Building International Indigenous People’s Partnerships for Community-Driven Health Initiatives

In this article we present an international Indigenous people’s partnership project co-led by two Indigenous communities, Musqueam (Coast Salish, Canada) and Totoras (Quichua, Ecuador), as a community-driven health initiative. The Musqueam-Totoras partnership includes Indigenous organizations, universities, international agencies, government, and nongovernmental organizations to address Indigenous health concerns in both communities. Our collaborative approach provides a framework to (a) increase the development expertise of Indigenous people internationally, (b) increase skills among all participants, and (c) facilitate Indigenous knowledge mobilization and translation to promote cultural continuity. This international Indigenous people’s partnership between north and south reflects the diversity and commonalities of Indigenous knowledge, contributes to cultural revitalization, and minimizes the impact of assimilation, technology, and globalization. Indigenous people’s partnerships contribute to self-determination, which is a prerequisite to the building and maintenance of healthy communities and the promotion of social justice. The exchange of Indigenous knowledge upholds Indigenous values of respect, reciprocity, relevance, and responsibility. Given the history of colonization and the negligence of governments in the exercising of these values with respect to Indigenous communities, this contemporary exchange among Indigenous people in the Americas serves to reclaim these values and practices. International cooperation empowering Indigenous people and other marginalized groups has become fundamental for their advancement and participation in globalized economies. An international Indigenous people’s partnership provides opportunities for sharing cultural, historical, social, environmental, and economic factors impacting Indigenous health. These partnerships also create beneficial learning experiences in community-based participatory research and community-driven health initiatives, provide culturally sensitive research ethics frameworks, increase capacity building, and address basic human needs identified by participating communities.     

Peak Waste: When Is It Likely to Occur?

Population and per capita gross domestic product (GDP) projections are used to estimate total global municipal solid waste (MSW) generation over the twenty‐first century. Some projections for global population suggest that it will peak this century. Waste generation rates per capita generally increase with affluence, although in the most affluent countries there is also a trend toward dematerialization. The confluence of these factors means that at some point in the future total global waste generation could possibly peak. To determine when peak waste might occur, we used the shared‐socioeconomic pathway scenarios (used in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] studies) combined with estimates of municipal solid waste (MSW) generation rates, extrapolated from our work for the World Bank. Despite the expectation that total MSW generation in Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) and high‐income countries will peak mid‐century, with current trajectories global peak waste is not expected before 2100. The peak could be moved forward to around 2075 and reduced in intensity by some 30% if a more aggressive sustainability growth scenario were followed, rather than the current business‐as‐usual scenario. Further, the magnitude of peak waste is sensitive to the intensity of waste generation; it could vary from 7.3 to 10.9 megatonnes per day under the sustainability scenario. The timing of peak waste will substantially depend on the development of cities in Sub‐Saharan Africa, where population growth rates are more than double the rest of the world.     

Body mass dynamics during incubation and duration of parental care in Pacific Dunlins Calidris alpina pacifica: a test of the differential parental capacity hypothesis

Breeding is energetically expensive and individuals face a trade‐off between current and future breeding investment. Due to their production of large eggs, female birds are thought to have substantially higher initial energetic investments than males, which decrease the female's offspring rearing capacity. The differential parental capacity hypothesis argues that this large initial investment limits the ability of female shorebirds to provide extended parental care, which can ultimately lead to offspring desertion. This hypothesis predicts that (1) during early incubation females will be in poorer condition than males, (2) both sexes will lose condition during incubation, but the decline in females will be slower than the decline in males and (3) there will be a positive relationship between female condition and the duration of maternal brood care. These predictions were tested using data on body mass adjusted for body size (as a proxy for condition) and parental care from Pacific Dunlins Calidris alpina pacifica nesting on the Yukon Kuskokwim Delta, Alaska. None of the predictions received support: females were heavier than males in early incubation, the overall pattern during incubation was that males gained mass while female mass remained relatively constant, and there was no relationship between female mass and maternal brood care duration. These results suggest that the factors influencing parental care decisions are more complex than a parent simply caring until it is physiologically unable to do so.     

