Subject: Boston Globe article (Jonsson).
Date: Sun, 03 Sep 2000 142637 -0500
From: Roy Beavers
To: guru
--------------------------------------------------
.........From EMF-L........
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Boston Globe article
Date: Sun, 03 Sep 2000 12:54:28 -0400
From: azul@flash.net
To: Roy Beavers
CELLULAR TOWERS IN THE WILD SEND BAD SIGNAL
Author: By ALEX BEAM, Globe Staff Date: 08/30/2000 Page: F1 Section:
Living
ALEX BEAM
Here is a different kind of summer hiking story: Not so long ago a group
of friends and I were ascending Mount Kearsarge, a not particularly
challenging 2,900-foot peak in central New Hampshire. It was rainy and
foggy. We had a bunch of children with us and were planning to picnic on
the summit, which was obscured from view.
Imagine our surprise when we discovered who had arrived there first - US
Cellular Corp., with a 180-foot-tall cellphone antenna tower. The
otherworldly forest of high-tech geegaws was footed firmly in concrete
blocks, otherwise we might have been tempted to cut it down.
The story of what happened to Mount Kearsarge is quite astonishing, and
it is one that is being repeated all around the country. The cellphone
industry has wired most urban areas and the nation's most-traveled
highways so that Muffy always can reach husband, Ralph, in his Jeep
Explorer and remind him to bring home that fresh arugula for supper.
Now the industry is adding 50,000 new sites to "fill in" the uncovered
tracts, which is why cellphone towers are becoming a common sight in
state parks and wilderness areas. Mountaintops all over New England are
fair game. In Mas sa chu setts, the Department of Environmental
Management has leased out15 of its summit fire towers for cellular
transmissions. On Mount Mansfield, Vermont's highest peak, a summit
trail has been closed for several years because of excessive microwave
radiation from a communications tower.
When it comes to siting one of these ungainly monsters, underhanded
behavior is the order of the day. The Society for the Protection of New
Hampshire Forests deeded the Kearsarge mountaintop to the state "upon
the express condition that the state will maintain said tract as a
forestry and recreation reservation for public use and benefit." But in
1997, in the proverbial dead of night, New Hampshire's Department of
Resources and Economic Development let US Cellular throw up its
gargantuan tower. One state bureaucrat counseled that the tower be built
without "a general public notice and notification."
Soon after the tower went up, 1,000 local residents petitioned Gore
administration wannabe Governor Jeanne Shaheen for its removal. She blew
them off. Concord Monitor columnist John Skow, who lives near Kearsarge,
calls the tower "a huge, glittering one-finger salute from business
greedsters and our own state officials." (An un-gelded columnist at a
serious American newspaper? That's a story in itself. . . .) Two
citizens groups and the SPNHF itself have filed lawsuits seeking to tear
down the tower. They've lost in lower courts, and the
impeachment-depleted New Hampshire Supreme Court is in no condition to
hear their appeals.
Prodded by the Federal Communications Commission, the telecom industry
last year agreed to inform the Appalachian Trail Conference when it
planned to site a tower within a mile of the historic Georgia-to-Maine
hiking path. But at least seven such towers have been sited, and only
one was reported to the ATC. "There is a legal document requiring
notification, but the industry associations are not getting the word
out," says David Reus of the ATC.
Thanks to the Republican Congress and the telecom-friendly Clinton
Administration, cell tower opponents hardly have a leg on which to
stand. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 says localauthorities can
review, but not reject, cellphone tower proposals - quite a dandy
present for the wireless industry. So far, attempts to strengthen local
autonomy in tower siting have failed.
Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy and Representative James Jeffords proposed
legislation in Congress that died. The Massachusetts Legislature passed
a similar bill that was not enacted. A proposed moratorium on the
development of Mount Kearsarge languishes in the New Hampshire
Legislature.
The broad anti-community wording of the Telecom Act has provided a field
day for lawyers, and suits opposing cell towers have sprung up in almost
every jurisdiction in America. But no precedent-setting case has yet
made its way to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the towers keep going up.
"They really are changing these mountaintops," says Eleanor Tillinghast,
an environmental activist in the town of Mount Washington. "And once
they change, they're changed forever."
Archive provided courtesy of WaveGuide, http://www.wave-guide.org
Reprinted with permission of Roy Beavers, http://www.emfguru.com