Access Utah

A mother talks about the gap between when her son is seen as "normal," and when he's seen as "not normal." She's talking about his invisible disability - a disability which at first glance isn't readily apparent, and includes intellectual impairments such as autism. Given the misperceptions and mistaken judgments people with invisible disabilities frequently encounter, a film, “Invisible Disabilities:

Are GMOs or Genetically Modified Organisms beneficial or dangerous to global health? Are GMOs critical to sustainability or a danger to the environment? Should companies have the right to patent seeds? Can GMOs co-exist with organic farming? We’ll seek answers to your GMO questions from Jennifer Reeve, USU Associate Professor of Organic and Sustainable Agriculture; David Hole, USU Professor of Plant Breeding/Genetics; and Amelia Smith Rinehart, U of U Associate Professor of Law. You can join the discussion by email or on our Utah Public Radio Facebook page.

Eastern Utah’s Uintah Basin has seen sharp increase in economic development in recent years with oil and gas extraction leading the way. Uintah County has grown by 29% in the last decade. With this growth has come an increasing air quality problem. A coalition of public health and conservation groups sued the Environmental Protection Agency last year, saying the agency is failing to protect the Uintah Basin from high levels of air pollution. Can industry and cars coexist with good air? Do we face a choice between jobs and a healthy environment? And what about climate change? Is oil and gas extraction in eastern Utah contributing to climate change? What can and should be done?

Young people in the United States are entering the youth justice system in shocking numbers, and many seem to come out worse than when they went in. More than half of incarcerated kids are likely to re-commit crimes after being released. Some wonder whether exposure to the system itself could be perpetuating a life of crime. On the other side of the world, a New Zealand youth court has incorporated restorative principles of justice adapted from Maori culture, bringing victims and offenders together to resolve disputes. In Maori history, a crime put the community out of balance. Traditional Maori justice seeks to restore that balance. Focusing on rehabilitation more than punishment, New Zealand has seen great success and set a precedent for youth justice around the world.

For two days each year in August, county, municipal and state leaders and other stake holders gather in Cedar City for the Utah Rural Summit. They come from throughout Utah to explore issues that impact rural life, to hear from experts the latest information pertaining to rural life, and to discuss policies necessary to maintain and expand the political, cultural and economic relevance of rural communities. UPR's Southern Utah Correspondent Chris Holmes reports from the summit on its second day.

Thomas Jefferson called farmers “the chosen people of God” and claimed that they were inherently virtuous, the best citizens for the new republic. Evelyn Funda, author of “Weeds: A Farm Daughter’s Lament,” says that “the American imagination has endowed farming with profound and enduring symbolic significance. ...no other occupation —with perhaps the exception of motherhood—so fully spans the imaginative range of human experience or is so profoundly invested with symbolic significance in our culture, even by those who have never worked or lived on a farm.” In Jefferson’s day, 90 percent of the population worked on family farms. Today, in a world dominated by agribusiness, less than 1 percent of Americans claim farm-related occupations. What was lost along the way is something that Funda experienced firsthand when, in 2001, her parents sold the last parcel of the farm they had worked since they married in 1957.

Has Alzheimer’s Disease has touched your family? There are 50,000 Utahns affected by Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and Utah has the nation’s highest growth rate of AD (127%). There are more than 5 million cases of AD in the US today and by 2050, that number is expected to nearly triple to 13.8 million and care costs will reach over $1.2 trillion. There is no known cure and the impact on afflicted individuals and their families is devastating. The AD process may begin decades before diagnosis. But Maria Norton, USU Associate Professor of Family Consumer and Human Development, says that while there are some factors we are born with (e.g. genes) that can't be modified, there are a host of factors that have been shown to affect our risk for Alzheimer’s that ARE modifiable, and if we can encourage individuals, families and communities to adopt healthy lifestyle habits, we may be able to make a "course correction" to avoid or at least delay AD as individuals, and as a society.

Rich Cohen writes in National Geographic magazine's August cover story titled “Sugar Love (a not so sweet story)” that sugar was the oil of its day. The more you tasted, the more you wanted. In 1700 the average Englishman consumed 4 pounds a year. By 1900 he was up to 100 pounds a year. Today the average American consumes 77 pounds of added sugar annually, or more than 22 teaspoons of added sugar a day. As lands with oil and gas are greatly sought after today so it was with lands for sugarcane that needed tropical, rain-drenched fields to flourish. In school they call it the age of exploration, the search for territories and islands that would send Europeans all around the world. In reality, it was a hunt for fields where sugarcane would prosper.

Chip Ward writes in The Nation: “At this very moment, [TrekWest adventurer John] Davis is walking, biking, paddling and horseback riding 6,000 miles through a chain of mountain ranges that stretches like a spine across North America from the Sierra Madres of Mexico through the Rockies of the American West up into Canada. He started this winter in the Sonoran desert we share with our southern neighbor and has been heading northward for months. He will cross many of our most treasured national parks like Yellowstone and Grand Canyon, the ones that tourists love, but his trek is no sightseeing adventure. Davis and his Trek West partners along the route are advocating for what they call 'landscape connectivity' on a continental scale.”

Ophthalmologists Dr. Geoffrey Tabin (based in Salt Lake City) and Dr. Sanduk Ruit have dedicated their lives to restoring sight to blind people in some of the most isolated, impoverished reaches of developing countries in the Himalayas and Sub-Saharan Africa. Drs. Ruit and Tabin founded the Himalayan Cataract Project (HCP) in 1995. Geoffrey Tabin was a high-achieving Harvard Medical School student from the suburbs of Chicago who was also an accomplished mountain climber; he was the fourth person to reach the famed Seven Summits, the tallest peak on each continent. It was through high-altitude climbing that he first came to witness the dramatic effects of cataract surgery on blind villagers. Dr. Tabin joins Tom Williams for the hour on Tuesday’s Access Utah.