The heart of the EMF issue comes down to a simple question: what are the risks of exposure to electromagnetic fields? Unfortunately, while the question is simple, the answer is much more challenging. Citizens of the modern, industrial world are exposed to a potpourri of nonionizing electromagnetic energy and until recently little was known about the types of exposure experienced at home and on the job. Even less is known about the biological effects of this kind of exposure.

Some particularly prominent physicists have promoted the idea that since we know all about the interaction of electromagnetic energy with matter (the dead stuff that physicists study), it is clear there are no risks from fields except at high energies and high intensities. High energy electromagnetic waves, like X-rays, can rip apart molecules and are a potential danger to health. while people in the past used X-rays to help fit shoes in shoe stores, today much more care is taken in the use of X-rays for things like medical purposes. High intensities of electromagnetic energy can actually heat things up and this is why a microwave oven works. If people are exposed to too many microwaves they get cooked too and safety standards have been developed to prevent this.

Yet what these physicists fail to comprehend is that living systems are not the same as the dead stuff they are used to studying. Biology is the study of the extremely complex organization of dead stuff and it is this remarkable organization that characterizes life.

While dead stuff is easy to take apart and study, living stuff presents a more complex problem. When you take complex things apart, you loose insight into their organization. This is the great problem of biology and the basis of a perennial debate over holism versus reductionism. In a nutshell, it is not at all clear that the interaction of EMF with dead stuff in a laboratory is the same as the interaction of EMF with whole, living, breathing creatures. The types of EMF people are exposed to in their daily lives might not be important for dead stuff but it may affect the organization of living system and be important for people.

Carrying out research on living things is difficult because they are not identical (like atoms are) and are constantly interacting with their environment. Hence biologists get results that are not as perfect as those of physicists and many physicists cast a critical eye on biology, causing some to go as far as to claim that results showing bioeffects from EMF are not scientifically valid.

The point of all this discussion is that it is not possible to make definitive statements about the risks of EMF. There is too much that remains unknown. Yet that is exactly what the editor of a major scientific journal did recently in response to a single epidemiological survey. Since scientists do not yet understand fully the interaction between EMF and people, epidemiological surveys can only be crude and imperfect attempts at defining broader health implications.

In the meantime, how should society deal with new and old risks with a significant degree of uncertainty? The first principle is that of the importance of public involvement. Too often experts with contempt for the "emotional" public get to decide which risks should be judged acceptable. Here it is useful to quote Carnegie Mellon University's M. Granger Morgan, a breath of fresh air in the risk management business:

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The second principle is that of the importance of "balance" in risk decisions, another way of saying that there should be a way of reducing the power of money in influencing decisions. The first principle is a difficult one; the second very difficult.

A pair of risk experts were recently interviewed about their new book on risk issues. They laughed about the irrational members of the public who were concerned about things like PCBs and growth hormones in milk and pointed out that protesters who had traveled to demonstrate against a large shipment of PCBs headed for their community had a much greater chance of injury or death from their use of the car than they did from the PC Bs. Presumably, they should have stayed at home unless they were able to reach the demonstration by public transit. According to this "theory," very popular amongst experts, people willingly accept the risk of the automobile so they should willingly accept all (putatively) lesser risks. Because of the great danger of automobile, this includes practically everything except jumping the Grand Canyon in a rocket propelled car and climbing Mount Everest.

The holes in this theory make it look like Swiss cheese. First of all, people do not necessarily accept willingly the risks of the automobile. Modem cities, especially North American ones, leave citizens little choice. A little known fact is that several large corporations bought up privately owned and profitable mass transit systems in the US and trashed them in order to increase dependence on the private car. Cars are only as safe as they are through the work of citizens and consumer advocates like Ralph Nader.

Secondly, even if the danger of the car is accepted "willingly" by most citizens, and there is much reason to doubt, that does not make concern about other, perhaps smaller, risks "irrational." Risks are not spread evenly - the executives of nuclear power plants and their families are not usually among those living in the plants' shadows nor does everyone get the benefits of the risks they are supposed to accept.

Perhaps the really irrational things about the risk issue are the unequivocal pronouncements about complex and unsolved problems and the blind faith in technology that so often steamrolls the concerns of communities.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 1997 edition of Network News.

Michael P. Milburn, Ph.D. is the author of Electromagnetic Fields and Your Health, (New Star Books, Vancouver) and the forthcoming, The Tao of Healing: Chinese Medicine and the New Biology, (Avery, New York). Dr. Milburn may be reached at his office in Canada at Elmag Research & Consulting, 421 Barrie Place, Suite 11, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3Z6 Canada, or via e-mail at mpm_mo@compuserve.com