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Weekend Roundup: Anti-Global Backlash Is Realigning Politics Across the West
The great sociologist Max Weber postulated that the birth act of modern capitalism was the secession of business from the household and thus the web of moral and ethical obligations that intimate form of human organization entailed. Zygmunt Bauman has called globalization the "'second secession'" in which unleashed capitalism has "'flown away'" from the constraints of the nation-state, in effect the larger household. Now, national households are clawing back their claims, reasserting sovereignty in an anti-globalization backlash that is profoundly realigning politics.

"Across the West," Nouriel Roubini writes, "establishment parties of the right and the left are being disrupted -- if not destroyed from the inside. Within such parties, the losers from globalization are finding champions of anti-globalization that are challenging the formal mainstream orthodoxy. Thus, the traditional distinction between center-right and center-left is breaking down." In the U.S. and Britain, he notes, working class voters traditionally aligned with the left, are joining the ranks of Trump and Brexit. In continental Europe, discontent with immigration and austerity has given rise to new parties on both the far right and the far left. "A new political alignment,' Roubini concludes, "erases the old left and right paradigms of labor versus capital, workers versus business, taxes and regulation versus free enterprise. Instead, the new alignment will be organized around pro and anti-global integration forces." As Roubini points out, support for globalization these days comes mainly from the emerging economies, which have largely benefited from foreign investment and access to global markets. While inequality has grown within the West, he notes, it has diminished on a global scale.

To the extent global integration has touched Brazil, pride rises with greater prosperity. As the Olympics wound down, Adriana Caitano vents her anger in an open letter from Brazil "to people who love to come here to enjoy the beaches and stare at women in bikinis, but disrespect the country that hosts them." She imagines what the "American swimmers [involved in the faux robbery scandal] must have thought: Of course it would be very possible for four foreign, white, tall, Olympians to be assaulted in Rio de Janeiro. Who would not believe it? This underdeveloped country can't even clean a pool the right way. They would never be able to find the truth. So we'll just go back to the American dream with our medals."

One can't speak these days of bikinis in Brazil without bringing to mind the controversy over banning the burkini in France, where local police this week forced a woman on a Nice beach to show more skin in her bathing wardrobe. Willa Frej reports on a man in France who has been paying the fines for women ticketed under the burkini ban. Nick Robins-Early examines what many regard as the weak reasoning behind the ban. And, indeed, by week's end, France's highest administrative court, the Council of State, suspended the ban in an initial ruling in a case brought by a human rights group. At the same time, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who is running for office again, pledged he would implement a nationwide ban on the burkini if elected.

During a visit to the beach in Izmir Province, Turkey, Ilgin Yorulmaz surveys opinion in that Muslim-majority country with a modern secular history. "With historical ties to France," she reports, "Turks are divided over their opinions of the burkini both in France and in their own country." Despite Canada's historic links to France, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has made clear his country doesn't share France's secular fundamentalism. "We should be past tolerance," he says, and move toward embracing diversity. In a post from HuffPost Maghreb, Akram Belkaïd calls for, "open debate about this implicit requirement of total assimilation" behind the burkini ban. Writing from Germany where a debate is underway about banning the burqa, Christian Democratic Union politician Ruprecht Polenz similarly argues that. "underlying the burqa debate is the fear that we can never eliminate the differences in our society."

The repercussions of the Turkish coup continue to roil the geopolitical landscape. As U.S. Vice President Joe Biden visited Turkey this week in an effort to temper rising anti-Americanism fueled by a belated and tepid response by U.S. authorities to the failed coup, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan doubled down on the demand to hand over Fethullah Gülen, who lives in the U.S. and whom he sees as the culprit behind the attempted overthrow of the government. Reviewing these developments, David Hearst asks, "Is America losing Turkey?" Doug Bandow thinks that it would be a good idea if America did lose Turkey. "The growth of Putinism in Ankara today is a terrible embarrassment, with no corresponding security benefit for America as compensation," he writes. "The U.S. should change its approach to reflect changing circumstances. Turkey's membership in NATO no longer serves America's and Europe's interests." Farah Mohamed examines the impact of the coup attempt on the long-festering conflict between Greeks and Turks in Cyprus. Resolution of that conflict is seen by many as a key stepping stone in Turkey's bid to join the European Union, a relationship now even more fraught as Europe is deeply wary of Erdoğan's even sharper post-coup turn toward authoritarianism. As one Cypriot told Mohamed, some islanders, "feel caught up in a fight that does not belong to them."

