Evan Vucci/AP

President Trump and South Korean President Moon Jae-in participate in a signing ceremony for the United States-Korea Free Trade Agreement at the Lotte New York Palace hotel during the United Nations General Assembly, Sept. 24, 2018, in New York.

If it’s not a trade war yet, it sure is trade chaos.

Thanks to US tariffs, Walmart and other retailers are warning of price hikes this holiday season. Beijing is accusing the US of using a trade war to slow China’s rise as a world power. And America’s president just said, “We don’t like [Canada’s trade] representative very much.”

Behind the chaos, though, is a rethinking of global trade rules and relationships. In the face of President Trump’s aggressive push to reset US trade relations with all its major partners, those partners are recalibrating their own relationships. It’s a two-track strategy.

Nations are responding to Trump’s demands by engaging in direct talks with the US, but also by resetting ties with one another. And they’re using his approach of elevated bilateralism – casting doubt both on the relevance of the World Trade Organization and on the potential for larger-scale deals that can bolster the concept of a rules-based global trading system.

“Whatever one thinks of what the president is doing, he has succeeded in doing what he promised he would do, which is forcing new bilateral negotiations with almost all of the major US trading partners,” says Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

“Bilateral is basically the only game in town,” says Fredrik Erixon, director of the European Center for International Political Economy (ECIPE) in Brussels. “I think the general feeling [in Europe] is that with Trump in power, there's not going to be any multilateral trade reform that can happen.”

Such moves suggest more tension ahead between the United States and its major trading partners.

China cuts tariffs, except for US

In New York this week, Mr. Trump used a United Nations speech to showcase his “America First” worldview, and in some ways that’s being mirrored around the world in an every-nation-for-itself scramble in the realm of trade. As the US pushes its trade partners for a better deal for things it exports and imports, those nations are often pushing back – or seeking closer commercial ties with one another.

For example: When Trump fulfilled a campaign pledge by abandoning American involvement in a proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (pleasing US critics of the deal, including organized labor), the other remaining Pacific nations concluded the accord on their own.

On Monday, China cut import duties on 1,585 types of products, a move interpreted by some as an effort to forge closer trade bonds with non-US partners. The tactic could help China at a time when its tariff battle with the US – started by Trump and expanded by Beijing’s retaliation – looks likely to put a significant dent in Chinese exports.

Europe is trying alongside like-minded countries like Japan and Canada to “take down the level of confrontation,” says Mr. Erixon in Brussels. Meanwhile, the tariff threats from Washington have been an impetus for nations including Mexico and Japan to step up efforts for bilateral trade deals with the European Union (EU), he adds.

“I think generally speaking that Europe as well as many other parts of the world are revisiting the core planks of the trade strategies, and without America they will need to find other ways to to deal with trade interests,” Erixon says.

Mr. Alden in New York sees the same trend.

“The Canadians now have a minister of trade diversification and the clear aim of that is: ‘Let’s find other markets,’ ” he says. “China’s got its own set of negotiations through RCEP,” the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a proposed arrangement spanning from India to Japan and Australia.

Too big to ignore

Still, none of this translates into an ignore-Trump strategy. America First won’t make America last in the world of trade.

“The US is the largest economy on earth,” Matthew Kroenig, an expert on security strategy at the nonprofit Atlantic Council in Washington, said in a conference call with reporters Thursday. Its heft as a market for exports gives the US leverage in bilateral talks with just about anyone, which may help explain Trump’s preference for that style of bargaining.

But with China’s growing economic weight, and with no nation responding well to a badger-thy-neighbor tone, the situation now has huge uncertainties.

“Who has more leverage here? Who is more vulnerable?” Mr. Kroenig asked. “I've heard credible arguments on both sides.”

China’s stock market has been struggling more than America’s amid the turmoil. But as tariffs have escalated, Chinese President Xi Jinping has shown little rush to make concessions. Some in China say the US seeks no less than containment of China’s economic rise.

“We haven't clearly articulated where we're going,” Kroenig says of Trump officials. “Is the goal ... cold-war style containment,” he asks, or more to “get China to play by the rules?”

Tension on the rise

The risk of a full-blown trade war is amplified, Alden says, by Trump’s gamesmanship. The US “betting seems to be that increasing the tariff pressure is going to leave the Chinese in a still weaker position and then at some point the US will be prepared to engage” more in negotiations.

