall), or completely changed our lifestyle and consumer preference (think central air conditioning).

Innovations like those above, often come at a high cost though—costs that usually do not directly impact your wallet or a corporate balance sheet but do impact society.  The production of PVC pipe for residential plumbing and byproducts like vinyl siding as Sandra Steingraber writes in her book Raising Elijah, is one of the most environmentally destructive things we do; sheetrock or drywall as it is commonly called, is one of the most prevalent materials used in a modern home but molds quickly and easily when it gets wet and if not remediated can have long-term public health consequences; and indoor central air has created a generation of Americans who don’t know how to open a window and has led to what I consider a crisis of under-ventilated buildings, poor indoor air quality, and the incremental erosion of human health.

Unlike the toaster, you see, innovations in home building usually come with what both my graduate engineering and business school professors called ‘externalities’ which complicate the cost/benefit analysis.   We don’t see these hidden costs and usually don’t consider their unintended consequences, but we all pay the price—in this case, higher health care costs, lost productivity, and reduced human potential.   If we started to add these societal costs to conventional building, green and healthy building would begin to look like the relative bargain that they really are.

And finally, unlike the toaster, innovation in home building rarely depends on a complementary technology to fully exploit its true potential.  One relatively recent exception: advances in stone cutting technology was instrumental to the adoption of granite and other natural stones as a common countertop material.

That’s a good thing because it means we DO NOT need innovation to build healthy high-performance homes today—we have all the tools, and techniques, and naturally-derived building materials available to us right now to do so. All it takes is a builder and a client dedicated to that common purpose, along with someone like myself (smile) who is looking at the big picture and who can tie it all together in a package that makes both financial and lifestyle sense for today’s post COVID real estate market.