Howard Martin (Interview Archive)
Erik: We had to splice those two sections together, so we're back. Pick up wherever you left off. We were on the subject of the planet's energy field.
Howard: Right. The earth generates energetic fields. One is the geomagnetic field, the thing a compass responds to. The other is the ionosphere, a field that begins just past our atmosphere and reaches up roughly 110 miles into space. The two of them operate together as protective layers wrapped around the planet, shielding us from space weather, solar radiation, cosmic rays, that whole category of forces. They're part of the earth seen as a living system. You can picture them as a kind of energetic ecology. Take them away and life on this planet, at least as we know it, doesn't exist.
These fields encircle the earth and they never sit still. They shift constantly, and the changes can be dramatic. There's a large body of research, with more of it underway, that shows pretty clearly that shifts in the geomagnetic and ionospheric fields affect human health and behavior, both at the level of the individual person and across whole societies. The fields act on us. So part of what we're doing is studying that effect, getting a sharper picture of it. We're also coming to understand the fields on their own terms and contributing what we learn to the academic literature.
Then there's a hypothesis we find interesting. It runs like this: mass human emotion, whether it leans positive or negative, is leaving a mark on the geomagnetic and ionospheric fields. If the fields are acting on us, we're asking whether the reverse also holds, whether we are acting on the fields.
To look into all of this we've set up Global Coherence Monitoring sites and we're positioning them around the world. We're assembling a ground-based system for watching these fields, and as far as we know nobody has attempted this before. It's the sort of project you'd expect from a government agency or a large university, but we took it on ourselves. The plan calls for 12 sites eventually. We're placing them deliberately, keeping the coverage balanced. One site sits in Northern California. A second is up in Northern Canada. The third is in Lithuania, the fourth in Saudi Arabia, the fifth in New Zealand. Within the next couple of weeks the sixth goes into South Africa.
Even as we sit here doing this interview, every one of those sites is streaming data back to our research labs in Northern California. The scientists there are working through it, learning more about the fields and running experiments on the effects the fields have on us. At the same time they're building the baseline we'll need to test the other idea, that we are influencing the fields in return. That the seven billion of us sharing this planet are, collectively, part of what shapes them. That could matter quite a lot.