“I think that’s probably a miscalculation,” he says. “The longer this goes on with no serious negotiations, the less likely it is that a negotiation will be possible.”

If the US-China relationship is the most consequential wild card in global trade right now, it’s not the only one.

The US is bargaining also on trade terms with the EU, and for now a key element of cross-Atlantic talks involves automobiles. Trump has threatened car-import tariffs as a high as 25 percent to bring more manufacturing back to the US.

The auto issue is also central in three-way talks aimed at a makeover of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Plenty of cars and auto parts flow across America’s northern and southern borders. Trump’s team cut a deal first with Mexico and now aims to bring Canada in.

The US says time is running out before it sends just a two-way deal (US-Mexico) to Congress. And Canada faces the reality of economic dependence: Seventy-five percent of its exports head to the US.

Yet the talks have stalled. Mark Warner, a Canadian and American trade lawyer who has worked on trade negotiations for three decades, says Canada appears to be banking on the “chaos scenario.”

That, he says, would mean refusing to make concessions, and trusting that the US Congress will thwart both a bilateral (US-Mexico) deal and the threatened auto tariffs.

So the trade chaos lives on, for now at least. And as Canada joins other nations in seeking to diversify its global trade, Mr. Warner sounds a cautionary note: “This stuff takes time.”

Staff writer Laurent Belsie contributed to this article from Boston.

With floodwaters continuing to rise nearly two weeks after hurricane Florence thrashed North and South Carolina, many are wondering how much of the deluge can be attributed to climate change.

That’s a frequent question, and one without an easy answer. Unlike some other extreme weather events, like heat waves or unusually heavy rainfall, hurricanes have been particularly difficult to pin solidly on global warming.

They’re relatively rare, for one thing, and they’re caused by complex meteorological conditions. And some skeptics note that there hasn’t been a consistent detectable long-term trend.

But as extreme-event attribution matures, climate scientists are increasingly willing to connect the dots between certain aspects of hurricanes and climate change. Researchers hope that a sharper understanding of the role global warming is playing in the intensity and impact of storms like these could inform mitigation and preparedness while answering some of the most common questions people have.

“There’s been an explosion of research over the last decade,” says Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University who is an expert on extreme-event attribution. Among the innovations in the past few years, he says, are efforts to use real-time conditions and data as events take place. Complementary research doing longer-term studies, on the other hand, can help quantify the odds of such events occurring and the odds of the physical conditions that create those events. The two types of research “answer different sets of questions, and are both important,” says Professor Diffenbaugh.

In just the past few weeks, analysis of real-time conditions have started to connect the dots linking still-active storm systems to climate change.

Earlier this month, as hurricane Florence approached the Carolina coast, a team of researchers put out a forecast in advance of landfall – a first – using models to quantify the likely impact of climate change on the storm’s rainfall, size, and intensity. Among other things, they concluded that the rainfall forecasts were more than 50 percent higher than they would have been in a world without climate change.

The numbers are preliminary, and it will take months for researchers to conduct a postmortem of the forecasts made ahead of Florence to confirm – or refute – their validity.

Subsequent analysis of real-time attribution efforts during the 2017 hurricane season has also been finding strong links between those storms and climate change.

This Thursday, a study published in the journal Science concluded that warm sea-surface conditions in the tropical North Atlantic were a driving force in the unusually active 2017 Atlantic hurricane season, which included Harvey, Irma, Maria, and three other major hurricanes in the North Atlantic.

Hiroyuki Murakami, an atmospheric scientist at Princeton University and the lead author of the study, says they looked at La Niña as one possible contributor, but their simulations found that it wasn’t a major factor. Instead, the unusual warming of the tropical Atlantic relative to global ocean temperatures was the primary driver.

“Climate models consistently project a warmer tropical Atlantic in the future,” says Dr. Murakami. If it continues to warm faster than other oceans, that could increase the average number of major hurricanes each year from three to five, or even more, by the end of this century, he says.

“It’s still very challenging to attribute extreme hurricane events,” adds Murakami.

Real-time attribution?

This fall, we got the first taste of more immediate attribution when scientists from Stony Brook University, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research released a forecast, and maps, just before Florence was scheduled to make landfall.

