Reading the Leaves: The Trees Near the 49ers' Substation Knew First

George Kittle just confirmed what scientists have been documenting for decades, and what it means for all of us.

Yesterday, San Francisco 49ers tight end George Kittle said something on the Complex podcast that should have been the lead story on every sports network in America. When asked about the electrical substation adjacent to the team’s practice facility, Kittle didn’t talk about the player injuries, he talked about the trees.

“Now one thing that messes me up with it, this is tough, my rookie season there used to be trees in between the electrical substation and our practice facility. There’s a fence there too and above the fence all the trees had no leaves on them. year round, all dead. There’s a couple bunches of leaves every once in a while. Nobody notices it until you point it out. I didn’t point it out to Kyle Shanahan until 2021. A vet pointed it out to me my rookie season and I was like ‘That’s kind of weird.’ But then this year the NFL came in and cut them all down. So they’re not there anymore so no one can see them. So it’s only us vets that know that was the truth. I don’t think anyone talked about that yet. That one messed me up.” I was like `Oh my goodness there’s no leaves on these trees! Why?`‘

Now maybe it was just a coincidence. Or maybe the NFL (or Silicon Valley Power) just cut them down because they were dying, but what they didn’t do is investigate the trees. They didn’t test the soil, the bark or the leaves, they just cut them all down, and now the evidence is gone.

This is the same story I’ve been telling about the 49ers’ injury cluster, but the material is cellulose rather than collagen. Chronic electromagnetic exposure degrades biological health. It’s not the only factor. It’s never the only factor. But it is an acute factor that pushes systems already under stress over the edge, creating the kind of statistical outlier that makes people say, “Something is wrong here.”

And just like with the players, the institutional response follows a predictable script: It can’t be the EMF. It must be something else.

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The Playbook of Denial

Whenever trees die near cell towers, electrical substations, or other sources of electromagnetic radiation, the same roster of “confounding factors” gets trotted out:

Construction vehicles compacted the soil, the paved service area around the infrastructure starved the roots of water, a maintenance crew probably spilled fuel or sprayed herbicide nearby. And besides, urban trees are already under siege from pollution and drought—they die all the time.

Every one of these explanations is plausible, and some of them are probably true, but notice that electromagnetic fields get removed from the conversation before the conversation even gets started, every single time.

The logic goes like this: since other things can kill trees, the EMF must not be a factor. But that logic is broken. In biology, multiple stressors don’t cancel each other out, they compound. The question isn’t whether soil compaction or heat or drought can kill a tree. Of course they can. The question is whether EMF exposure adds to the load, and whether that added load is what tips certain trees over the edge.

There’s plenty of science suggesting the answer is “Yes, it does”.

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What the Science Actually Shows

The “Side-Specific” Damage Study

In 2016, Dr. Cornelia Waldmann-Selsam and her colleagues published a landmark study in Science of The Total Environment documenting something that shouldn’t exist if EMF is truly harmless to plants: trees that were dying on only one side.

The research team conducted long-term field monitoring of 120 trees in the German cities of Bamberg and Hallstadt, observing the effects of 4G/LTE mobile phone base stations on surrounding vegetation. What they found was a distinct pattern of unilateral damage—trees showing significant decline specifically on the side directly facing the antenna. Yellowing leaf margins, premature leaf drop, dead branches—all concentrated on the side with the highest power flux density.

The critical observation was what they called the “radio shadow” effect. Trees shielded by buildings or other larger trees remained healthy. If the damage were caused by soil quality, drought, or citywide heat—factors that don’t have directional preferences—the damage would be uniform across the entire canopy, but it wasn’t. The damage stopped where the tree’s own trunk provided a shadow for the back-side branches, shielding the back-side branches the same way a building blocks a cell signal

Dr. Waldmann-Selsam went on to publish extensive photographic documentation of this phenomenon, cataloging years of observations across Germany from 2005 to 2021. She also co-authored a detailed observation guide—a visual manual teaching anyone how to recognize the specific damage patterns that distinguish RF-related tree decline from other causes. The guide emphasizes that while drought damage presents uniformly from the roots up, RF damage presents unilaterally from the exposure side inward—a fundamentally different geometric pattern.

