Mark Playne
March 1
ARTHUR FIRSTENBERG May 28, 1950 – February 25, 2025
As many of you will remember, I called Arthur Firstenberg's book 'The Invisible Rainbow' "NOTB's book of the century.
He set the level, warning us of the harm of the world of electricity for many of us to follow.
NOTB republished many of his fascinating and insightful emails.
It is maybe the most important book for understanding the real cause of the many symptoms we witnessed during the pandemic. Symptoms labelled as due to a 'coronavirus'.
The book provided much of the foundation for my understanding of what we have been going through.
They called this illness 'Influence of the stars', a name that morphed into 'Influenza.'
However, I did meet with Arthur's ex-campaigning partner at 5G Space Appeal Claire Edwards, who pointed out that Arthur never seemed to fully acknowledge the possibility that the very domestic technology he was warning the world about could also be used as a weapons.
EMFs, RFs and EFs are without a doubt being used as weapons within a military context as well as well as on civilians, yet IMO this apparent chink in Arthur's armour simply represented the sign of a decent human being. Simply put, good people, which 99.99% of us are, find it hard to imagine such dark actions, which is one of the reasons why so many of us have fallen for the lies of our leaders and their 'evil deeds'.
As he said in his introduction:"I was astonished by the number of people who contacted me after I broke my arm telling me they had broken theirs too -- some of them this year, and others within the last few years. It occurred to me to wonder: has there been a significant increase in osteoporosis and bone fractures around the world? And if so, is this yet another health effect caused by the use of cell phones and their infrastructure irradiating our bones as well as the rest of our bodies?"
On the 2nd October, Arthur announced he had become ill, with something he could not get to the bottom of.
"...I have been extremely ill for six weeks.
I am putting all my energy into making sure The Earth and I, my important book about the environmental crisis, will be released shortly.
On August 20, after spending all day on the computer... my body was seized by an unknown force that has paralyzed and crippled me ever since.... Suddenly, from one moment to the next, as I was shutting down the computer, I could not move and every muscle in my body felt like it had been attacked by a baseball bat. Since then I am in extreme pain all over all the time, from my fingers to my toes, all my muscles are so weak, and I can only move very slowly. I am still trying to find out what is causing this..."
Coming from one of the world's best researchers, such words leapt off the page as I read them.
A couple of months later, Arthur wrote the following words - a stark reminder to our current place are in this stage of man's 'progress' in his supposed evolution.
"...Electromagnetic hypersensitivity” (EHS) is a term that allows doctors to pretend that electricity is harmless and that radiation does not injure their patients.
It allows people who have discovered they can feel electricity and radiation to pretend that there is something wrong with them and that everyone else does not feel it.
It allows environmentalists to pretend that the vanishing of birds and wildlife and the collapse of the Earth’s life support systems are due to something else.
It allows people who use cell phones to pretend they do not feel the radiation and that their insomnia, headaches, joint pains, digestive problems, panic attacks, memory loss, tinnitus, nosebleeds, high blood pressure, heart failure, neurological problems, and diabetes are caused by something else.
It is late autumn here in Santa Fe.
And it is late autumn in the life of the Earth.
We must prevent winter from coming, for there will be no spring if it does.
It is up to all of us..."
ARTHUR FIRSTENBERG - 13th December 2024 newsletter
Obituary
ARTHUR FIRSTENBERG
May 28, 1950 – February 25, 2025
For nearly 50 years, Arthur Firstenberg lived with awareness of technology’s harms. May he rest in peace.
Arthur Firstenberg, author, environmentalist and activist, died in his home after months of an undiagnosed illness, surrounded by family and friends.
Arthur was born in Brooklyn, New York to survivors of the Holocaust. His childhood summers in upstate New York, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite National Park, and on an island near Newfoundland fostered his love of nature. At Cornell University, he devoted half of his time to hiking, canoeing and rock climbing—and half to physics, mathematics, ancient civilizations and foreign languages. After graduating in 1971, he lived with small farmers in Norway and among Guatemala’s traditional Maya.
