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Editor:  

In last Thursday’s (Jan. 24) Daily Planet there was an article titled “Students Want a Seat on City Council.” 

If students want more involvement in City politics, where have they been all year? Each time I attend a City Council meeting I scan the Council Chambers for U.C. students, thinking that evolution can’t do its thing without them. But rarely do I find them. Last Tuesday’s public hearing (Jan. 22) on the Public Safety tower was no exception. There were lots of people who live near the tower, but no students wishing to represent their or anyone else’s point of view. Probably they don’t even know that the l70-foot police tower is going to zap us all, near or far, student or no, with more hazardous microwaves. Never mind that the Macro Corporation, whom the city hired to study the tower (and the only entity allowed to apply for the consulting position), says microwaves are harmless. If the Macros really had wanted to get to the truth about microwaves, they could have tried www.microwavenews.com, or www. EMRNetwork.org for starters. 

Paul Brodeur’s wonderfully informative book “The Zapping of America” can still be found on many library shelves.  

Why are students so disinterested in the subject of their own survival? Consider the cell phone. How can students or anyone else blindly trust industry cell phone studies when it is clear that such short-term studies are useless? Radiation emissions from cell phones and cell phone towers have essentially the same negative impacts on living organisms as do the emissions from the police tower. Because of student addiction to the cell phone (which stimulates endorphins in the brain, making them addictive), dangerous microwave-emitting cell towers may soon be installed on Berkeley apartment houses or on telephone poles only six feet from bedroom windows. I personally would not want anyone to represent me on City Council who passed with flying colors the class Extinction l0lA, for which cell phone use is the only requirement.  

On the other hand, hats off for those in council last Tuesday, Dona.Spring and Kriss Worthington, who nixed turning on the police tower (Mayor Shirley Dean was out of town) in spite of city pressure to turn it on. It’s difficult to imagine anyone voting for the tower after listening to Erica Etelson, a lawyer and a member of the neighborhood group there protesting the tower. She reported that 10 days before, a court in Spain had ordered the removal of a cell phone tower near a school where four children had been diagnosed with leukemia in the 18 months since the tower was erected. And in Summerland, (near Santa Barbara), the fire department is suing Nextel to remove wireless antennae installed on their station house a few years ago, because the firefighters began suffering grogginess, confusion, sleep disorders, and other mental problems soon after the antennae were installed. Yet Etelson’s words were ignored by most of council.  

What’s more, the tower is not even legal, since its erection sidestepped Berkeley public processes. 

Apologies are not enough; the tower should come down.  

ÜC students will have a second chance on Tuesday, Feb. 5, 7 p.m., to sharpen their survival skills at council.  

Their support would be most welcome. Sadly, however, if they do come Tuesday they will come, like the rest of us, with the risk of being ignored by most of our City Council... . 

Kate Bernier 

Berkeley