There is a subtle way to measure progress. Every time we head north to God’s country, we’re forced to bring along the cell phone. Normally, we refuse the electronic leash. But when we’re on the road in a secondhand mini-van full of kids, or when we’re trying to rendezvous with people who have already gone over to the dark side, who conduct their many important affairs, and also their petty ones, by cell phone—well, sometimes you just have to join them.
We notice the cellular networks have gradually and dependably migrated north to the Canadian border. It’s a mild entertainment to watch the rising column of connectivity in the LED window in our palms, where we used to watch the dip and rise of the passing phone lines out the car window. It is our particular cross to bear that our cell service is superior in the city where we never need it, and lousy where we do. North of Duluth, we would need another phone—one that would roam promiscuously in search of other, larger networks.
Until a couple of weeks ago, that would have necessitated a new phone number. We’re not sure what the impediment was, exactly, but federal regulators have removed it—the one preventing consumers from keeping their old numbers when they migrated across service providers or bought a new phone. One would have thought the marketplace sorted this out a long time ago. Now that 130 million Americans—nearly 70 percent of all adults—are sold on the idea of cell phones, they’ll undoubtedly be tempted to change phone companies and handsets, while committing for the long haul to one number.
In the past, most cell phones were used for an average of eighteen months, practically a lifetime. There are already 500 million decommissioned cell phones in the U.S. Another 100 million are thrown on the pile or in the sock drawer each year.
Increased coverage in rural areas, along with stepped-up competition among phone companies, suggests that soon there may be more cell phones than televisions, which cannot be a good thing. We don’t have much patience for the casual Luddite who grumbles every time he sees someone using a cell phone out in the bass boat, but there are good reasons to be worried about this growth.
In the north, it’s a special example of the hen coming home to roost where the eggs are being hatched. Anyone who has paged through the literature that accompanies a Minnesota fishing license will tell you that it’s not exactly smart to eat Minnesota fish—even if you’ve caught them in the most isolated BWCA backwater. The lake at the foot of Will Steger’s middle-of-nowhere homestead, for example, contains walleye and northern pike that a wise person would not eat more often than once a week.
The culprit, long known and understood but still ubiquitous, is mercury. It is brought on the wind and in the rain, even to virgin lakes that have never been churned by an outboard. Mercury is a common component in batteries, and because wireless technologies are becoming more common, not less, we can expect this problem to increase. We’ve slipped dead batteries into the trash often enough to realize that general public awareness of the problem is no guarantee that it will go away.
We are accustomed to thinking of this “information age” as being environmentally benign at worst—virtual worlds, paperless offices, telecommuting, and all that. But this ignores the serious environmental impact of numerous toxins and heavy metals that go into a PC, a Palm Pilot, or a cell phone. If we learn one thing from our newly networked world, it should be this: What you can’t see can hurt you.—Hans Eisenbeis
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