These resources remain available through the Environmental Health Sciences archive for anyone willing to look with fresh eyes.

The Faraday Cage Experiment

In 2010, researcher Katie Haggerty published results in the International Journal of Forestry Research that should have changed the conversation entirely. She took the anecdotal observations and turned them into a controlled experiment.

Haggerty divided Aspen seedlings into two groups. One group was placed inside Faraday cages—copper mesh enclosures that block electromagnetic waves. The control group was left exposed to the ambient RF radiation typical of our modern environment. Same soil, same water, same sunlight. The only differing variable was the electromagnetic environment.

The results were striking. The seedlings protected by the Faraday cages showed 74% more shoot growth than exposed trees, 60% larger leaf area, and increased chlorophyll production. The shielded trees weren’t just marginally healthier—they were dramatically more vital, suggesting that the ambient electromagnetic signals we swim in every day may be interfering with plants’ ability to photosynthesize efficiently.

This is peer-reviewed evidence that even background levels of cellular radiation act as a metabolic burden on living organisms.

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The Dead Trees in Avondale, Arizona

If the science sounds abstract, consider a case that went viral—and got “debunked” before anyone looked at it seriously.

In Avondale, Arizona, a photo circulated showing a couple dead palm trees surrounding a cell tower disguised as a fake palm (a “monopalm,” installed by Verizon in 2019). The image was captioned with claims about 5G killing the trees, and fact-checkers were quick to respond.

Full Fact rated the claim “false.” AFP confirmed the tower was providing 4G LTE service, not 5G. Avondale City Council stated the trees died from lack of water during a very hot summer. Case closed. Move on.

I have to admit when I first came across this story, I dismissed it myself, almost reflexively. But something still stood out to me, what were the fact-checkers not asking? Why did those specific trees die from lack of water while palm trees elsewhere in the Phoenix metro survived the same summer? Phoenix hit all-time record temperatures in 2020—and yet the vast majority of established palms made it through. These three, directly adjacent to a 4G antenna, did not.

The debunking addressed the wrong claim (it wasn’t 5G) and accepted the simplest explanation (heat and drought) without investigating whether there was a contributing factor that made these particular trees unable to handle conditions their neighbors survived. That’s “fact-checking” in only the narrowest possible terms.

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What Fact-Checkers Don’t Check: The Root Cause

Scientists who study this phenomenon aren’t looking for a smoking gun. They’re pointing to cumulative load — the biological reality that organisms don’t fail because of one insult, but because of the total burden on their systems.

Here’s the higher-level picture of what researchers believe is happening:

Calcium signaling disruption. Plants rely on calcium ions (Ca²⁺) as their primary stress signaling mechanism. When a tree senses heat, drought, or pest attack, calcium signals tell it to close its stomata (the microscopic pores on leaves that regulate water loss), conserve water, and redirect resources. Researchers including Dr. Waldmann-Selsam have argued that RF radiation causes interference with cellular membrane function, creating “noise” in these calcium signals. A tree whose stress communication is disrupted may not conserve water as effectively—and then it dies of “drought,” even though the vulnerability to that drought was induced by the nearby antenna.

Chlorophyll interference. Haggerty’s experiment showed that RF-exposed trees produced significantly less chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is the molecular machinery of photosynthesis—the process by which trees convert sunlight into the energy they need to survive. A tree with compromised chlorophyll is a tree running on a depleted battery. It’s not dying from one thing. It’s dying from everything, because it lacks the energy reserves to handle any of it. In animals, the parallel is mitochondrial function, the cellular respiration that converts food and oxygen into ATP, your body’s energy currency. Same principle: compromise the energy machinery, and every downstream system suffers.

