Ecological Justice Border Crossings ~ Part 5
Captured Agency, Captive Audience:
Shifting from Industry-Funded Science to Cultural Biomimicry
Cara Judea Alhadeff
August 2022
Fake-tree cell tower, Italy. Click the image to enlarge.
"I think the big crisis of our times is that our minds have been manipulated to give power to illusions." —Vandana Shiva
Following my six Interludes (February-July, 2022), for this month's Mother Pelican essay, we return to the intricacies of duplicitous digital-technology industries.
The medical establishment thrives on captive clientele. Echoing J. Krishnamurti who declared, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society,” we discover that the more our bodies are required to adapt, the sicker we become—thereby increasingly requiring “professional” medical care and health insurance. Our food system lacks required nutrients and is reeling from the effects of Colony-Collapse Disorder. Both familiar and as yet undiagnosable illnesses are massively proliferating due to low level wireless microwave radiation.[1]
We are relegated to being technology specimens—sacrificial guinea pigs to our technocratic elite. A few years ago, when the local electric company was removing my broken electricity meter, I specifically requested an analog replacement and explained in detail why I did not want a smart meter outside my son’s bedroom.
Not surprisingly, Penn Electric denied my request.
Public utilities commissions (PUC) maintain federal funding while denying the scientific validity of citizens’ choices to defend our bodies and those of our children. Again, freedom of health is curtailed.
Industry-Funded Ignorance
Science, like nature, is not governed by transcendent, immutable laws. We must be extraordinarily cautious when we relinquish our individual and collective agency to “the science;”[2] in particular the mechanistic science industry that spends millions of dollars on lobbying policymakers. For example, “SCIENCE IS REAL” signs are displayed throughout US rural, urban, and suburban liberal homes. In conjunction with “BLACK LIVES MATTER” signs, these public postures ignore both systemic racism in the history of Western science and scientific determinism leading to unquestioned disinformation. This conflation feeds equality propaganda: “We are all in this together!” This color-blind, class-blind false sense of equality is rooted in conformity through behavioral engineering: “The trick is...to generate a common group identity. ...And also introducing gradual degrees of social punishment and disapproval for people who don't bat for the team.”[3] Analogous to Big Tobacco, “public ignorance has been cultivated and secured”[4] by Big Tech and the wireless industry. Tragically, the public doesn't distinguish between scientific investigation and industry-funded science.
“Peer-reviewed” does not unequivocally imply pure “fact;” rather, too often self-referred validation. We worship science-as-truth—the final word. However, historically, there is no monolithic “science.”
Click the image to enlarge.
Reductive language and institutionalized disinformation rely on a disavowal of such histories. These concepts are not static, but rather lived relations beyond dichotomous reductionism.[5]
Organizations such as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), World Health Organization (WHO), FDA, National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the EPA do not claim wi-fi is safe. They do claim that due to long-latency periods for various forms of cancer and other disease there is “inconclusive evidence” and “more research” is needed.[6] Yet, for example, The WHO reminds us: “Mobile phones are often prohibited in hospitals and on airplanes, as the radiofrequency signals may interfere with certain electro-medical devices and navigation systems.” Simultaneously, we must consider that in addition to copious independent and institutional research on carcinogenic effects of RF-EMF emissions, there are over 1000 peer-reviewed, published papers showing harmful biological effects from microwave radiation exposure. This includes major epidemiologic published studies “that provide further evidence that long-term mobile phone use is associated with increased risk of brain tumors.”[7] How can we accept that corporate institutions and governmental regulatory agencies justify this deadly irony?
As I wrote in The Global Electrical Circuit: Enabling the Digital Epidemic, my January, 2022 Mother Pelican essay, misguidance in many of the federal regulatory agencies' testing procedures is ravaging our bodies and our planetary body. The FCC is a captured agency.
Captured agencies are essentially controlled by the industries they are supposed to regulate. ...The FCC sits at the core of a network that has allowed powerful moneyed interests with limitless access a variety of ways to shape its policies, often at the expense of fundamental public interests. ...Most insidious of all, the wireless industry has been allowed to grow unchecked and virtually unregulated, with fundamental questions on public health impact routinely ignored.[8]
The US government (including the FCC, EPA, and FDA) have never set safety standards based on the evidence of scientific reviews. They have never explicitly conducted public research on radiation from wireless technologies or instituted guidelines to set standards that protect human health based on comprehensive scientific review of radiation.[9] Currently, institutional guidelines ignore the bio-accumulative effects of radiation being emitted from multiple sources. For example, if we were to calculate a child’s total exposure we would need to consider the cell tower located near the school, the child's own device and all the other children's and teachers' devices in class, the WiFi routers at home and school, and the myriad other electronic devices within the child's vicinity.
At this juncture, we can only surmise the psychological and physical impacts of the new wearable Bluetooth “smart watch/GPS tracker” devices for tracking children (HQ Anti Lost GPS Tracker Watch For Kids SOS Emergency GSM Smart Mobile Phone App or GPS/LBS Tracker Locator Smart Watch Wrist Bluetooth GSM SOS For Children/ Kids). Dr. Bruce Lipton, epigeneticist and author of “Conscious Parenting: Parents as Genetic Engineers,” tells us that visual technologies are epigenetic: they override our genetic makeup and can disable intellectual and emotional development.[10]
Four years ago, during our parent-child workshop titled: “Peace, Love, and Harmony: Emotional Balance, Personal Space and Boundary Skills,” I noticed that my son’s six-year-old friend was wearing this tracker. It kept calling his father even though they were sitting right next to each other! When his son asked why he has to wear it all the time, his father responded, “So I know where you are every second of every day and night.”