From 1978 to 1982, Arthur attended medical school at the University of California, Irvine. He left before graduating after more than 40 dental x-rays led to his experiencing microwave sickness.
He became a vegetarian and a Feldenkrais practitioner.
In 1986, Arthur participated in the Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament. While walking across the U.S., he witnessed modern society’s destruction of the Earth and its creatures. In 1989, in search of a simple life, he traveled to northernmost Canada but found heart-wrenching destruction there, too.
In 1996, to expedite the roll-out of cellular phone service, Congress passed the Telecommunications Act. Its Section 704 prohibits municipalities from denying permits to install cellular antennas based on their environmental effects. Arthur founded the Cellular Phone Task Force and began providing a clearinghouse for information about wireless technologies’ injurious effects and a global support network for people disabled by electromagnetic fields. He began tracking the permit requests that corporations made to municipalities to install cellular antennas, smart meters and other radiation-emitting technologies—and rallied others to try to stop such efforts.
In 1997, based on the rights of states, nature and disabled people, the Cellular Phone Task Force joined other groups to challenge the Federal Communications Commission’s radio-frequency radiation exposure limits. Their efforts were unsuccessful.
In 2002, the U.S. Access Board recognized that under the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), electromagnetic sensitivities may be considered disabilities.
Arthur moved to Santa Fe, NM in 2005. Introducing himself to a packed audience at the Women’s Club, he named some of the effects of exposure to electromagnetic radiation—nausea, nosebleeds, diarhea, headaches, insomnia, fatigue, irregular hair loss and nerve pain. Many people were moved to tears as they realized wireless technologies’ effects on their families, pets and themselves.
Each time a corporation proposed a new cell tower or the city proposed installing new WiFi, or a utility proposed transmitting “smart” meters, Arthur notified his mailing list and encouraged people to attend public hearings and speak out. The City Council chambers often overflowed.
Arthur became known for his intolerance of wireless devices, his passionate public comments, his unwillingness to compromise on ecological or public health, and for suing a neighbor whose Wi-Fi disturbed him. The NY Times and other media repeatedly ridiculed Arthur for that lawsuit. The attention did not faze him.
In 2021, through the Santa Fe Alliance for Public Health and Safety, he petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on 1)whether the Telecom Act’s Section 704 violates the First Amendment right of access to courts and 2)whether “environmental effects” also encompasses “health effects.” Many organizations joined this suit, but the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.
Arthur tracked the dates of his experience of new or intensified symptoms—and found that they correlated with the dates on which satellites, 5G and other technologies turned on. In The Invisible Rainbow, he correlated electrification’s rise with the increase of previously unknown diseases including cancer, heart disease, diabetes and Alzheimer’s. He considered radiation emitted by cordless phones, cellular antennas, mobile phones, laptops, fluorescent lights, satellites, smart utility meters, newer cars and other transmitting devices a violation of nature.
For years, Arthur got around Santa Fe with a bicycle. He never owned a television or a cell phone. He dreamed of people politely accepting neighbors’ requests to turn off mobile devices and unplug WiFi. Because computers ravage the Earth and public health from their cradles-to-graves, he dreamed of a society with shared—not individually owned—computers. He frequently called for people to quit using mobile devices.
As a member of Once A Forest, he opposed forest management policies such as thinning and prescribed fires.
Arthur understood the consequences of the electrical power at our fingertips. “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. Instead of trying to fix the whole planet, let us attend to our own simple lives.”
Firstenberg’s books include 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).
Arthur Firstenberg is survived by a nephew and countless people committed to respecting nature and reducing electronic technologies’ harms to ecosystems and public health.