Sexual conflict over parental investment in repeated bouts: negotiation reduces overall care

Understanding the evolution of parental care is complicated by the occurrence of evolutionary conflicts of interest within the family, variation in the quality and state of family members, and repeated bouts of investment in a family of offspring. As a result, family members are expected to negotiate over care. We present a model for the resolution of sexual conflict in which parents negotiate over repeated bouts of care. Negotiation is mediated by parents deciding at the start of each bout how much care to give on the basis of the state (mass) of offspring, which reflects the amount of care previously received. The evolutionarily stable pattern of care depends on whether the parents care together for the whole family, or each cares alone for part of the divided family. When they care together, they provide less care in the first bout, more in the last bout, and less care overall, resulting in lower parental and offspring fitness. Our results emphasize that negotiation over parental care may occur as a means of avoiding exploitation owing to sexual conflict, even in the absence of variation in the quality of either sex of parent, and lead to a reduction in fitness.     

The Return of the Phoenix: The 1963 International Congress of Zoology and American Zoologists in the Twentieth Century

This paper examines the International Congress of Zoology held in Washington D.C. in 1963 as a portrait of American zoologists’ search for effective and rewarding relationships with both each other and the public. Organizers of the congress envisioned the congress as a last ditch effort to unify the disparate subdisciplines of zoology, overcome the barriers of specialization, and ward off the heady claims of more reductionist biologists. The problems zoologists faced as they worked to fulfill these ambitious goals illuminate some of the challenges faced by members of the naturalist tradition as they worked to establish disciplinary unity while seeking public support in the competitive world of twentieth century science.     

Material Flow Indicators in the Czech Republic in Light of the Accession to the European Union

This article deals with the economy‐wide material flows in the Czech Republic in 1990–2006. It presents in brief the overall trends of the material flow indicators in 1990–2002. The major part of the article is focused on the years 2002–2006, which immediately preceded and followed the accession of the Czech Republic to the European Union in 2004. It is shown that this accession had quite a significant impact on the volume and character of the material flows of the Czech Republic. The accession was beneficial from an economic point of view, as it allowed for an increased supply of materials needed for economic growth. Furthermore, it was accompanied by an improvement in the efficiency of material transformation into economic output. From an environmental and broader sustainability point of view, however, this accession brought about some controversial outcomes. There was a significant increase in the net export of environmental pressure, on one hand, and an increase in net additions to the physical stock of the economy, on the other. Although the former is controversial from the viewpoint of equity in sharing area and resources, the latter places an additional burden on future generations because all physical stocks will turn into waste and emissions at some point, when their life span expires.     

Disparate Geography of Consumption,Production, and Environmental Impacts

International trade transfers social and environmental impacts across national borders. The consumption of forest products often takes place far away from industrial production sites, and mills procure raw material from remote forests. Finland produces about 10% of forest products that are traded internationally, with the majority of its exports destined for other European countries. Here we report and analyze data that demonstrate that international leakage, in relative terms, increased faster than the production of commodities. The international consumption of products made in Finland increased, and an increase in wood imports from Russia provided the raw material for most of the incremental production. The international consumption‐production system translated the increasing global demand for Finnish products into increased harvests in Russia, until the Russian customs duties started to increase in 2007. We argue that national and regional policies for the promotion of sustainable consumption and production must be analyzed and assessed from an international, holistic perspective.     

Fisheries management in the twenty-first century: will new paradigms apply?

