Gary Duncan, Rio Grande National Forest, Colorado. All photographs from Colorado and New Mexico, July 2024, by Richard Rothman for Harper’s Magazine © The artist

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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.

Duncan’s truck

Duncan understands that people regard him as crazy. He feels the same way about them. Over the years, he has developed a unique holistic outlook, a heterodox synthesis of elements from Eastern and Western medicine outlined in reams of photocopied flyers that he keeps in his truck-mounted cabin to distribute to anyone who will stop and listen. Duncan ensured that I received the whole syllabus, a stack of more than thirty xeroxed leaflets, including “The Meridian-Neurology Interface,” “The Link Between MCS and EHS,” and “The Allopathic Dichotomy,” this last title referring to the schism between medicine and psychology. “By applying a holographic pattern to reality,” one fly sheet read, “we quickly find out that what exists on one dimension of reality will very often have exact corollaries on every other plane of existence.”

Browsing the stack, I at times found it difficult to see Duncan as anything more than a crank. In conversation, his dialogue occasionally hinted at a manic overconfidence and a grandiose sense of self-importance. From his isolated perch in the wilderness, Duncan spoke of letter-writing campaigns, appeals to public officials, and sweeping proposals to convert swaths of national forest into EI-refugee habitats. Given the state of the world, much of this felt like unmoored bluster.

But while his own theories could appear outlandish, Duncan agreed that the environmental-illness scene has become cluttered with snake-oil salesmen. “If you really are electrosensitive, or you really are having environmental health effects, and somebody sells you a crystal that supposedly sucks in the negative EMFs or makes your bed safe, and you go back into the environmental anomaly and do nothing about it,” he said, “then this is going to escalate to carcinogenics real fast.”

It’s here that Duncan set himself apart. “This is the work of my life,” he said. “What the fuck’s going to happen to it if I quit breathing tonight? If I don’t pass this on to you—whatever the fuck you do to it—if there isn’t an interchange with the media and an exchange with younger generations, what the fuck was my life about?”

I first became interested in EI refugees during the early days of the pandemic, when social media was aswirl with conspiracy theories linking the virus’s physiological effects to the ongoing 5G rollout. Initially, the idea that radio-frequency radiation could cause people to experience physical symptoms struck me as absurd. Radio signals have blanketed the ambient environment of modern civilization for decades, and like many people, I had long taken their invisible omnipresence for granted. Meanwhile, a fair amount of scientific dissent had in fact been forming in opposition to mainstream acceptance of the allegedly innocuous effects on the human body of nonionizing EMF exposures. Artificial electrical fields disrupting our internal power grids does make a kind of intuitive sense: we are bioelectric beings; our cells conduct delicate electrical currents that mediate our nervous systems, facilitate our thoughts, and enable our bodies to move at will. Electricity, once a universal animating life force, is now directed in ways totally alien to our evolution.

Duncan’s aversions, however, are not limited to the electromagnetic spectrum. Like most of the dozens of EI refugees I have met, he cites a broad range of sensitivities. “When I first started to sensitize, the list was immense,” he said. “Any kind of glucose product, any kind of lactose product, chocolate, anything in the laundry aisle in the grocery store, any kind of petroleum-based volatile organic solvent—turpentine, gasoline—any kind of airborne combustion products, smoke from fires, almost all body-care products that had any kind of synthetic ingredients in them, the whole gamut of electromagnetic fields, any type of wireless radiation.” One might conclude that he and others like him are simply allergic to modern civilization.

While conditions like MCS and EHS can appear to be distinct phenomena, they are understood by advocates and detractors alike to share common symptoms. In a 2020 study published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, the French researchers Dominique Belpomme and Philippe Irigaray found that EHS was associated with MCS in 30 percent of some two thousand self-reported cases; a 2005 World Health Organization fact sheet noted that both disorders are “characterized by a range of non-specific symptoms that lack apparent toxicological or physiological basis or independent verification.” Depending on whom you ask, this link evidences either a causal relationship, an increasingly hazardous world of artificial irritants, or a shared delusion among patients.