In an essay titled "Why China Fears a 'Color Revolution' Incited by the West," I argue that the U.S. should appreciate the resonances of China's history as a unitary state present in today's one-party system. By recognizing that system's legitimacy, the U.S. would allay the suspicion of China's leaders that it is seeking to foment regime change through the promotion and support of human rights activists. I further argue that, for the first time in the long history of China's "institutional civilization," an autonomous civil society is emerging because everyone now has the same information as those who rule them. "Whether China ends up on the wrong side of history or not depends on its ability to find a balance between rule from the top and an emergent civil society from below," I conclude. "We in the West should encourage China's effort to forge a new equilibrium out of its own experience, not seek to project our legacy onto their future."

Writing from Beijing, Peiran Wei asks, "Why are Chinese companies, which have long been playing catch-up with their U.S. counterparts, now leading the way?"

Finally, our Singularity series this week looks at how Harvard scientists have "radically rewritten" the E. coli genome, heralding a major step forward in synthetic biology.

WHO WE ARE

EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Co-Founder and Executive Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Executive Editor of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Alex Gardels and Peter Mellgard are the Associate Editors of The WorldPost. Suzanne Gaber is the Editorial Assistant of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is News Director at The Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost's news coverage. Nick Robins-Early is a World Reporter. Rowaida Abdelaziz is World Social Media Editor.

CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul.

EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media), Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).

VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS: Dawn Nakagawa.

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy), Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review) and Katherine Keating (One-On-One). Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are Contributing Editors-At-Large.

The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.

Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the "whole mind" way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.

ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council -- as well as regular contributors -- to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo, Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail and Zheng Bijian.

From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.

MISSION STATEMENT

The WorldPost is a global media bridge that seeks to connect the world and connect the dots. Gathering together top editors and first person contributors from all corners of the planet, we aspire to be the one publication where the whole world meets.

We not only deliver breaking news from the best sources with original reportage on the ground and user-generated content; we bring the best minds and most authoritative as well as fresh and new voices together to make sense of events from a global perspective looking around, not a national perspective looking out.

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science

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Stop Being Ridiculous: We Agree On Animal Alternatives
While watching the games of 2016 -- not the Olympics, the U.S. presidential election -- I am reminded of the stare-down between drug companies and animal rights activists. Of this mounting conflict, you'd think the answer is simple -- that animals can and should eventually make their exit from so many labs and testing facilities. Alternatives are in the wings, if even in their earliest days.

"2016-08-24-1472062485-8586230-BrainThatWouldntDie.jpg"

But as in politics, neither side is listening, and declaring moral victory seems more important than making progress. Like convention delegates, each side is being ridiculous. Here are a few reasons why:

ABSOLUTISM Animal rights activists don't tolerate ambiguity. The ethics behind captive orcas for theme park profits is somehow equivalent to, say, the use of macaque monkeys to develop life-saving vaccines. For this lack of clarity, they earn the wrath of serious scientists and are slapped with extremist and absolutist labels.

RATIONALISM By the same token, researchers who use animals to advance their work are imbued with an intellectual bias that conveys as conceit and a dismissal of pain and suffering. For this, they are packaged by activists as genocidal monsters. This is not an overstatement.

ENTERTAINMENT What activists NGOs, particularly The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), understand so well is that entertainment is core to their cause. They know, for example, that researchers are largely incapable of rebuttal in terms that are anything less than boring. I'm a scientist, not a media whore, their targets complain. They also know that inside corporations it's the legal department that trumps communications -- hence, the tone-deaf verbiage that accentuates the appearance of guilt. At BioDrug Corp we are committed to humane animal welfare... But you can't be committed when so much of the public sees you as disingenuous. And you can't credibly claim to be humane when your otherwise healthy animals don't fare so well.

