As a parent, I take pride in carefully choosing what my child eats, how much screen time she gets, and the safety measures we use at home. Yet, despite all my efforts to protect her health, I have absolutely no say over the cell tower looming just outside her classroom window. It’s a glaring contradiction: I can decide what goes into her lunchbox, but I can’t influence what’s saturating the environment where she learns and grows.
Why does this happen?
For decades, layers of outdated laws, biased standards, and legal roadblocks have stifled local decision-making and public health protections:
- Outdated FCC Cell Phone Radiation Standards: Stuck in the 1990s, these guidelines focus solely on heating effects and ignore the modern science showing non-thermal biological impacts of radiofrequency radiation (RFR).
- Implied Conflict Preemption: Federal rules trump local health concerns. Even when communities want safer siting of cell towers, federal “standards” silence their voices.
- Tort Immunity: Legal protections for telecom companies limit accountability and strip families of their recourse when evidence suggests harm.
- Regulatory Capture: Corporate interests exert outsized influence on agencies meant to protect us. Instead of prioritizing public health, regulators often echo industry talking points.
- Telecommunications Act of 1996: This law bars local authorities from considering the health effects of RFR in cell tower placement decisions. It’s a legislative gag order on community self-governance.
- Suppression of Science: Attempts to highlight the latest research and cautionary findings are too often dismissed, downplayed, or ignored to preserve the status quo.
Taken together, these factors form a systemic barrier that prevents meaningful action. Our communities—parents, teachers, local officials—are sidelined from decisions that profoundly affect our children’s health. We deserve better.
Change is possible. By updating FCC standards, revisiting the Telecommunications Act, and ensuring that regulators serve the public, not corporations, we can restore local control and align policy with the latest science. We must break through the decades of inertia, undue influence, and stifled evidence.
Until then, I can choose every ingredient in my daughter’s meal, but I have no control over the invisible exposure she faces at school. It’s time we fix these systemic failures and restore the rights of communities to protect the well-being of their children.
https://x.com/rfsafe/status/1867359317944652092
