EMF radiation damaging Colorado's beautiful trees

I recently posted an article about some 9^th Grade students who experimented with the effects of wi-fi radiation on the germination of Cress seeds (see here).  The results were simply astonishing and highlighted the huge damage this radiation can have on our environment.

Katie Haggerty

Colorado researcher Katie Haggerty, has taken this study a step further.

She began studying electromagnetic fields 20 years ago. In 2005, when she noticed that her geraniums were stunted, she put the plants in a Faraday cage, an enclosure covered by a metal screen that blocks radio frequency energy, and soon found that the plants had larger leaves and were growing more vigorously.

The beautiful aspens of North America have been in decline for the last few decades.  Katie was well aware of the rapid growth of radiofrequency (RF) radiation around the country, particularly from mobile-phone ‘towers’ and wondered if this radiation could have contributed in some way to the decline?

So she set out to find the answer.  She planted three test plots of aspen seedlings. Carefully matched in all other respects, one plot was shielded from a nearby town’s RF radiation, one was ‘mock’ shielded, and the other was left unprotected.

Unshielded seedling

Shielded seedling

The difference, recorded in the International Journal of Forestry Research, was startling: the fully shielded saplings were vigorous and healthy, but both the ‘mock’ shielded and the exposed plants were small, lacked pigments, and had sickly leaves.  "I found that the shielded seedlings produced more growth, longer shoots, bigger leaves and more total leaf area. The shielded group produced 60 percent more leaf area and 74 percent more shoot length than a mock-shielded group," she said.

Journal Editor Terry Sharik, a Utah State University professor commented on the findings saying, "If she (Katie Haggerty) turns out to be right following subsequent investigations by others, the results could be very significant and cause people to rethink the current notion that anthropogenic sources of radio waves are fairly harmless to the environment and by extension to humans."

[The study is printed in fullhere:  International Journal of Forestry Research, 17 February 2010.]