People with self-diagnosed EHS and MCS often trace the onset of their conditions to an underlying trigger, such as a brush with an experimental medication or accumulated irritant exposures. Duncan blames his sensitivity on work-related chemical exposures from his time as a high-end cabinetmaker in Los Angeles, where he worked for clients like Steven Spielberg, Dustin Hoffman, and Madonna. “I very likely contracted chemical sensitization due to the building products we were using in the cabinet shop,” he posited, “to say nothing of breathing L.A. air.” Duncan is especially suspicious of medium-density fiberboard, a common building material made from sawdust pressed and held together with a formaldehyde-based adhesive. “Everything we used to make these cabinets was formaldehyde-laced.”

Duncan came to recognize his illness in the midst of a broader turn in his life, and several years after getting sober following a failed suicide attempt, he received, around a drum circle, an informal diagnosis from a German doctor. He explained a litany of vague symptoms that he was experiencing at the time: chronic fatigue, insomnia, nervous hypertension, high blood pressure, blurry vision, loss of balance, tinnitus, severe migraines, and a bizarre set of dermatological issues. His thoughts on building materials were heavily influenced by the German Baubiologie (“building biology”) movement, which champions sustainable and “life-affirming” architecture. Baubiologie was developed in direct response to the post–World War II reconstruction boom, which saw the widespread use of cheap, industrial, and chemically enhanced building materials. A physician named Hubert Palm argued that there was a correlation between post–World War II housing stock and an influx of patients harboring strange new chronic ailments, leading him to write a series of books and articles that would serve as the movement’s foundation.

Inspired by Baubiologie, Duncan formed the Smart Shelter Network in 1996, two years after his EHS diagnosis. A loose coalition of sensitives, the network initially focused on building with natural materials like adobe and hay but shifted focus in the early Aughts, when Duncan concluded that constant motion was the only way to outpace the ongoing encroachment of pesticides and cell towers. The Smart Shelter Network has since identified several hundred “safe sites” across the sparsely populated American West, and Duncan contends that the work of maintaining them is also beneficial to his healing of agitated nervous systems.

“I’m developing a relationship between myself and the cosmos,” Duncan said of his land-stewardship work and transient, solitary lifestyle. “And this has an extremely powerful, spiritually transcendent value to it, but it also has a health aspect: when you do this, your health very definitely and graphically improves.” As if to demonstrate what he meant, Duncan took me out to forage edible plants and collect spring water for tea, and later invited me to partake in some weeding. We outlined a perimeter that had been overtaken by invasive Canada thistle and slowly worked across it, uprooting the plants in a weaving, meticulous grid. “Doing this work to restore the natural wildland is the single most powerful element that you can give to someone who has been sensitized,” Duncan said. “You’ve got to be in an electromagnetically free environment to do it, but if you just set them out there and let them heal,” he told me, they will.

During our time together, Duncan lent me a worn copy of The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life, by Arthur Firstenberg, an offbeat history of man-made electricity and a kind of bible for electrosensitives. “It’s un-fucking-believable,” said Duncan. “The guy is a walking fucking encyclopedia. He is the guru.”

Several days later, I paid Firstenberg a visit at his sun-dappled, single-story home at the end of an overgrown cul-de-sac in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A short, slender Brooklyn native with long gray hair pulled into a ponytail, he spoke with a buttoned-up New Age candor. “Santa Fe is a special place,” he said. “It’s actually protected.” We were sitting in the Española basin, and Firstenberg suggested that its topography may confer protective qualities. He wagered that several thousand electrosensitives live in the area, with his public-pressure group, the Santa Fe Alliance for Public Health and Safety, accounting for some two dozen of them.

As a result of their contentious status, environmental illnesses have spawned a relatively self-contained universe of in-group experts and authorities, among whom Firstenberg stands as a giant. The Invisible Rainbow has sold more than one hundred thousand copies, and his newsletter reaches roughly twice as many subscribers. Locally, however, he is better known as a serial litigator, the agitator behind a string of lawsuits targeting all aspects of the expansion, regulation, and modernization of the telecommunication and energy grids. These suits have ranged from the petty to the grandiose: In 2010, he sued his neighbor over her apparent use of a wireless-network extender, which allegedly caused him to suffer “years of inconvenience and acute and chronic pain and suffering.” A decade later, he pressed a complaint against the City of Santa Fe all the way to the Supreme Court in an effort to block local 5G upgrades. But while Firstenberg is still involved with ongoing regulatory campaigns, all of his cases to date have lost.

