I first met Gary Duncan three years ago, outside a pub in the town of Saguache, Colorado, from which he led me to a remote corner of public land at the northern end of the San Luis Valley. A wily, leather-skinned Vietnam War veteran, Duncan has maintained a hermitic lifestyle for the past two decades, wintering in a propane-heated trailer outside Moab, Utah, and spending the nicer parts of the year shuffling between sites like this one, selected for its seclusion from man-made electromagnetic fields, or EMFs. It is illegal for anyone to live on public land full-time, so although Duncan spends much of his life rooting out invasive species and repairing damaged roads, he is forced to stay on the move, constantly looking over his shoulder for law enforcement.
His “mobile domicile,” as he calls it, is a 1987 Dodge pickup that he has modified beyond recognition. It looks like Ted Kaczynski’s cabin on a flatbed, with a wooden steering wheel, barrel-roofed living quarters, and an adobelike mixture packed into the vent wells—just one of Duncan’s many dubious DIY interventions meant to ward off radio-frequency, or RF, radiation. The vehicle’s exterior is plastered with laminated prints of his poetry, manifestos, and diatribes against cell phones and pesticides.
Duncan is a refugee from what some would call “environmental illness,” or EI: a person who feels as though they have been pressed to the physical margins of society by the proliferation of artificial irritants associated with controversial, broadly unrecognized conditions like multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) and electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS). People suffering from these ailments find themselves in a world of virtually unavoidable threats (commonly claimed triggers include perfumes, personal-hygiene products, cellular towers, and power lines) that can send them into spirals of deteriorating health. They are widely seen as overly anxious hypochondriacs. Because they find scant support from mainstream medical practitioners, EI refugees often consider self-directed avoidance their only viable option.
Although others leap to psychological explanations, Duncan firmly interprets his sensitivities as a bodily rejection of toxins that likely harm everyone they touch. “There is nothing wrong with us,” he asserts of his fellow “sensitives.” “The problem is out there, in the deteriorated environment.” This is a common view among EI refugees, and it’s why so many of them have taken up residence in remote pockets of the high desert of the southern Rockies—where the air is clean, mountains and mesas provide natural cover from cell towers, and people are few and far between.
Full article here:
https://harpers.org/archive/2024/10/the-fever-called-living-environmental-illness-evan-malmgren/
