Louise Young is a passionate environmentalist who has written five books on environmental issues. In 1980, at age 60, she was the oldest student to earn a master`s degree in science (geophysics) from the University of Chicago. Her first book, ”Power Over People,” was the first published warning of the dangers of living and working near high-voltage electric transmission lines. Young, 71, and her husband, Hobart, recently returned from Easter Island, where she studied the effects of pollution. She talked with Chicago writer Jean Noe Clark about the events that shaped her decision to become a champion for our endangered planet.
In 1969, we discovered that the Ohio Power Co., a subsidiary of American Electric Power, was going to run one of the highest voltage transmission lines in the world over our family farm in southern Ohio.
I grew up on that farm. It has been in my family for eight generations. The closest town is Laurel, with only about a hundred people. It is a wonderful place to live-clean and quiet, with miles of beautiful, unspoiled countryside and very productive farmland.
The plan to build this 765-kilowatt transmission line had been a well-guarded secret. First we received a letter about the line from the power company. Then they sent an agent around who talked to us in a very high-handed manner.
From our porch we can see miles and miles of countryside, really deep country. The line was to cut diagonally across that view. We thought that if they could only move the line a third of a mile and cross the farm in front of the house instead of in back, it would not be such a visual horror. We asked if we could pay what it would cost to change the routing of the line just that slight amount.
The agent said, ”A billion dollars would not move this line one foot.”
It was that attitude that started me researching the need for and the possible effects of these lines. Since I had worked on electromagnetic field in theory in radar research, I did have some knowledge in that field.
I was a physics major at Vassar. After I graduated in 1940, I worked for a year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York because the laboratories wouldn`t hire girls. Then the war came along, and I got an offer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the radiation laboratory.
My job was to work on a secret project; they wouldn`t say what. As it turned out, we helped develop radar. I was one of five women in a group of 2,000 people working on the project.
Since nobody really knew much about this subject at the time, we were given a crash course in the principles of electric and magnetic fields and in the ways these could be used to build radar equipment. So, although I didn`t have any advanced degrees, I got what amounted to a master`s degree in physics. One of the four radar antennas I have patents on went to the moon with Apollo 15.
Anyway, many people were upset about the power line. We wrote letters to the vice president in charge of construction and other such people inquiring what the strength of the magnetic and electric fields would be at ground level near these lines.
We could not get an answer from them. They just refused to give us any figures. They told us there was nothing to worry about; there was not going to be any harm to crops, people or animals.
I got the answers by going to the Crerar Library, one of the best technical libraries, at the University of Chicago, and reading the technical journals that were published for electrical engineers. The figures and energy levels I read about sounded pretty high to me and possibly damaging.
When I read those articles, I realized that the electrical engineers employed by the power companies did recognize that there would be some problems for the people living near these lines. The most obvious problem was electrical shocks from any metal thing in the area: a child`s swing set, a fence, pieces of farm machinery operating under or near the line.
The next most serious problem I considered was that they made a lot of noise, particularly on foggy days. My husband and I talked to the people near a similar line about 30 miles south of us and listened to the line itself. The sizzling, crackling noise, when you got a lot of it, sounded like a waterfall. Then there was inteference with radio and television. And none of these things would be admitted by representatives of the company to the people who were going to have these things over them for the rest of their lives.
I was so shocked by this that I thought it ought to be brought to public attention. One of the families we talked to who lived under the line south of us had a little girl who was dying of leukemia. Of course one case proves nothing.
When my first book, ”Power Over People,” was published in 1973, I was the first person to bring the concern over electromagnetic fields around transmission lines to the public`s attention. The book really started a movement in opposition to these big lines and forced a lot of research by the electric companies.
After the book came out, I got a package from someone who said he was an electrical engineer, but that he wanted to remain anonymous. He said I ought to know that in Russia they had been doing health studies of people who were routinely exposed to electromagnetic fields from power lines because they were concerned that there were biological problems. The materials he sent were reprints of papers and speeches that had been given at an international conference in Paris, which a number of our electrical engineers had attended a year before my book was published.