I asked Firstenberg whether he thought public officials took his advocacy work seriously. “They did for a number of years, and then they got sick of me,” he replied. “I’m no longer viewed in a very favorable light.”

Still, Firstenberg does not view that work as narrowly centering the interests of electrosensitives. In fact, he took issue with the very framing of “environmental illness” or “environmental sensitivity” in analyzing the issue, referring to EHS and MCS as politically motivated terms. “Sensitivity is heard as a psychological term, he said. “It’s almost derogatory—it marginalizes people who are being injured. People are being poisoned; they’re not sensitive, there’s nothing wrong with them. That’s blaming the victim instead of focusing on the environmental assault, which is affecting everyone whether they know it or not.”

Rather than agitating for a special interest group, he sees himself as a warrior for public health amid a sea of addiction to modern convenience. “To study people who say they’re electrically sensitive is to focus on the wrong thing,” he said. “This is my message: stop using the devices, throw away your cell phone, turn off the wireless devices in your house. If enough people do it, you curb the driving force behind all this radiation. To me, that’s the only solution.”

While he did not share Duncan’s principled aversion to fixed housing, Firstenberg seemed to mask similar anxieties with his blunt and analytic demeanor. “The sources of radiation are becoming so pervasive compared to what exists in nature,” he said. “They’re changing the electromagnetic environment of the entire planet. Even if you live in a Faraday cage, I don’t think you’re going to be protected in the long run.”

Ann McCampbell, an environmental health and chemical sensitivity consultant in Santa Fe, talks to around thirty people with sensitivities each month. McCampbell was a practicing clinical physician in women’s health until she became too sick to continue her work in 1989. She found that exposure to everyday substances such as perfume, smoke, paint fumes, and even ink left her feeling dizzy, nauseated, and fatigued. She suspects pesticides, in particular, also greatly affect her. “As I’m lying there thinking, ‘What has happened to me?’ none of my medical training helped. So I really had to rely on the people who had gone before me, both the patients and the doctors—and most doctors who end up treating people with chemical sensitivities do have some form of it themselves. It’s still somewhat mysterious.”

Given the dearth of formal treatments and accommodations, McCampbell’s ability to help sensitives through her consulting work is somewhat limited. “I have a list of experienced physicians who are in practice and that’s what they do, but it’s unfortunately getting shorter all the time, with doctors either passing away or retiring.” Part of the difficulty in formally categorizing MCS owes to its broad range of symptoms and enormous variety of triggers. From processed foods to clothing treated with flame-retardant chemicals, our industrially manufactured environment has been inundated with such an enormous array of artificial substances that singling out culprits and linking them to discrete effects can seem impossible. “While some of the symptoms are known toxic reactions, we can have vastly different symptoms,” said McCampbell. “This individual variability and exquisite sensitivity can be so pronounced that many scientists and doctors find it hard to accept as real.”

Although MCS is not recognized as an illness by major professional medical organizations like the WHO and the American Medical Association, a consensus definition was published in the Archives of Environmental Health in 1999. MCS soon attracted interest, in part because of the large number of veterans returning from the Gulf War with strange medical ailments that had apparently arisen from wartime chemical exposures. Today, a questionnaire called the Quick Environmental Exposure and Sensitivity Inventory is commonly used to screen diagnoses.

But even as EHS and MCS have found scant acknowledgment among medical associations, they are more widely supported in the realm of disability accommodation. Neither condition is approved as a qualification for Social Security benefits, but quite a few sensitives whom I spoke with had managed to secure them. Some policymakers have even taken it on as a pet issue. A 1993 National Council on Disability report on the implementation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, for example, noted “full protection for people with environmental illness” as a notable gap in coverage; in 1999, Senator Patrick Leahy and Representative Bernie Sanders introduced companion bills in the Senate and House, calling for a review of the research on the health effects of radio-frequency radiation.