INFORMATION Consumed by regulations and allergic to negative media, those of the pro-research persuasion embrace an out-dated model to push their point of view and best practices: Social Education. But because media are drawn first to fire and second to Smokey The Bear, the defenses that pharmas and their surrogates mount are ignored, out-flanked or exploited for their wooden corporate-speak. Despite their lobbying and support of biomedical research associations, animal research and testing is out-gunned, easily ten to one by my estimates. The odds might be evened were it not for the consistent refusals of the super association PhRMA to snuff out the long fuse that is sparking toward its pharmaceutical member companies.

Indeed, national surveys confirm that activism works and activists are winning. For almost a decade, public approval of animal research and testing has dropped year-to-year, all to suggest that critical species will leave the labs, beginning with chimpanzees then others that society judges most cuddly and dear. It's a win for idealism and a disaster for commerce and healthcare.

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Looking for answers, pharmas and universities have hit the panic button. After all, taking animals out of the equation is a seismic shift that threatens vital pipelines and requisite profits. Their first instinct has been to call on law firms and PR agencies to defend their freedom to operate and mollify the rising public upset. This is not to keep bunnies in lipstick labs; this is to preserve compelling and life-saving work that contributes to the cures, therapies and vaccines of ravaging disorders and diseases. Think polio, epilepsy, HIV, hepatitis. The list is long and an awesome demonstration of applied science, not only for humans but also animals.

You might think the status quo, habit or laziness are what keeps mice, rats, dogs, cats, rabbits, lambs, pigs, primates and other species in air conditioned vivariums. But the costs to breed or buy, house and feed happy and healthy animals -- a necessity for sound research -- is exorbitant and a natural inhibitor to their use. What binds pharmas, academia and their networks of contract research houses to animals is the sheer effectiveness of non-human testing and, in recognition of this fact, the many legal requirements to use animals in drug discovery and trials. Consider the example of oversight committees, called IACUCSs, required in virtually every modern animal testing facility. By law, researchers and testers are mandated to apply and prove among other things a Three Rs standard to animal use -- Replace, Reduce and Refine. It's a logistical and costly requirement that ensures best practices and moves us incrementally toward animal-alternative research.

"2016-08-24-1472061622-3081644-Slide2.png"

Having stormed us with stunts -- some violent, even fatal to researchers -- activists are craftily now turning to supply chains and decision trees. They have easily gained the sympathies of shippers, particularly airlines on which researchers rely for safe delivery of their animals, and soft-hearted lawmakers who have produced what researchers regard as draconian, innovation-killing regulations.

Out of this handiwork have emerged two modes of strategy response by scientists and their employers:

-- Defensive, the default mode. This is the social education model, to inform and disseminate facts: Educate the public. Get into the classrooms. Issue PSAs. It's also the evasion strategy: Get to the legislatures. Find the work-arounds. Use trucks instead of planes. Start breeding. Start outsourcing. Start offshoring. And so it goes. But none of this is secret to activists who, again, are manifestly better mobilized, relatively unregulated, more focused, and simply better entertainers and storytellers. They are already lobbying, expertly. They are at work in China. And their cameras are everywhere.

-- Offensive, the counter-intuitive option. This requires vision, some courage and competitive instinct: Invest in alternatives. Ramp up synthetics (e.g., organs on chips). Focus on less sentient species (e.g., zebra fish). Tap big data and cloud computing to simulate outcomes. Partner with or fund in vitro and virtual medicine start-ups. It all sounds good, but ask any clear-eyed animal researcher and they'll tell you soberly that real progress to virtual testing and research is a lifetime away. Animals, they insist, will always be needed in some capacity and, besides, the human body is simply too sophisticated to ever accurately mimic.

But science surprises itself with unexpected regularity, particularly when pressure is applied or incentive is offered. Pick up your smart phone or take your morning pills for proof. My rebuttal, then, to the DVMs, PhDs and VPs who say we can't move that fast is this: You won't know until you really start trying.

Out of duty, I have detailed policies and competitive strategies that defend the forts of animal research and testing. But these are prophylactic, even unnecessary, because what underlies the animal research-versus-animal rights rivalry is in fact a shared value and vision: Quality of Life. Researchers are driven by curiosity and a unique delight in explaining and taming what is life-limiting. Activists are driven by compassion and a dream for a higher standard of humanity. In my experience, no researcher would rather probe than pet an animal. And no activist would rather lose their child to a disease than spare the mice and monkeys that help cure it.