One of the biggest factors they attributed to human-caused climate change: the extreme rainfall which, in the end, was responsible for the devastating flooding – similar to Harvey last year in Houston.

Indeed, one preliminary report put Florence just behind Harvey as the second-wettest storm in 70 years. An average of 17.5 inches fell over a region of 14,000 square miles. In Harvey, 25.6 inches fell over that same area.

Several peer-reviewed studies in the past year, using a range of methods, all found that climate change significantly increased the amount of rain that flooded Houston.

While the advance attribution for Florence was unusual, since it was looking at predicted forecasts rather than the actual event, it seems to fit in that same context.

The forecast was part of an effort to answer the questions that people most want to know, says Kevin Reed, an atmospheric scientist at Stony Brook University in New York and a coauthor of the report.

“Increasingly, these questions – did climate change impact this event – are what the public and the media are asking,” says Dr. Reed. “Scientists have devolved into probabilities and trends, and aren’t always answering the questions the public is asking.”

Reed and his colleagues used peer-reviewed models and detailed data about conditions to compare present-day forecasts with forecasts that removed the climate-change elements, or “signals,” from conditions like sea-surface temperatures and atmospheric moisture.

“We’re not just decreasing the temperature by one degree everywhere,” says Reed, explaining the complexity of the models used.

Now, he says, the challenge is to work on an in-depth analysis that’s peer-reviewed and see how well their initial conclusions hold up. “We can let the community decide if these kinds of things are useful or scientifically validated,” he says.

No crystal ball

Despite all the advances in attribution science, there are still limitations, and it remains hard to tease out the role climate change plays in complex weather events like tornadoes, wildfire, and hurricanes.

Some of the elements from an event like Florence or Harvey have a lot of consensus: Storm-surge flooding is higher with higher sea levels. The increased water vapor in the atmosphere as the atmosphere has warmed is “a robust long-term trend,” says Diffenbaugh. “For a given land-falling tropical cyclone … it’s likely to produce a higher amount of precipitation.”

Other aspects of hurricanes – like their frequency and intensity – are more controversial. “We can’t say a hurricane is due to global warming,” says Adam Sobel, a professor of applied physics and applied mathematics at Columbia University, and a leader in event attribution. “We have a lot of confidence they should produce more rain, and that they should produce more wind. The  controversy is over whether those changes are already evident.”

But Dr. Sobel also thinks that the standard climate scientists use – trying to disprove the hypothesis that there’s no climate-change signal with very high certainty – is arguably too conservative.

Imagine a credible terrorist attack in a crowded room, he says, and CIA agents trying to hear what the suspects are saying, but the noise of the room drowning out much of their conversation. “Would you say, ‘Can we disprove what they’re saying?’ You’d say, no, we can’t make out exactly what these guys are saying, but that’s not a reason to be complacent.”

Separating out the climate-change influence on hurricanes from the natural variability and limitations of the observational record is analogous to distinguishing those quiet voices from all the background noise, says Sobel.

In other domains where the outcome is important, “you don’t apply this extreme standard, he says. “It’s not the rational standard to use for a public-policy debate about risk.”

His giant sword glinting in the autumn sunshine, a statue of Alexander the Great sitting astride a rearing stallion dominates the center of Skopje, the pint-sized capital of Macedonia. The warrior king looks down on a panoply of neoclassical museums, government buildings, and shining white bridges lined with bronze statues of ancient Macedonian heroes.

It is a display of muscular nationalism, built in the last decade, that has long antagonized Greece, Macedonia’s southern neighbor, which claims Alexander and many of the other historical figures as its own. For the Greeks, ancient Macedonia was Hellenistic and any attempt to muscle in on its past glories is cultural appropriation by modern-day Macedonians, most of whom are Slavs.

But this tiny Balkan nation of 2 million people, which is smaller than Maryland, now has a chance to move away from decades of confrontation with its neighbor. In the most important vote in the short history of the former Yugoslav republic, which became independent in 1991, Macedonians will vote in a referendum on Sunday to change the name of their country to North Macedonia.

It may seem inconsequential to outsiders, but it is not. It is the key to unlocking one of Europe’s most intractable diplomatic disputes, which has dragged on for the last 27 years. But for many Macedonians, particularly members of the Slavic majority, the change – driven largely by outside pressure – could also mean eating away at the country’s national identity.