In more recent years, however, that front has fallen comparatively silent. A partial explanation lies in the telecom, pharmaceutical, and chemical industries’ vested interest in avoiding regulation and maintaining the public perception that their products are safe for general consumption, a campaign pursued not only through lobbying and public relations, but also through the funding of science that concerns product safety. Elizabeth Kelley, a leading advocate for EMF legislation and former Department of Health and Human Services policy analyst, described her time in government as an “eye-opening experience” in which she witnessed the extent of corporate influence over public-health regulation. “In Washington,” she said, “there are many competing interests that sometimes impede the health-care delivery system.”

It is difficult to say much about a subject so close to the threshold of the unknown without sounding crazy, but it’s equally hard to deny that we are slowly toxifying our planet in the name of expedience and entertainment. Cancer-linked chemicals permeate common consumer goods; microplastics swarm our bodies. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that environmental illnesses are becoming more common. A 2004 national-prevalence survey found that 11.2 percent of Americans reported an “unusual hypersensitivity to common chemical products such as perfume, fresh paint, pesticides, and other petrochemical-based substances,” with 2.5 percent having been medically diagnosed with MCS. A 2018 follow-up found that the figures had risen to 25.9 percent and 12.8 percent, respectively. If the claimed experiences of EI refugees are taken at face value, preserving a few pockets of sanctuary might be the least of our concerns.

Last summer, I reconvened with Duncan in a secluded section of the Rio Grande National Forest. I showed up and pitched my tent about an hour before the time we had agreed to meet, but as minutes and then hours crawled by, Duncan was nowhere to be seen. After settling in, I anxiously considered whether I had made an eighteen-hour trek into the Colorado wilderness in vain. Conditioned by a world that relentlessly questions the truth of their experiences, people with environmental illnesses can be skittish around journalists. More than a few declined to speak with me on the record, and I feared that Duncan had gotten spooked. At the same time, I considered whether I had been conditioned to expect instantaneous electronic communication in the event of an unexpected complication. So I settled in, spent a day swatting mosquitoes, and reminded myself that the only thing I could do was wait to see what would happen.

It had been dark for hours by the time I heard Duncan’s rig crawling into camp—ten hours late. We caught up over breakfast the next morning. He had a nasty cough—“the VA diagnosed me with emphysema: I should have been dead two years ago”—but was otherwise spry for his seventy-seven years. Still, the mosquito infestation was bad enough that we opted to relocate. Bug spray was not an option around Duncan.

He knew of a safer spot within a few miles, so we set off. Upon arriving, Duncan did what he always does to assess a location: he produced one of his EMF meters, donned a headset, and surveyed the air for electrical interference. “Oh fuck,” he muttered, after pacing about with the device for several minutes. “That is likely problematic.”

Duncan claimed to have picked up something on his reader, a twenty-year-old device developed by the British electrical engineer Alasdair Philips that translated EMF frequencies into clicking sounds of variable intensity. He speculated that it was likely a new cell tower, or perhaps an old one that had been upgraded to 5G. “Out of some four hundred sites between Moab, Aspen, and Santa Fe, I’d say I lose four to five sites every year,” he said. “This is like half of my life, scouting out every square fucking inch of the most remote, inaccessible terrain we can get to.”

There was something quintessentially American about Duncan’s notion of a self-directed lifestyle in the unbridled wilderness. I recognized many of his gripes as those usually framed as problems for wild animals: his habitat is shrinking, natural water sources dwindling, native forage plants dying off. The walls of civilization are closing in on Duncan’s way of life from every direction: extraction projects threaten to deteriorate air quality on once-pristine public land; cell service has begun to reach deep into the unsettled area around Duncan’s trailer near Moab, prompting him to experiment with constructing protective barriers. In their oft-thwarted pursuit of life beyond modernity, EI refugees illustrate how profoundly difficult it has become to simply walk away and live off the land.