REVIEWS
RETIRED BIOLOGICAL SAFETY OFFICER
IMPERIAL COLLEGE - LONDON
This is an excellent summary of Arthur Firstenberg's book "The Invisible Rainbow", which is itself a much longer summary of the timeline linking the exposure of animals (especially humans) and plants to a wide range of illnesses and metabolic disorders. These include microwave sickness (aka electromagnetic hypersensitivity) diabetes, heart attacks, cancer and many more.
The villain of the piece is pulsed and other alternating electromagnetic fields in the environment that interfere with electric currents used by our own bodies and, in particular, the electric currents that flow through our cell membranes. Their main effect is to make these membranes leak. This short circuits and reduces the normal voltage (trans-membrane potential) that provides the energy for most of our bodily functions In effect, they starve us of our energy and this can have all sorts of unexpected effects.
For example, the mitochondria (the cells' powerhouses) use an electrochemical gradient across their membranes generated from the food we eat to make ATP, which is the main energy currency of our cells. But this ATP is used by the external membrane of the cell to absorb nutrients and excrete toxic byproducts, So, not only do these electromagnetic fields starve us of energy (giving, among other things, symptoms of chronic fatigue) they also poison us with our own toxins. Also, since ATP is needed by our immune systems, we become more susceptible to disease and also to cancer, which arises from the inability of the immune system to weed out precancerous cells.
That said, the body does try to fight back. In particular, the inflow of calcium ions through our leaking cell membranes stimulates metabolic activity in general and repair mechanisms in particular. If you think about it, this is the only way that a cell can "know" that its membrane has been damaged.
But the increased metabolic activity needed to repair the damage has side effects, particularly on the cells of the nervous system. Here the extra activity makes our sensory cells send false signals to the brain to give us the symptoms of electrical hypersensitivity, including ADHD as our brain cells become hyperactive and pain and false feelings of heat or cold anywhere on our body. When the inner ear is affected, we may experience tinnitus, loss of balance and all the symptoms of motion sickness, including nausea.
It is not nice to be electrosensitive and no one knows this more than Arthur Firstenberg, who is the most electrosensitive person that I have ever come across Please read on to see more details and the observations and experiments that inspired Arthur to write his book, "The Invisible Rainbow".
It is hard to comprehend how systematic and deliberate the silencing of the harm that electromagnetic radiation causes has been.
It is not accidental that the very youngest have been 'educated' into regarding many of the devices that have incredibly high EMF radiation as essential for their lives.
Whatever age we are we have been programmed to accept more and more EMF radiation into our lives. The other side of this is that those canaries in the coal mines that have been suffering from severe effects of the EMF radiation have been mocked and dismissed by all forms of the biased media.
Startling instances of men, women and children suffering harm have been suppressed. Moving forward to our present time we can now see that so many of these devices that are causing harm are also part of surveillance capitalism.
It is little wonder that this agenda of 'smart' everything would be pushed forward regardless of any harm it may be causing. This book is so valuable in that it tells the story from the beginning and is immensely readable (yes, I know it's long), and then has all that evidence to back up what is written.
I knew this book was important when it arrived as a gift from Mark, and I have been recommending it to others ever since.
To read the quick read summary, keep reading below....
About Arthur Firstenberg the author Arthur Firstenberg is a scientist and journalist who is at the forefront of a global movement to tear down the taboo surrounding this subject.
After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell University with a degree in mathematics, he attended the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine from 1978 to 1982.
Injury by X-ray overdose cut short his medical career. For the past thirty-seven years he has been a researcher, consultant, and lecturer on the health and environmental effects of electromagnetic radiation, as well as a practitioner of several healing arts.
About the Book This remarkably well-documented and -referenced book is a cornerstone in the sense that it traces the deployment of electricity in our civilization, in terms of its interaction with living organisms, from its initial discovery in the 1740s all the way to our time, and even projected into the future.
It should be noted that the title refers to the entire electromagnetic spectrum comprising the colors of the rainbow, including the invisible frequencies such as radio frequencies and the fields generated around conducting wires.
QUICK READ SUMMARIES IN 11 LANGUAGES:
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