The “straw that broke the camel’s back” scenario. A healthy tree can survive a 115°F Arizona summer. A tree living next to a cell tower in a state of chronic metabolic burden—disrupted signaling, reduced photosynthesis, stunted growth—cannot. The EMF isn’t the direct cause of death, but it may be the thing that made the cause of death possible.

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You Are Not Separate From the Tree

And here is where I would like to expand the conversation beyond cell towers and dying trees, and electrical substations and football injuries, because it’s not really about football anymore.

It is a mistake to see humans as separate from nature. We build nanotechnology, edit genomes, and engineer “artificial intelligence” and convince ourselves that we have transcended the natural world, but we haven’t. We are subject to the same forces that govern the tree extending its branch toward the sun, the European Robin following magnetic fields to find its winter home, and the tree dying silently next to an antenna while no one notices.

And this isn’t just a philosophical statement, it is biological at its root. Dr. Martin Pall’s research on voltage-gated calcium channels (VGCCs) has shown that low-intensity electromagnetic fields open calcium channels in animal cells via their voltage sensor, flooding cells with calcium and triggering oxidative stress, inflammation, and cellular damage. Plants don’t have true VGCCs, but they have functional analogs—Two-Pore Channels (TPCs), particularly TPC1, which share a similar voltage sensor structure. Plants also carry an entire toolkit of calcium-permeable channels that respond to environmental signals and are potentially susceptible to the same electromagnetic interference.

The same fundamental mechanism—electromagnetic fields forcing open calcium channels—operates across the entire tree of life. In animals, it manifests as disrupted signaling and oxidative stress. In plants, it manifests as compromised stress responses, reduced photosynthesis, and death by “drought” when the real vulnerability was electromagnetic. The calcium that signals stress in a tree is the calcium that floods your cells. The chlorophyll that converts light into life in a plant is the cousin of hemoglobin that carries oxygen in your blood. We are built from the same molecular toolkit.

But there is a deeper truth here still.

I’m aware this is where some readers will roll their eyes, and I may lose a few of you. Fair enough. Two years ago, I might have responded dimissively myself. What I’ve experienced since then, through surrendering to the path that opened up in front of me, following the thread even when it didn’t make rational sense, and which culminated in a conversation about EMFs reaching tens of millions of people many times over—has taught me not to be so certain about what I can dismiss. If this feels like a leap, stay with me for a minute.

It is a mistake to see ourselves as separate at all.

Everything is connected. Not as a metaphor, but as a description of reality at its most fundamental level. Dig into quantum mechanics — nonlocality, entanglement, tunnelling, the observer effect — and the boundaries between “things” dissolve. Particles behave as waves. Systems remain connected across impossible distances. Observation itself shapes what is observed.

There is a quote attributed to Werner Heisenberg — Nobel laureate, architect of the uncertainty principle — that may be apocryphal. No one has been able to source it definitively. I’m going to use it anyway, because apocryphal or not, it captures something I believe to be true:

“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”

Until recently I would have hedged and said “Universe” where referring to “God.” It felt more scientific, and less loaded, and not tied to any single tradition or theological framework. But the deeper I’ve gone drinking from this cup—into the research, into the experience, into the mystery of how I have been guided down this path—the more “Universe” feels like a euphemism. There is an intelligence woven into the fabric of everything, a consciousness that precedes matter, and to me “God” is now the only word in the English language with enough weight to hold it.

Jesus laid out this concept of interconnection plainly in the Gospel of Thomas: “Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up a stone, and you will find me there.”

Nearly every spiritual tradition has pointed to this idea for thousands of years. The Vedic sages. The Buddhist meditators. The Sufi mystics. The Kabbalists. The Taoists. Indigenous cultures across the globe. They all arrived at the same place—and the founders of quantum mechanics, working from the opposite direction, arrived there too. When you dig deep enough to stare into the fundamental mysteries of the universe, it becomes very hard to see anything other than God staring back.