The studies showed an increase in cardiovascular problems among workers who were exposed to electromagnetic fields over a certain strength, fields below those that we would be exposed to by the lines being built over our farm.
None of that information ever entered the technical literature and certainly not any lay literature that any ordinary person could have access to.
It has taken almost 20 years, but gradually the issue is receiving attention. The evidence has been accumulating that there are problems. Our scientists think there is a great connection between cancer of various forms and exposure to magnetic fields.
In the late `70s, Nancy Whethhimer, an epidemiologist from Boulder, Colo., was interested in (studying) the incidence of childhood leukemia. She was trying to find some common element that the children in her study had been exposed to.
To find a common factor, she was very careful to find the homes where these children had lived for any significant amount of time, say two years.
One day she was looking at the exterior of a housing development in which a child had died of leukemia. She noticed that outside the house, the electric lines had been brought into a transformer near the house. Then the lines ran into each house along the street.
She went back and looked at the other houses she had been studying. There were transformers near the houses. She found that most often it was the first or second house that was fed from these lines where the child with leukemia had lived. The lines come from the transformer and go into house No. 1, then house No. 2 and maybe down to No. 10. By the time it gets to No. 10, the current flow is much smaller.
She and a physicist rigged up a measuring instrument. It seemed to be the magnetic field more than the electric, which if above a certain level had a significant relationship to the number of cases of childhood leukemia.
The electric companies tried to discredit her studies. They hired someone to make a similar study, but even in their studies, there still was the same relationship.
There was a lot of talk in the electrical engineering community that there was something flawed about this study also. It took three or four confirmations for the data to become recognized as legitimate. Even today you will find there is a great deal of argument about whether there is any significance. There have been studies in Sweden and Portugal. But they all came up with the same connection.
To be in danger from a transmission line, you have to be within 500 feet of the line. It is now believed that magnetic fields may be more of a problem than electric fields, but I don`t think enough research has been done yet. I think both of them are dangerous.
I think the electric companies are beginning to recognize that there may indeed be a serious problem. But this was almost 20 years ago. It may be another 10 years before it reaches the point that they really change their way of doing things. There`s still enormous resistance, but there`s also the growing sense that we do have a problem.
There are, of course, even greater threats to our world today.
When we returned to Chicago (in the `40s after she and Hobart were married), I was offered a job working on what proved to be the atom bomb project at the University of Chicago. Because I was pregnant and it would have been a very difficult commute from Winnetka (where they lived) to Chicago, I didn`t take it.
To tell you the truth, I was a little disappointed when I discovered what an exciting project they were working on. But now I`m happy I was never involved with it because I think atomic power is the worst thing that has happened in my lifetime. Radar was a very benign thing to have worked on, something I was happy about.
But you can`t separate atomic power and the atomic bomb. I don`t think we`re mature enough to handle this terrible force responsibly. The factor of human error is too great. There are too many kooks in the world, too many crazy people who want to have their own way at any price.
After atomic power, I think the population problem is the greatest threat to our world. The cause of air pollution is basically that there are so many people using so many kinds of energy and filling the world too full so that we put too much pressure on the resources of the Earth. And we are using them in such a way that causes all these environmental hazards.
My new book, ”Sowing the Wind” (Prentice Hall, $17.95), is about our atmospheric pollution problems, the ones that have worldwide significance. It explains, in lay terms, the greenhouse effect, acid rain and the depletion of the ozone layer and what we can do about them.
This is a book for the next 10 years. There have been many articles and books that deal with just one of these areas. The truth of the matter is that these problems are related to each other.
This is a book that I want decisionmakers to read. The books were sent to several key members of Congress. And to Barbara Bush. I put her on my list. I don`t think George is very inclined to listen.