PERFECT STORM, PERFECT OPPORTUNITY

Still, animal research and testing is treated as a crisis, never yet in my experience as an opportunity. It needn't be, because we all agree that the future in biomedical research is not in animals but in actual humans. Virtual humans, to be precise.

If activists and scientists agree that animal research and testing should go the way of strip mining and whaling, then why are corporations and institutions resisting the call? The answer lies in reputation, profits and pride, perhaps not in that order. Corporations have to perform, always to the satisfaction of investors. Investments to replace so-called animal models are expensive and their returns can only be trusted through experience and success. In the mean time, activists are determined to alienate customers from the brands whose benefits are ensured by lab animals. They test bunnies! They murder monkeys! The consequences are policies that manage and mitigate (mode 1 as described above) instead of lead and innovate (mode 2).

Like liberals and conservatives, each side is lead by a point of view that is inarguable because it's based on a world view. It goes to philosophy and a life's purpose. So when one party is framed as a Frankenstein, or Pollyanna as the case may be, the natural reaction is to recoil and resist the impolite accuser. Because no one is wrong, no one can be right.

"2016-08-24-1472062241-7395129-Sheep.jpg"

I describe the phenomenon as a battle for the back row and total anonymity. And as a prescription, I argue for a lock-step advancement of sheepish pharmas to mount a collective defense. No one need stick out their neck if they shuffle ahead together.

But this is an incremental play, and it only slows the progress of both activists and their targeted corporations. Again, the irony is that both sides want the same thing, but what they seem to value more than results is to progress on their own terms and most especially without the goading advice of their disdained detractors. As with party politics, they want to be the winner and the other guy the loser.

Inside this perfect business storm is in fact a perfect competitive opportunity. With drugmakers uniformly obscuring their animal research and testing activities, there is an obvious but counter-intuitive option to bolt the party. The risk is only temporary because while the pharma that steps out might draw activist fire it can simultaneously pledge its support of activists, declare a moon shot to produce animal-free drugs, and challenge others to follow. The pharma that flees the flock can become a darling of PETA and HSUS, not an enemy. And even better, it can gain a significant advantage over its cowering competitors.

By degrees, and particularly with our much-loved chimps and other self-aware species, a few pharmaceuticals have made this move though in far too tentative steps to exploit and disrupt the norm. Novartis is notable, so too is GSK, but on the whole the progress toward animal alternatives is halting and inhibited by the extreme caution and considerable fear of CEOs and their risk-averse legal and communications chiefs.

What has been treated as a problem by the businesses, institutions and associations that participate in and defend animal research and testing is, in fact, a chance to do great things. If we approach it more as a potential for innovation than an exercise in risk mitigation, we can step out of the back row and advance a kind of discovery that propels our collective success and defines a higher form of humanity. It's a way to be reasonable instead of ridiculous.

Photo credits: Trailers From Hell, Shawn the Sheep

Graphics credit: Gallup

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

science

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gaia

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Stop Being Ridiculous: We Agree On Animal Alternatives
While watching the games of 2016 -- not the Olympics, the U.S. presidential election -- I am reminded of the stare-down between drug companies and animal rights activists. Of this mounting conflict, you'd think the answer is simple -- that animals can and should eventually make their exit from so many labs and testing facilities. Alternatives are in the wings, if even in their earliest days.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

gaia

1472247075000

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Underwater Clarity

By Drs. David Niesel and Norbert Herzog

Have you ever opened your eyes while diving in the ocean without a mask and realized that you really can't see very well? Well, the children among a nomadic sea faring people known as the Moken can see underwater with total clarity, but what is really interesting is that other children can acquire this ability too in just a matter of weeks.

The Moken people have historically been totally dependent upon the ocean surrounding the Mergui Archipelago, a group of 800 small islands off the southwestern coast of Myanmar. The Moken people are Austronesians who are thought to have migrated from southern China about 4000 years ago. For 8 to 9 months of the year, the Moken live aboard their boats, known as kabang, living on land in temporary camps only during the monsoon season. They live on what they can harvest from the sea and the beaches and by trading the sea life they gather with Chinese and Malay neighbors. There may be as few as 1000 Moken still living the traditional way.

