Hi, this is Frank Ramono from WhatTheyThink.com. One item on the agenda today is an article that appeared in the Los Angeles Times, it appeared in a number of other publications, and it has to do with a number of studies that were done at a University in the Netherlands. They were looking at the effects of electromagnetic radiation on plant life; trees especially. They took 20 Ash trees and they exposed them to radiation sources for a period of three months. They discovered that the trees closet to the WiFi networks produced a lead-light shine on the leaves which caused the decay of the outer layers of the leaves and then the leaves died. They also looked at the effect of WiFi and said that it could stunt the growth of corn cobs. I thought that corn cobs were already stunted but I could be wrong about that. In any case, they found that the trees throughout the Western world we exhibiting kinds of unexplained problems with bark tears, premature leaf death and other things. About 70% of the trees in the Netherlands urban areas are showing similar symptoms at this point. And they say it’s not only urban areas; that trees in densely forested areas have almost the same problems.

Now this brings me back to a point that I’ve been making for some period of time and that is that there is this movement out there that somehow paper is bad because it destroys trees, and that therefore by using email and electronic communication we are saving money and we are saving trees. And now we know we’re killing the trees! WiFi kills trees. WiFi kills trees. So therefore, let’s go back to paper. At least it’s a renewable resource. It something we can use. We can harvest the trees as we need them. This is the whole problem with today’s society that we have this movement out there that requires the printers and communicators of all kinds have to prove that they’re using paper in a responsible way. Well how about somebody using WiFi and electromagnetic radiation in a responsible way. Because we’re not. We have no idea what the effect of this stuff is going to be long term, not only on plant life, what about human life. We’ll be wearing aluminum hats at some point or aluminum suits in order to ward off this radiation. And if you look at the networks are getting faster, we’re going into different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum in order to get the bandwidth capacity that we want. We want faster and faster WiFi on all of our devices. There’s not a place in the world you can walk and not find people without cell phones to their ears or now looking at their iPads; walking around with their iPods. Well they loaded the stuff on there in advance if you will.

So I contend, let’s get back to rationality. Let’s get back to reason that we should not make paper the enemy. Paper is actually a good thing. Its recyclable, it’s reusable. We do not devastate forests, and we don’t need to pay a lot of people money to prove that we’re doing responsible things. Printers now are in this position where they have to have all these people come in and verify that they’re buying paper from trees in the right manner.

So I contend that these kinds of studies, you can see more of them, there’s going to be a big debate about it, it will be the same debate by the way about global warming and all that kind of stuff as well, but it’s a debate that we’re going to have to have and it has to come down to some point where the world realizes that printing is a viable, reasonable, and very good way to communicate. And that WiFi, although it’s wonderful and we all like it very much, could have a devastating effect not only on our planet but on ourselves. And that’s my opinion.