Bel Jacobs & Tia Grazette investigate the controversy surrounding 5G wireless technology, being trialled this weekend at Glastonbury Festival, as a new campaign against ‘Radiation for the Nation’ is launched.
This weekend, festival goers at Glastonbury will be enjoying four days of fun, music and festivities – as well as hitherto undreamed of connection speeds. What they may not realise, however, is the controversy behind the new tech. Earlier this year, the West of England Combined Authority secured £5 million to trial a super fast 5G network in Bristol, Bath – and Glastonbury Festival.
Local residents are up in arms, with one scientist Christopher Baker speaking passionately to Glastonbury Town Council about the potentially “debilitating” effects of 5G. Baker, an electromagnetic field consultant, argued that 5G has been developed without “adequate testing of the long term effects” on human health and urged councillors to “halt the installation of 5G” until the technology has been evaluated. “I care about the Glastonbury community, especially the young generation who are at a greater risk,” he said. He’s not alone. Last July, the Belgium government cancelled an agreement with telecom operators to relax strict radiation standards in Brussels – a necessary precursor to 5G. “I cannot welcome such technology if the radiation standards, which must protect the citizen, are not respected, 5G or not,” Environment minister Céline Fremault said. “The people of Brussels are not guinea pigs whose health I can sell at a profit.”
An appeal launched by Santa Fe-based consultant and lecturer on electromagnetic radiation Arthur Firstenberg to halt the deployment of the 5G network has reached over 100,000 signatories including scientists, doctors and environmental organisations. They are now calling on the UN, WHO, EU, Council of Europe and governments to halt 5G.
Their argument? Human health, pure and simple. The fifth-generation wireless network (5G) has been billed as instant access to super high speed, wireless communications from any point in the planet – but naysayers are raising all kinds of red flags. “Despite widespread denial, the evidence that radio frequency (RF) radiation is harmful to life is overwhelming.
“The accumulated clinical evidence of sick and injured human beings, experimental evidence of damage to DNA, cells and organ systems in a wide variety of plants and animals, and epidemiological evidence that the major diseases of modern civilisation – cancer, heart disease and diabetes – are in large part caused by electromagnetic pollution, forms a literature base of well over 10,000 peer-reviewed studies.”