The nub of the issue is this: Since its creation from the remains of Yugoslavia in 1991, the country officially named the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or FYROM for short, has been called Macedonia by its inhabitants, as well as most of the world.

But its neighbor to the south, Greece, has long felt that the name Macedonia implies an irredentist territorial claim on its own most northerly region, also called Macedonia. As a result, Greece has refused to acknowledge the country of Macedonia by that name. More significantly, Athens has long vetoed Macedonia from joining NATO and the EU.

Marko Djurica/Reuters

People walk in front of the 'warrior on a horse' monument in central Skopje, Macedonia, on June 4. It is widely described as depicting Alexander the Great.

But in the deal in June between Athens and Skopje, Athens will lift its veto in exchange for FYROM being officially renamed to North Macedonia. That would open the door to many new opportunities for Macedonia.

“For Macedonians, this is a chance for a reset and a move into the European-Atlantic community” at a time of expanding Russian influence in the Balkans, says Heather Conley, director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington. “They also see it as an opportunity for economic renewal.”

But others are furious that Macedonia is being asked to change its name under what they see as pressure from the Greeks. They say that modern-day Macedonia was part of the ancient Macedonian empire and that they have every right to claim Alexander the Great, his father Philip II, and all the other heroes as part of their heritage.

Changing the country’s name would be a “generational sin,” they say, and have mobilized what they call “a mass citizen rebellion against the legitimization of historical treason through an illegal power grab and referendum fraud.” 

Even Macedonia’s president is against the deal. Addressing the UN General Assembly in New York this week, Gjorge Ivanov said that the proposed name change would be a “flagrant violation of sovereignty” and “historical suicide.”

Opponents of the name change are calling for a boycott of the vote so that turnout is lower than 50 percent, which would diminish its legitimacy. But the most recent polls suggest around 57 percent of Macedonians will cast a vote in the referendum, with the majority of them saying they will opt to accept the name change deal.

Demographics play a significant role in the likely outcome.

Macedonian identity has always been a fragile and shifting concept. The landlocked country is surrounded by four larger countries – Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia, and Greece – which at one time or another have made claims on its territory.

And like most Balkan countries, Macedonia is far from ethnically homogenous. Ethnic Albanians make up 25 percent of the population and they are largely in favor of voting yes. “They have less emotional attachment” to the name Macedonia, Talat Xhaferi, the speaker of parliament and a major proponent of the name change, explains. The Slavic majority is more divided on the issue, as they have deeper ties to the name Macedonia.

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

“On Sunday, this generation is confronted with the choice of succumbing to the historical challenge, falling on its knees, folding its spine, and giving up its own identity,” said Igor Janusev, a leading member of the conservative opposition party VMRO-DPMNE. "Or to continue to fight and proudly transmit to future generations an example of how to keep what is yours.”

But the potential for a better life seems worth the tradeoff, others say.

Many are motivated by hopes that membership of the EU – even though it could take years to come about – could help lift an economy in which the average monthly wage is currently just 300 euros.

“I’ll vote yes. The economic situation in Macedonia is not good. We need a better future,” says Iso Musli, who works in his uncle’s souvenir shop in Skopje’s old Ottoman bazaar, a tangle of cobbled streets, tea houses, mosques, minarets, and hammams. “For me, changing the name of the country is a small thing. It’s not a problem.”

Even some who are proud of the Macedonian nationalism on display in Skopje are in favor. “We are a small country but a proud one,” says Stefan, a student in the capital. He is thoroughly admiring of the grandiose statues and monuments that have sprung up – “they’re awesome,” he says – but he cautiously supports the name change deal, too. “We will still be Macedonians.”

When President Trump this week regaled a fancy New York hotel ballroom full of journalists with a tale of how China’s leaders respect him for his “very, very large brain,” it rang a bell with me.

Ah yes, I thought, as I observed the ripple of laughter the president’s remark elicited: Mr. Trump’s NATO summit press conference, just a few weeks earlier in Brussels.

In that case, hundreds of mostly foreign journalists had assembled in a large press conference tent to glean any clues as to the US leader’s intentions for the transatlantic alliance. Instead, the president’s takeaway comment was a bit of self-flattery that left the journalists – most of whom were experiencing Donald Trump as president for the first time – scratching their heads.