In contrast to stripping our children of their self-confidence and sense of empowerment, in her TEDx talk, “The Myth of The Digital Gene,” Mary Rothschild tells us when we teach our children to “face the [unknown] future...with agency and joy, we are teaching them how to be healthy.” In From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future we Want, Rob Hopkins, the founder of the Transition Movement, connects the imperative of challenging the dysfunction of screen time and 'petroleum parenting'[11] with the urgency of reimagining, redesigning, and rebuilding our world.[12]
Click the image to enlarge.
Cultural biomimicry, applying what we learn from nature's living intelligence to eradicate the roots of eco-social catastrophes, is one vibrant model that parents and activists can adapt in order to directly challenge these interconnected urgencies.[13] What if we could learn from creatures that communicate using extraordinarily evolved sensitivity to their environment. And, how can we apply these lessons of complex social organizational systems to human-oriented infrastructures? This is not a new proposition. For thousands of years, cultures across the globe have practiced this kind of cultural biomimicry. What if modern industrialized civilization like Big Telecom could adapt behaviors and infrastructures rooted in ancestral animism and earth technologies?
In next month's Mother Pelican essay I will investigate cultural biomimicry as a radical pause in order to learn from the non-human world around us. The origin of the word radical is root. I will emphasize radical so that we can acknowledge the roots of what we are pausing from in relation to the roots of what we are pausing into.
[2] It is vital we understand the dangers of combining messages of “Black Lives Matter,” immigration rights, and anti-homophobia with habituated obedience to the science: “SCIENCE IS REAL.” See my “Queering the Apocalypse: Climate Chaos and The Obscene,” Socioscapes: International Journal of Societies, Politics, and Cultures; Gender and Sexualities Studies in Difficult Times: Uncertain Presents, Coalitional Futures, S.IJSPC vol. 1 Issue 1, pp. 143-154, ISSN 2734-0940.
[3] Team leader Peter Lunn quoted in Graham Lawton's article in the May 2020 issue of New Scientist. Lawton focuses on the science of producing public acceptance through behavioral engineering. His article includes interviews with researchers from the Behaviourial Research Unit in the Economic & Social Research Institute of Ireland.
[4] Norm Alster, “Captured Agency: How the Federal Communications Commission Is Dominated by the Industries It Presumably Regulates,” Harvard University's Center for Ethics.
[5] For a detailed discussion of habituated obedience see my “Queering the Apocalypse.”
[6] “Top scientists within the US National Cancer Institute (NCI), FDA and the Surgeon General insist upon undeniable proof of harm before taking any action. Take, as an example, how the WHO classified outdoor air pollution as a Class 1 Carcinogen in September 2013 citing research indicating that in 2010 3.2 million deaths worldwide resulted from air pollution. When asked why it had taken so long to reach this conclusion, IARC director Dr. Christopher Wild said, 'Often we're looking at two, three or four decades once an exposure is introduced before there is sufficient impact on the burden of cancer in the population to be able to study this type of question.' Similar to many other carcinogens, undeniable proof may not be available for decades. The EPA states, 'More research is needed to clarify the question of safety.' No medical organization that we know of has stated this radiation is safe.” Ibid.
[10] See The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles, Carlsbad, CA: Hay House 2005). See also Zazu Dreams, Endnote 28, 91.
[11]Petroleum parenting is the term I use to describe the Anthropogenic market-driven choices parents make that contribute to both environmental destruction and body-phobic institutional practices. See my “Embodied Ecoliteracy: Uprooting Petroleum Parenting and Industrial-Waste-Consumer Capitalism (how our kids can help us decolonize our economy)”. Excerpts will be included in my upcoming Mother Pelican articles this Fall.
[12] Conversation with Transition Movement Colorado, Marissa Mommaerts.
Dr. Cara Judea Alhadeff, Professor of Transdisciplinary Ecological
Leadership, has published dozens of interdisciplinary books and
articles on critical philosophy, climate justice, art, epigenetics,
gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies, including
the critically-acclaimed Zazu
Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable
for the Anthropocene Eraand
Viscous
Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene.
Alhadeff's
theoretical and visual work is the subject of documentaries for
international films and public television. She has been interviewed
by
The
New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Pacifica
Radio, NPR, and the
New Art Examiner.
Alongside
Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Vandana Shiva, Alhadeff received the
Random Kindness Community Resilience Leadership Award, 2020. Her
work has been endorsed by Noam Chomsky, Bill McKibben, James E.
Hansen, Paul Hawken, SHK-G, Eve Ensler, Alphonso Lingus, Avital
Ronell, and Lucy Lippard among other activists, scholars, and
artists.
Alhadeff's
photographs/performance-videos
have been defended by Freedom-of-Speech organizations (Electronic
Freedom Foundation, artsave/People for the AmericanWay, and the
ACLU), and are
in private and public collections including and San Francisco MoMA,
MoMA
Salzburg, Austria,
the
Kinsey
Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and reproduction, and include
collaborations with international choreographers, composers, poets,
sculptors, architects, scientists. Her art-based and pedagogical
practices, parenting, and commitment to solidarity economics and
lived social-ecological ethics are intimately bound. Former
professor of
Philosophy, Performance, and Pedagogy at
UC Santa Cruz and Program Director for Jews Of The Earth, Alhadeff
and
her family
live in their eco-art
installation repurposed schoolbus where
they perform and teach creative-zero-waste
living, social
permaculture, and cultural diversity.
She is always eager to collaborate with other activists, scholars,
and artists from other disciplines. If you are interested please
contact Cara via email at photo@carajudea.com
or
via her websites, Cara
Judea
and
Zazu
Dreams.
See also this article: Social
ecology pioneers return to Nederland.
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