If Duncan has embraced the life of the solitary drifter, other EI refugees seek haven in like-minded communities. The largest permanent EHS and MCS refuge in the country lies 320 miles west of Santa Fe, on the outskirts of the desert outpost of Snowflake, Arizona. There I paid a visit to Susan Molloy, a local fixture who helped found the community, at her single-story home, a structure of red and cream sheet metal against sandy earth. “I just call it our neighborhood,” Molloy said of the informal settlement. “I don’t want to be pretentious by naming it something that would be overblown.”

The interior of Molloy’s home was dark, naturally cooled by drywall covered in foil. Books were individually wrapped in sandwich bags on their shelves; the doors were metallic; a hardwired DSL modem was installed in a Faraday cage in the foyer, away from the living space. Her dog, a five-year-old mutt named Gracie, greeted me at the door.

Molloy believed that she may have initially been sensitized by pesticide exposures while living near San Francisco. “I was used to being pretty strong and able to do a great number of things,” Molloy said of her former life in Marin County. “But I didn’t understand that the ambient environment—the whole thing—was wearing me down.” By the time she left, she was in a wheelchair and breathing out of an oxygen tank. She moved to Snowflake with a friend, another sensitive, in 1992. Aside from the dry, sterile quality of the local air, the high desert’s inhospitableness was initially a selling point for Molloy and her friend. They were among the first to settle the area, and further development seemed unlikely.

Over time, their once-undeveloped plot of land attracted several dozen permanent EI refugees. They even lobbied successfully for state funding to support four stand-alone public-housing units to accommodate applicants with environmental illnesses. According to Molloy, these are among the only public-housing units specifically reserved for people with EHS or MCS in the country. “About five of us in northern Arizona decided that we had to get housing for our colleagues who were unhoused and dying,” she said.

Snowflake’s MCS and EHS community has slowly developed a set of novel home-building practices. The homes’ concrete-slab foundations prevent the accumulation of mold; transformers, breaker panels, and electrical meters are installed outside; finished-steel exteriors block EMFs and do not require paint; horizontally mounted lumber siding eschews the use of “toxic” plywood. Molloy asked me to avoid using detergents and personal-hygiene products for several days before my arrival—and, of course, requested that I turn off my cell phone.

Still, Snowflake has never been a practical destination for many sensitives, and in recent years Molloy has found it particularly difficult to encourage would-be newcomers to make the leap. EI refugees are often unable to hold long-term jobs because of the strain caused by their sensitivities, and many are not able to afford a home there. Some dislike the slow pace of rural life, but for others, Snowflake has gotten too congested. The general population is growing faster than the local EI-refugee community, and fresh irritants, like newly installed power lines and a Smithfield Foods industrial hog farm, have arrived with them. “We’ve been pretty careful to try to lower people’s expectations,” she said. “The most ill people should not move here. I don’t know where they should move, except get in your car and get out of where you are.”

Nonetheless, there are people for whom escape is not only psychologically difficult but physically impossible. Molloy told me that she gets phone calls every day from people struggling to understand and adjust to their environmental illnesses. “Most of the people with whom I interact are living in their cars, or maybe their car doesn’t run anymore and they live in it anyway,” she said. “And that has become immensely harder in the past couple of years, as the prevalence of Wi-Fi has grown in national forests and state forests.” Many sensitives thus see the dearth of targeted EI accommodations as a civil-rights issue. Molloy claimed that she has personally been forced out of jobs over workplace irritants, like when she worked at a day care in California: “I had a great time with the kids, you know, but the people who ran the day care used a dish detergent that made me horribly ill.” She also described being let go from an intake job at a social-services office over issues with the presence of cleaning products, a microwave oven, and unshielded computers.

Molloy likened present-day attitudes toward synthetic chemical products and radio-frequency radiation to society’s once-blasé adoption of asbestos, leaded gasoline, and tobacco. If the past few decades are any indication, however, greater regulation doesn’t seem likely. Molloy, Firstenberg, and other EI advocates whom I spoke with all indicated that they’d found an easier time securing a mainstream audience in the Nineties, when things like mobile phones were new and less deeply integrated into daily life. Many of their movement’s luminaries share a generational kinship—they can remember life in the before times—but they are starting to retire or die out.