“I’m a very stable genius,” Trump declared, to widespread bewilderment. Later a perplexed Afghan journalist friend would ask me, “What did this ‘stable genius’ thing mean? Why did he say that?”

With alliance leaders, Trump had threatened and laid down gauntlets – no more taking advantage of the United States of America and not paying your fair share of defense. And in the president’s own estimation, his tough line had yielded results.

But with journalists, he let loose and had a good time.

Mr. Kurd's moment

And so it was in that New York ballroom. For nearly 1-1/2 hours Wednesday, the president of the United States was more like the spirited reality show host he had once been, at the same time marveling at the sea of raised hands before him and relishing how it was his to command.

Trump sparred with some “fake news” broadcast journalists over Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and over his own history of sexual misconduct allegations. He thrilled one Kurdish reporter demanding from the back of the room to be recognized, calling on him as “Mr. Kurd.” The nickname astounded a number of American journalists, who quickly live-tweeted it, but not so the beaming recipient of the presidential quip, who would later insist it had made his day.

Trump even declared his true feelings for what he again called “the failing New York Times,” cooing to the Times’s Mark Landler that despite everything, “I still love the paper.”

If one got a strong sense of Trump letting off steam, perhaps it was because the rest of his week on the world stage, interacting with a much less solicitous crowd at the United Nations, had been much less to his liking.

On Tuesday, delivering his annual address to the UN General Assembly and the hundreds of assembled leaders and diplomats, the president was uncharacteristically subdued. His speech on reasserting national sovereignty and vaunting American unilateralism drew neither “hear-hears” nor applause in the house that post-World War II multilateralism built.

Trump did draw laughter when he opened by using a line that had gone over well at a recent Indiana political rally, claiming he had accomplished more in less than two years than almost any administration before his. He expressed surprise at the amusement, saying it was not the reaction he had expected, but he later insisted his audience was laughing with him, not at him.

Around the table, support for Iran deal

Then on Wednesday morning, at a UN Security Council session on nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction over which he presided, Trump sat stone-faced as country after country in the 15-nation council expressed support for the Iran nuclear deal – the same deal Trump withdrew the US from four months ago.

Indeed, even as Trump once again blasted the nuclear accord negotiated under President Obama as “horrible, horrible” – for in his view it gave Iran everything in exchange for nothing – the rest of the leaders at the circular table lined up in opposition.

The deal is working in that a compliant Iran is much further away from possessing a nuclear weapon than it was when the deal was struck, they said – adding for good measure that the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” concluded with Iran is reflective of the kind of multilateral engagement an interdependent world needs to turn to more, not less.

Leaders and diplomats I ran across at various venues over the course of the premier diplomatic week that is simply referred to as UNGA (for United Nations General Assembly) had varying explanations for a subdued Trump.

Some wondered if a preoccupation with what one diplomat referred to as the “chaos” in Washington – the Russia investigation, the national drama of the Kavanaugh nomination – might explain it.

In another interpretation of the impact of Trump’s domestic challenges, one diplomat insisted instead that a desire to deflect attention from domestic political turbulence was motivating the president to lash out at the international community in ways that pump up his political base.

“It is absolutely offensive and a flagrant violation of international norms that the president of the United States of America would announce unilateral sanctions from the house of multilateralism,” said Venezuela’s foreign minister, Jorge Arreaza, to a small group of journalists moments after Trump used his General Assembly speech to herald a fresh round of sanctions on Venezuelans officials – including the country’s first lady.

“We know why President Trump is doing this and much more, going so far as to insist on sovereignty for the United States even as he blatantly violates the sovereignty of others,” Mr. Arreaza said. “He is trying to hide the many political scandals in Washington.”

An opening to engagement?

Others simply lamented America’s turn inward under Trump – but held out hope that the president can be drawn back to the mantel of American leadership they say the world needs.

“Mr. Trump’s speech was unfortunate, it seems he is isolating America at a time when so much of the world really needs American leadership,” Enele Sopoaga, the prime minister of the Polynesian island nation of Tuvalu, told me.

“One of the main reasons we come here to New York every year is to hear the American president and to hear how America envisions leading the world in addressing the many problems we all face together,” he said. “So yes, it is disappointing to hear President Trump talk about America’s relations with the world in this way.”

But Mr. Sopoaga said he felt Trump was “more moderate” this year than last, a sign he chose to interpret as a potential opening to renewed American engagement in global issues.