The last decade has seen growing concern at the uncertain effectiveness of most fisheries assessment and management approaches as reflected by trends in global landing statistics published by FAO. These imply full exploitation of the majority of fishery resources and a serious overcapitalization of fleets at the global level. Projected increases in demand, future prices for fisheries products, and impacts of growing world populations on the ecosystem all require an urgent search for improved management frameworks.Improved management of fisheries requires, first, an understanding of the axioms and working assumptions underlying the current approaches and how these evolved in response to regional or local conditions and target species. This should promote integration of methodologies which better reflect local situations and can be expressed in the form of one or more working paradigms. These paradigms should incorporate ecosystem considerations, including environmental fluctuations and socio-economic factors. They should not assume that current production levels are independent of natural fluctuations and human impacts and should recognize the dangers of maintaining open access to marine resources throughout their seasonal cycle, life history and distribution range.Wide-use management paradigms incorporating explicit user rights, participatory management and inputs from a variety of disciplines and stakeholders are becoming popular, but must operate within a hierarchy of pre-negotiated responses to pre-specified limit reference points so that social and economic options are not lost because conservation issues have not been given precedence.Academic and research institutions could aid the management process by more participation, by promoting interdisciplinary teamwork with stakeholders and by breaking down excessive specialization and regionalization within fisheries studies. On the management side, the key elements for improving the situation seem to be consultative management frameworks that explicitly incorporate watchdog functions and implement precautionary approaches to management. Risk-averse strategies are appropriate but, given the high level of uncertainty that managers face with natural systems, fail-safe management with redundancy, both in the data sources they rely on for fishery performance and in the management measures applied, seem appropriate.For near-shore resources, governments could consider partly devolving management responsibility to appropriate levels in society, involving coastal communities, individual use rights and other vehicles for allocating access. Changing emphasis of modern technology from fisheries exploitation to improved management will be one aspect of successful future management systems, perhaps incorporating geotemporally defined access rights to near-shore and shelf resources.Recent international agreements, including the formal ratification of the Law of the Sea, show that governments are prepared for more ecologically appropriate approaches. The key stake of the fisheries industry in sustainable fisheries development needs supporting, particularly for developing countries, now the major source of aquatic marine products. High priorities for management of marine resources are rebuilding depleted resources and restoring habitats, with concern for maintaining genetic and ecological diversity. There will be a need to consider impacts of global trade on conservation of resources for future generations, if proper management is to be maintained in the face of growing demand.International agreements of relevance to future management paradigms which are compatible with the Law of the Sea Convention (and each other), include Agenda 21 of UNCED, the Biodiversity Convention, the UN Agreement on Straddling Fish Stocks and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks, the Compliance Agreement and the FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries. Such agreements, ratified or now open for signature, provide a comprehensive basis for future customary law that can assist authorities in constructing appropriate management frameworks. Current concern remains with application of these agreements in international waters, where limited access as required for proper management still has not been established.     

Serologic prevalence of antibodies to Helicobacter pylori in internationally adopted children

Background. Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) infection has been linked to gastritis, diarrhea, peptic ulcers, failure‐to‐thrive, anemia, as well as predisposition to gastric malignancies. Because many internationally adopted children have diarrhea, failure‐to‐thrive, and anemia on arrival to the US, we determined the prevalence of HP antibodies among these children. Methods. Serum samples from 226 unselected children from 18 countries who were evaluated in the International Adoption Clinic at New England Medical Center were tested for antibodies to H. pylori. The results of serologic screening were analyzed in relation to age at adoption, site of residence prior to adoption, weight and height, and the presence or absence of anemia, diarrhea, or intestinal parasites. Results. 31% of internationally adopted children had antibodies to H. pylori. The presence of H. pylori‐antibodies was associated with residence in an orphanage (vs. foster care) prior to adoption, older age at adoption, and coinfection with intestinal parasites. No direct effects on height or weight were identified; no associations with diarrhea or anemia were found. Conclusions. Internationally adopted children have a high incidence of exposure to H. pylori, as diagnosed serologically. Residence in an orphanage (compared with foster care), older age at adoption, and coinfection with intestinal parasites were more common among children seropositive for anti‐H. pylori antibodies.