At the same time, environmental illness is a broad spectrum, and many keep quiet about their conditions. Over the course of my reporting, I met a retired chemical engineer afflicted with MCS, a retired electrical engineer with EHS, a successful corporate headhunter from Silicon Valley who moved to a remote corner of the Rockies in Colorado to escape medical symptoms that he had attributed to the Bay Area’s ambient toxicity. It is no surprise that some cherish a physical community in which their views resonate with an outright majority.

Molloy took Gracie and me on an afternoon walk to admire the desert’s quiet beauty. “I’m astonished, and very blessed, that I get to have this much of a life,” she said. “I’ve had the opportunity to get somewhat adjusted.”

When I first started working on this article, in the summer of 2021, my attitude toward the refugees was somewhat voyeuristic. While I may have been sympathetic to their subjective experiences and social positions, I assumed that most of them were likely dealing with psychosomatic symptoms or rationalizing psychological ailments. Then, after returning home to New York City, something unexpected happened: I started to feel it.

By “it,” I mean that I began to “feel” the physical presence of EMFs emanating from things like Wi-Fi routers and 5G transceivers, particularly if I noticed that they were close to my head. A tingling, staticky sensation would ripple first across my skin and then internally, particularly in my frontal lobe. It initially came as an amusement but gradually grew into a nuisance. At times the sensation escalated and seemed to induce mild headaches.

I put “feel” in scare quotes because I initially suspected, and suspect today, that these sensations were largely or entirely psychological. I had been thinking about electrosensitivity quite a lot, about the nature of the condition, trying to imagine what it felt like, so it made sense that I would have had a heightened awareness of the presence of wireless devices. At any given moment, our bodies receive an incomprehensible volume of sensory data, and how we process it is closely connected to how we channel our conscious awareness.

This experience initially shifted the tone and focus of my reporting, but it went on to progress further than I could have imagined. A large part of this article draws from reporting that I conducted more than two years ago. In the spring and early summer of 2022, I suffered what I have come to understand was a schizoaffective manic episode. I have since been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed a regimen of mood stabilizers, but while I can use this language to summarize the experience in retrospect, in the moment I felt as though I were going through some kind of spiritual awakening. I felt an intense, euphoric sense of connection with the universe; I believed that I was receiving direct communications from a higher power and felt as though I could perceive secret meanings in anything from billboards to brief exchanges with gas-station attendants. Among other things, my “electrosensitivity” greatly intensified during this period. I started to feel highly reactive to the presence of power lines and distant cell towers, and I went so far as to spend a few weeks in the National Radio Quiet Zone in West Virginia, to which I briefly considered relocating permanently. In that condition, of course, any doubts that I had previously held about the phenomenon dropped away completely.

Someone engaging in magical thinking naturally constructs their delusions from a blend of actual experiences, memories, and strong associations. In this way, “deluded” thoughts, fears, or perceptions perfectly resemble what might be considered clear-eyed reason, with the only meaningful distinction being the degree to which others affirm the truth or logic of a given conclusion. I would even say that the schizoaffective episode was and has been a tremendous catalyst for personal growth, albeit in far less revelatory terms than the way in which it manifested itself at the time. At the very least, it has deepened my appreciation for the likelihood that EI refugees likely do physically feel the sensitivities they claim, even in cases that may be of demonstrably psychological origin.

I say none of this to make generalizations or to suggest that people with environmental sensitivities are necessarily deluded. It is easy to imagine a neurotic individual who has worked themselves into perceiving harm where others may not, but it is also conceivable that others have been socialized into psychologically minimizing discomfort resulting from phenomena most of us regard as normal or harmless. Uncommon or poorly understood environmental sensitivities render this tension explicit, but it is one that can be found in all manner of conflicts and differences of perspective.