Moken children spend much of their time in the water and participate in the gathering of seafood starting at an early age. As opposed to most of us, the Moken children see everything with perfect clarity when diving underwater. A Swedish scientist, Anna Gislen, has been studying the Moken for two decades to learn how this is possible. She measured how clear the underwater vision of 17 Moken children was and compared that with 18 European children all aged 7 to 13 years old. The Moken children had more than twice the visual acuity compared with European children.

Gislen hypothesized that part of the reason they can see more clearly under water is their ability to constrict their pupils. Just like with a camera lens, if you constrict the pupil, you increase the depth of field. That is the distance between the nearest and farthest objects that will be in focus. Measurements proved that Moken children constricted their pupils underwater to the maximum known limit for a human. However, there had to be more to this, somehow, either consciously or unconsciously, Moken children had to also be changing the shape of the lenses of their eyes to improve the focus of an object, called accommodating their lenses. This is exactly what she found. This ability is retained into adolescence. What is fascinating is that European children could be taught to make these same changes to their eyes to improve vision underwater. After 11 training sessions over one month, they developed the same visual acuity as Moken children. How long this took was different for each child, but their vision would suddenly improve. Interestingly, seals and dolphins have similar abilities to adapt their eyes.

The traditional Moken culture is rapidly disappearing as a result in part from a 2004 tsunami that destroyed much of the Moken homeland. Governments are relocating them further inland for their safety and providing other employment. Sadly, the life of these sea nomads, as they are also known, is changing and their children may not develop "dolphin eyes" because they will not be spending so much time diving. However, this is a remarkable example of how adaptable the human body can be.

Medical Discovery News is hosted by professors Norbert Herzog at Quinnipiac University, and David Niesel of the University of Texas Medical Branch. Learn more at www.medicaldiscoverynews.com.

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science

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Recognizing The Value Of Food To Stop Waste
From watermelon and berries to sun-ripened tomatoes and peaches, summer is when we most enjoy local fruits and vegetables, so fresh and plentiful just now. Produce defines summertime picnics; like many of you, I savor these foods because they're in-season, local and readily available.

However, in America, we don't always balance or value our bounty. We actually experience a food glut, daily, along with a resulting situation of horrible waste.

According to U.S. Department of Agriculture 2015 figures, a shocking 31 percent of all U.S. produced food goes uneaten; each American discards more than 36 pounds of groceries every month. The USDA further found that a typical American throws out 40 percent of all the fresh fish, 23 percent of the eggs, and 20 percent of the milk that they buy.

Imagine what that means for the 800 million people who suffer from starvation across the globe. Waste actually encourages a self-perpetuating cycle, driving the specious argument that we need to grow more food and use chemicals that promise increased yields. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, globally we waste 2.9 trillion pounds of food annually, enough to feed those 800 million people twice over, with millions of pounds to spare.

Why does this happen? In a way, the problem is too much food. Immense quantities of grain, dairy, meat and produce are reaching U.S. stores - but retailers' policies and consumer behavior translate into immense waste. By design, retail chains discard tons of fresh produce because it is "unattractive," and dispose of food nearing sell-by dates, even though it's still fresh. Consumers are encouraged to stock up on on-sale foods, but how many of us have thrown away food we thought we might eat, but never got around to cooking?

In the developing world, most losses occur further down the supply chain. Inadequate infrastructure, storage, refrigeration, transportation and similar, mean that most wasted food simply never makes it to the people waiting for it.

These impacts resonate. When food is wasted, the resources that it took to produce, process and transport it are also wasted. Massive amounts of chemicals, fertilizer and fuel; acres of land; and -- in the U.S. -- 25 percent of all freshwater used, go to produce food that is, incredibly, thrown away. Uneaten food ends up in landfills, where its decomposition accounts for nearly 25 percent of U.S. emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas more than 20 times more harmful than CO2, according to the EPA.

We have to be smarter about getting food to where it needs to be. It requires communication, policy revision and a different mindset.

