Restating the Obvious

Can you hear me now?

The wire story leading today's front page, about brain cancer from listening to cell phones -- why not mouth cancer from talking into them? -- reminds me of my meeting with Dr. Herbert Kobayashi in 1991.

It was the 75th anniversary of Haleakal National Park (counting from Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, from which it later split), and every reporter here did a story about some aspect of the park's history. Mine was about Kobayashi's long-term study of silverswords. Every 10 years, he hiked the crater, counting plants, and 1991 happened to be one of those years.

Kobayashi was an iconoclast. He contested the received story that silverswords had nearly gone extinct. One of my most cherished quotations is from him. We had been talking for a while, and I had a notion, so I asked him a leading question: Do you consider yourself an environmentalist or an ecologist?

“An ecologist,” he said.

“What's the difference?”

“Ecologists know what they are talking about.” I couldn't agree more.

But that's not what this is about.

Kobayashi's day job was testing electronic devices for safety for the FCC in Maryland. He was pressed for time on his trip, and the only way I could catch him for an interview was to give him a ride up to the crater, where he was going down Sliding Sands for a three-day solo silversword survey. When my daughter, Scooter, and I dropped him off it was snowy-sleety, cold and foggy. Kobayashi lifted his pack on his back and reached into the trunk of my car for one last item, a walkie-talkie.

I don't recall his exact words, but he explained that because he was going into the crater alone, the park managers insisted that he carry the radio with him, in case he needed help. He added that his job involved testing that kind of equipment and said something along the lines of, “Some people say these give you brain cancer, and they're right.”

Yeah, and some people say power lines give you cancer, and they're crackpots. I believed Kobayashi on silverswords and hold no particular opinion about cell phones.

But those guys who used to carry boom boxes on their shoulders, blasting EMFs right into their heads day and night? Brain dead, every one of them.