Nonetheless, the break that I experienced instilled within me an appreciation for how strongly our perceptions of reality are shaped by beliefs, expectations, and anxieties that are, in turn, contingent and socially constructed. If I tell you that the act of reading these words may cause you uncomfortable eyestrain, it is natural for you to reflect on whether the statement resonates with what you are experiencing. You may become more aware of the ease or difficulty with which your focus drifts across the page. Likewise, if I tell you that your shampoo may cause dermatological irritation, you may have a heightened awareness of any minor discomfort you feel the next time you apply it.

Duncan typically makes weekly trips into town to stock up on supplies, send emails from a public library, and see live music. But his favorite diversion is visiting hot springs. After a few days in the Rio Grande National Forest, we drove an hour to the nearest one. “I’ve never met an electrosensitive who doesn’t love hot springs,” he said. “They help with the inflammation.” We undressed and climbed into the water. As we marinated, he spoke about the hardships of his life prior to his sensitization: his abusive, alcoholic father; his tumultuous young adulthood; his complicated feelings about his service in Vietnam. Even prior to his becoming sensitized, Duncan found it hard to sit still. He spent decades roving around as a tradesman and traveling musician, drifting between fraught, unstable, and painfully temporary arrangements. Within this context, he framed his EI diagnosis as a “come-to-Jesus moment.” At last, here was an explanation for his inner turmoil. “For Gary Duncan to do one thing for thirty years is unheard of,” he said of his ongoing work stewarding the land. “At that point, it’s like—you’re not going to quit doing this, you’re never going to change.”

I was struck by Duncan’s present-tense evocation of “the old Gary”—the noncommittal, troubled Gary of thirty years ago—even as he recounted how he had, in fact, undergone a meaningful personal transformation in the meantime. His surroundings had changed, but so had he.

Duncan spoke about his lifestyle with the self-assured confidence of a benign cult leader, but I could sense a kind of fear behind his bullish demeanor—fear of irrelevance, of marginalization, of the ever-churning wheel of time. Back at camp, he described occasional but acute feelings of loneliness: “We’re all crazy as shit, we’re reactive as hell, we can get sick at the drop of a hat, we have all of these limitations about what we can be exposed to and not. Who the fuck would want to be in a relationship with someone like me?” More than anything, he struck me as possessed by a desire to be heard and believed, to receive external affirmation of his pain. He and many other EI refugees whom I spoke with also frequently expressed feelings of paranoia: suspicions that they were being watched or thwarted in some way by a shadowy enemy. Duncan told me that he had recently started seeing ominous movements in the darkness at night.

After we parted ways, I found it difficult not to worry about Duncan. His age was catching up to him, and his manner of living seemed to preclude reliable medical care. Some months after I finished reporting this article, he lost an eye in an auto-repair accident. “Now we learn life as a cyclops at age 78,” he wrote me in an email. His optimism seemed resilient, but one wonders. At one point, he even expressed a desire to take his own life should he become too frail to maintain his nomadic existence.

When I told Duncan about my mental breakdown, he predictably speculated that Brooklyn’s EMF-dense atmosphere might have been a contributing factor. While I strongly doubt this was the cause, history can indeed find ways of absolving the paranoid, and there are plenty of cases in which environmental toxins once considered safe have later been proven to produce deleterious mental-health effects. Studies show that common air pollutants can increase the risk of psychiatric disorders such as depression and bipolar disorder, for example, and exposure to certain kinds of ionizing radiation has been shown to correlate with the onset of schizophrenia. Our minds and bodies reflect their surroundings, and our built environments are composed of such a vast array of inorganic materials that it seems inevitable that risks would go undetected.

EI refugees may be the canaries in the coal mine of the modern world, flush with under-recognized threats produced by industry and found everywhere, even in “safe” consumer goods. But regardless of whether their warnings prove prophetic, their plight illustrates the hard boundaries of a social order that prides itself on objectivity and rationality.

On our last day together, Duncan and I returned to the site that we had weeded two years before, to check on its progress and to root out any thistle that may have returned. Miraculously, virtually none had. Duncan was astonished. “I don’t make any pretense at all of understanding what the fuck’s going on with this,” he said. “But my suspicion is that if you put the right energy into the right project for a long enough period of time, it will determine reality.”