• Firstly, greater coordination will be needed between farmers, wholesalers and retailers. Developing farmer-buyer agreements will be critical, as well as raising awareness among industries, retailers and consumers to the problem and challenges of food waste.

• We need to stop wasteful retail policies that dispose of imperfect looking produce, and need to work with sellers and consumers to rethink their idea of what's acceptable. Perceptions can change: heirloom tomatoes taste wonderful, but two decades ago, no one would have bought tomatoes that were not perfect.

• We also need to make good use of food that is presently thrown away, in addition to instituting industry practices to decrease the staggering levels of waste and municipal and Federal laws that indemnify donors, such as the U.S.'s Bill Emmerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act.

There's a common thread in these solutions, and that takes us back to our summertime picnic. It all comes down to value and respect. We value the food we are eating because we know its perishable. And, we respect the food we eat, and the resources it represents, by bringing a limited amount -- only what we can actually eat and share with friends. If we respect food, we aren't tempted to waste it, and that is what we need to recognize and rekindle.

The culture of mass consumption and production without respect to nature further distances us from our food. Through Natural Agriculture and organic production, respect for food is changing. As consumers, we should remember what goes into growing and distribution. By supporting smaller-scale, local agriculture and markets, buying what we can actually eat, respecting food and changing the way we produce, consume and distribute food, we will go a long way to correcting the epidemic of waste in our lives and in the lives of others around the world.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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This EpiPen News Is Part of A Disturbing Trend

The TV was on as we sat waiting to be called in for our check up. My son, who is 11, turned his head as he heard the anchor use the word “EpiPen”. He is in tune since he has a life threatening peanut allergy and the EpiPen has saved his life. His face was full of emotion as he listened to the anchor talk about how some people could no longer afford this life saving device. He shook his head and said “mom that can't be right, they can't be right, can they, everyone who needs an EpiPen should have one.”

The media has exploded as word spread of some parents paying well over 600 dollars for this necessary life saving device. Headlines abound about big pharmacy greed and patients forced to pay outrageous prices, and this issue has enraged everyone. I am heartened to see food allergies being taken seriously in the mainstream media. As my son stated, everyone who needs an Epipen should have access to one. But food allergies are a topic that is underreported. Even when we are armed with our EpiPens, we have a long way to go in getting the public to recognize the real challenges of living in a world where respect for food allergies as a potential life threatening disease is lacking.

As founder of the No Nut Traveler, I collect the testimonials of food allergic passengers traveling on commercial airlines. Shockingly, many food allergic passengers are being ridiculed, spoken to rudely by the airline staff and most egregiously, sometimes asked to leave the airplane when disclosing a food allergy.

Last month, a food allergy mom sent me a testimonial via FaceBook with a heart-breaking photo of her child, as her family was asked to leave the plane by the pilot for disclosing her child's food allergy. She informed me that she had notified the airline ahead of time of her daughter's allergies. She brought their own food and a supply of medication. She said “We did everything humanly possible on our part. I do not know what else we could have done to prevent such a situation from happening”. She went on to tell me “a supervisor from JFK was called on board and he took our passports and boarding passes. We were then escorted out of the plane under the threat of calling security on us. We were publicly humiliated as we walked through the full airplane. My daughter was brought to tears. On the same airline the next day, a different pilot let our family fly. I find this kind of inconsistency and rudeness unacceptable.

Later in the month, a 22-year-old girl from New Jersey shared another disturbing encounter with me. She asserted that after asking for an announcement for her severe nut allergy, and asking for the surrounding rows to please refrain from eating nuts, the pilot told her that she was an inconvenience to have on-board, and that her thought process was selfish. She further asserted that the pilot said to her “You should be thankful to be allowed on this flight due to the huge risk and inconvenience you may cause to other passengers”. Her aunt, who was traveling with her, then asked what they would do if they had someone with a disability on the airplane and the pilot said they would accommodate them. She then asked why not her niece and he responded because a food allergy is not a disability.

When you receive the diagnosis of a life threatening food allergy, your life is irrevocably altered. Failure to treat a food-induced anaphylaxis quickly (i.e. within minutes) with epinephrine substantially increases the risk of death. No one asks to have this condition. There is the false perception that once you have your EpiPen, everything will be fine. But the truth is that sometimes the EpiPen can only buy you time. That is one of the reasons why you need to carry more than one-a reaction can require multiple EpiPens, and you always need to go to the ER to be monitored after using one.

There is no ER in the air and that is why, as allergic passengers, we ask for reasonable accommodations to make flying safer. Being able to pre-board, to clean the area from the last occupant, informing those around us to be cautious and asking politely not to consume what is deadly to us, and educating the airline staff of this potentially fatal disability, are reasonable requests for a legitimate medical condition. My greatest fear is that it will take a death in the air for meaningful change to occur.

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Defenders of Wildlife: Protecting and Recovering Wolves
This has been a tough week for wolves and those of us who are committed to their recovery. Wildlife officials in Washington state have made the decision to kill the Profanity Peak wolf pack due to repeated depredations since July 8.

This is a point we never wanted to come to. In our vision for wolves, lethal removal would never have to be used. Defenders of Wildlife has been working for decades to help avoid conflicts with wolves, specifically because of the deadly results these conflicts often end up having for them.

When we lose wolves, it is devastating for those who advocate for their recovery, as we have for decades at Defenders. It can be easy to feel that we are losing ground when decisions like this one are made. But as a biologist and president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife, I want to let you know that as gut-wrenching as this loss is, the work we do every day is creating a safer landscape for wolves.

The Incredible Return

Gray wolves once roamed freely throughout much of North America, possibly numbering in the hundreds of thousands. But government sponsored programs to hunt, trap and poison wolves almost wiped them off the map in the continental U.S. by the 1930s.

Today the gray wolf is the true "comeback kid." It is slowly but surely returning to some of its former habitat in several states, including Washington, as a result of strong conservation efforts throughout the years - conservation efforts in which Defenders played a major role.

Defenders' Leadership on Wolves

Defenders has been at the forefront of wolf recovery for more than 20 years. We were the first conservation group to introduce the idea of bringing wolves back to Yellowstone. We understood that for wolf recovery to succeed it was vital that we worked with the ranching community. The ranchers of today have never ranched in wolf country so while we look at recovery as a natural restoration of the landscape, ranchers look at it as a new hurdle they have to jump to make a living. This might be hard for some wolf advocates to digest, but the reality is that without the cooperation of ranchers, wolves don't have a chance on the landscape.

Defenders was on the ground supporting the reintroduction: paving the way by working with ranchers through an innovative compensation program for ranchers who experienced depredations. The federal and some state governments now manage and support this same program.

We also put our own staff on the ground to help ranchers and save wolves. We provided resources and technical expertise. Our experts explored coexistence efforts from other countries to bring ranchers the best tools to live with wolves. And it has paid off for the wolves.

Now, thanks to these cooperative efforts, a large and growing number of ranchers and rural communities are finding ways to successfully coexist with wolves, taking proactive steps to minimize the chance of a conflict - which is a win for them and wolves. The prevailing attitude of ranchers 20 years ago was total opposition to wolves. We were - and still are -- trying to change an entire culture, one that was built on the absence of wolves over the span of decades. Now we hear, "The wolves are here to stay so we have to learn to live with them."

Our approach in the Yellowstone and Northern Rockies region is the best way to secure a real future for wolves in Washington.

Wolf Recovery in the Northwest

Because of our expertise in wolf recovery and coexistence, Defenders of Wildlife has a seat at the table once more, this time on Washington's Wolf Advisory Group (WAG). The WAG is a cross-section of organizations and individuals that work together to provide guidance to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife on how to implement the state's wolf management plan.

Each member of the WAG has different priorities -- ours being wolf recovery. As national leaders in coexistence, Defenders provides recommendations on how the state can handle conflicts between wolves and livestock. Working with the other stakeholders on the WAG, we have been able to negotiate a far better deal for Washington's wolves.

It cannot be overstated how big a difference the new protocols have made for Washington wolves. In just the past two years, the number of livestock producers in Washington that are participating in conflict prevention plans with WDFW has tripled -- a striking indication of how attitudes are changing across the landscape.