Erwin Schrödinger, whose wave equation is foundational to all of quantum mechanics, spent decades studying Vedantic philosophy. In his book My View of the World, he wrote:

"The multiplicity is only seemingly true … The mystical experience of the union with God regularly reveals this, unless strong prejudices stand in the way."

He was referring to the basic conviction of Vedanta—the idea that individual consciousness and universal consciousness are one and the same. Tat tvam asi: You are that.

And then there is Anandamayi Ma—the Indian saint described as “the most perfect flower the Indian soil has produced.” When asked to describe her life, she answered:

“There is little to tell. My consciousness has never associated itself with this temporary body. Before I came on this earth, I was the same. I grew into womanhood, but still I was the same. And, Father, in front of you now, I am the same. Ever afterward, though the dance of creation changes around me in the hall of eternity, I shall be the same.”

One of the things Ma taught ties this entire essay together in a way that startled me when I came across it:

“Look at a tree: from one seed arises a huge tree; from it comes numerous seeds, each one of which in its turn grows into a tree. No two fruits are alike. Yet it is one life that throbs in every particle of the tree. So, it is the same Atman — the universal self, the consciousness that exists in all things — everywhere. All creation is That.”

One life. In every cell in the tree. In every cell in your body. In every atom in the universe. All creation is that.

Nature is One System

So when George Kittle looks at those dead trees and says, “That one messed me up”, we should pay attention. Not just because it might explain why 49ers players keep tearing ACLs and Achilles tendons, but because those trees are showing us something about ourselves and the world we’re building.

The trees are canaries, we are the coalminers, and we are all living in the same coal mine.

The electromagnetic sensitivity that kills a branch is the same sensitivity that your cells use to communicate, heal, and grow. We are not watching nature from the outside, we are nature watching itself, and right now, nature is telling us something.

The question is whether we’ll listen, or whether we’ll do what the NFL did, and cut down the evidence before anyone else can see it.

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Additional viewing:

Forest Dieback caused by Electro-smog, by Konrad Ermer

References

• Waldmann-Selsam, C., Balmori-de la Puente, A., Breunig, H., & Balmori, A. (2016). Radiofrequency radiation injures trees around mobile phone base stations. Science of The Total Environment, 572, 554-569.

• Haggerty, K. (2010). Adverse Influence of Radio Frequency Background on Trembling Aspen Seedlings. International Journal of Forestry Research, vol. 2010.

• Roux, S.J. et al. (2009). Transient effect of weak electromagnetic fields on calcium ion concentration in Arabidopsis thaliana. BMC Plant Biology, 9, 47.

• Pall, M.L. (2016). Electromagnetic Fields Act Similarly in Plants as in Animals: Probable Activation of Calcium Channels via Their Voltage Sensor. Current Chemical Biology, 10(1), 74-82.

• Breunig, H. & Waldmann-Selsam, C. (2017). Tree Damage Caused by Mobile Phone Base Stations: An Observation Guide. Available at: ehsciences.org

• Waldmann-Selsam, C. (2021). Tree Damage Caused by Radiofrequency Radiation: Exemplary Observations from 2005 to 2021 in Germany. Available at: ehsciences.org

• Belyavskaya, N.A. (2004). Biological effects due to weak magnetic field on plants. Advances in Space Research, 34(7), 1566-1574.

• Schrödinger, E. (1961). My View of the World [Meine Weltansicht]. Cambridge University Press.

• Schrödinger, E. (1944). What Is Life? Cambridge University Press.

• Heisenberg, W. (1971). Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations. Harper & Row. (Recollections of conversations with Rabindranath Tagore, 1929.)

• Yogananda, P. (1946). Autobiography of a Yogi, Chapter 45: “The Bengali ‘Joy-Permeated Mother.’” Self-Realization Fellowship. (Source of Anandamayi Ma quotes.)

• FullFact (2021), 5G tower did not kill palm trees in Arizona

Bonus for anyone who reads this far: