Peter Knight on why luddites are the bane of the environment

You’re perfect: no allergies, good weight, balanced disposition. You feel neither over-served nor under-served.

Perhaps this leaves you feeling disadvantaged for having no disadvantages? If so, we have just the right affliction for you – technology-based and impossible to prove. It’s called electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS).

This condition has no scientific basis but afflicts many who are convinced that the signals from mobile phones and other radio communications devices, including smart electricity meters, make them dizzy. It’s an iAffliction.

EHS joins the long list of subjective, phantom health conditions that people use to fight change in personal behaviour. This is bad news because it gives people excuses – despite scientific evidence to the contrary – to maintain lifestyles that damage the environment.

Luddite behaviour is not new, but what makes this rejection of science so frightening is the fact that it is taking place in a country that put a man on the moon and an iPod in your ear.

Read this article in full at Ethical Corporation