A Brighter Future for Wolves

While the authorized removal of the Profanity Peak wolf pack is a distressing loss to process for all of us, we strongly believe that this tragic situation will not undermine our overall goal of achieving wolf recovery in Washington state.

As the leader of the group that helped bring back wolves to Yellowstone and the Northern Rockies, I know we will be able to recover wolves in Washington and ensure their safe passage on suitable lands where they can rightfully roam freely in the wild.

There is tough work ahead. Together we can all make our vision for wolf recovery a reality.

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They Won't Feed the Bears at This Birthday Bash
The National Park Service is celebrating its 100th birthday this week but it is not an untarnished history.
We have 59 national parks - from the steamy tropical Everglades in Florida to the alpine majesty of Denali in Alaska - that have been selected for their spectacular natural qualities. Congress in 1916 told the park service that its first and foremost responsibility was to conserve "the scenery and the natural and historic objects and wild life."
Yet at times park managers over the last century have engaged in such contrary actions as exploiting wildlife, running carnival-like spectacles, allowing wholesale development and even permitting massive destruction of what makes the parks so special.
One of the most egregious examples was at Olympic National Park in the Pacific Northwest, a majestic region dominated by forests of Douglas fir, red cedar, western hemlock and the iconic Sitka spruce. Loggers were upset when the Olympics were first set aside as a national park but they were appeased during and after World War II when top park officials quietly initiated regular timber sales.
The logging was only supposed to remove scrap and bug-infested trees, but it did generate significant revenue for park improvements. It was also illegal.
Some of the park's seasonal naturalists were so upset by these actions that they gathered evidence of the crimes. This included photos of stumps that had once held Douglas firs five feet in diameter, and fields that had been clear-cut. Working with national conservation leaders, they forced a showdown with park officials at a 1955 meeting in Seattle.
Conrad Wirth, who ran the Park Service and appears to have been aware of the logging, was faced with such overwhelming evidence that he had to agree it was wrong and that the timber sales would cease. Afterwards he began to hedge, until he was confronted with a transcript based on a secret tape recording. Many of the part-time naturalists, however, never worked in the park system again.
Park officials also liked to entertain tourists by feeding bears at the park dump. Yosemite constructed a platform that was illuminated at night to watch the bears feed. Sequoia and Yellowstone built bleachers at the dump. There is a photo of Horace Albright, then Yellowstone Park superintendent and later chief of the entire system, depicted picnicking at a table with several bears.
Such carnival tricks were commonly employed to lure visitors to the park in order to boost popularity and revenues. Yosemite valley featured tennis courts, a swimming pool, and nightly dancing capped by a spectacle called firefall. About 9 p.m. a large bundle of live embers and burning logs were tossed over a 900-foot cliff, a display that could be seen throughout the valley.
The parks at times were less sanctuaries and more as high-end resorts with high class hotels, restaurants and touring cars. And we are especially fortunate about some of the proposals that never got off the drawing boards, including dams that would have flooded the Grand Canyon, tramways up Mount Rainier, and a hotel at the foot of Mount Denali, just as starters.
What changed?
After World War II park officials realized they no longer had to find ways to lure visitors to the parks - visitors literally began to flood the parks. That's a dilemma that remains today, with attendance now topping 300 million a year.
At first park officials responded to this influx by building more roads to more priceless but fragile assets. Eventually a combination of more science-based naturalists who joined the park service along with a cadre of conservationists and environmentalists such as Ansel Adams, David Brower and Howard Zahniser, began to make a difference.
Some of the stupidity - such as feeding bears - became obvious. Stunts such as firefall went only with intense resistance. Today the park service has pretty much fully embraced the idea that they are stewards and not showmen of the national parks.
That's why when we celebrate history - as hundreds of millions of us will this summer - and why it is important to keep in mind that these priceless wonders are not here just for us to enjoy, but for future generations.
One need only visit the dining room 750 feet underground at Carlsbad National Park to find that old tendencies can be tough to eradicate. Or witness the recent controversies at Grand Canyon where new proposed developments - from gondolas to uranium mines - threaten the canyon's integrity.
We need to keep in mind that threats to alter this rich inheritance never end.

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NASA to watch Musketeer relatives carefully