As a sign of that hope, the leader of the tiny country halfway between Hawaii and Australia said he plans to personally invite Trump to the annual conference of Pacific island nations that Tuvalu will host next year.

“I don’t think we are big enough to accommodate his giant airplane,” Sopoaga said, referring to Air Force One. “But we would very much welcome the leadership of the American president, however he got there. And this is President Trump,” he added, “so maybe he could arrive on a yacht.”

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

You may be familiar with Bigfoot and the Yeti, but what about the Yowie and the Chuchunya?

The image of a big hairy humanoid hiding in the wilderness appears not just in movies like “Harry and the Hendersons” and the animated film “Smallfoot,” which premieres on Friday, but also in cultures all over the world. Visitors to the mountains of the Chinese province of Hubei report sightings of the Yeren, or “wild man,” who dwells in the forest. In Cameroon, the fearsome Dodu is said to dine on grubs. The Mapinguari stalks the rainforests of Brazil and Bolivia; the Yowie walks about the Australian outback. In Russia’s Sakha Republic, it’s the Chuchunya, and in the Caucasus and Pamir Mountains of Central Asia, it’s the Almas.

Why do stories of giant ape-men keep popping up in such disparate places, despite the persistent absence of physical evidence? And what does that say about us?

“It certainly strikes a chord,” says Eugenie Scott, a physical anthropologist and former director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit that defends evolutionary biology and climate science. “When we are out in wild places and we hear noises and rustling and we hear sounds that we can’t explain, the inclination may be for us to infer that those come from a human-like creature.”

Sasquatch-like creatures play important roles in some of our most enduring stories. In one of humanity’s earliest known works of great literature, the “Epic of Gilgamesh,” written more than 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, there’s Enkidu, a wild man created by the gods to act as a countervailing force against the civilized but harsh King Gilgamesh. Enkidu ends up wrestling with the king and becomes his close companion.

Western literature kept returning to the theme of a creature standing at the intersection of human and animal. The Old English epic “Beowulf” has the title character battling Grendel, said to be a descendant of Cain. In “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” one of the founding texts of English literature, Gawain was said to occasionally battle with Wodwos, wild men who dwelled in the rocks. In William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” we meet the half-human, half-demon Caliban who has been tamed by the sorcerer Prospero. In Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” Lemuel Gulliver encounters the Yahoos, whom he characterizes as “brute[s] in human form” and compares unfavorably to the equine-yet-rational Houyhnhnms.

The theme continues right up through our modern mythology. Consider the dual nature of Han Solo’s loyal companion, Chewbacca, an able spacecraft pilot and mechanic who is perpetually one holographic checkmate away from dismembering someone, and who, as we’ve learned from Disney’s most recent addition to the “Star Wars” canon, occasionally eats people.

“It's a great mystery of something that can exist outside of our modern constructs,” says Gail de Vos, a Canadian librarian, author, and professional storyteller who writes about folklore and contemporary legends. “It’s beyond civilization.”

But how did these mental images of wilderness-dwelling man-apes first arise? Is it a cultural memory from when farmers coexisted with hunter-gatherers? Or did it begin even earlier?

“Even if Bigfoot doesn’t exist now, perhaps once upon a time it was some sort of distant relative, some sort of evolutionary branch, that then died out,” says Laura Krantz, the journalist behind “Wild Thing,” a podcast about Bigfoot and those who try to prove his existence. “I have no idea if that’s true or not, but where there’s smoke there’s fire.”

For Ms. Krantz, stories about Bigfoot prompt us to think about an undomesticated version of ourselves, which she calls a “road not taken.”

“Instead of becoming civilized and wearing pants every day, [Bigfoot] decided to stay in the forest and maintain a more primal existence,” she says. “I think some people in a romantic way yearn for that idea.”

Krantz, who says she grew up hiking and camping in Idaho, says she is drawn to the idea that, despite industrial civilization’s pervasiveness, there are still some wild places.  

“It's this idea that the world can still be unexplored enough so be wild and and untamed,” she says.

But that idea, says Donald Prothero, a former Occidental College geologist and paleontologist who, with Canadian writer and illustrator Daniel Loxton, wrote the 2013 book “Abominable Science!: Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids,” has been untenable for a long time.

“In fact, nearly all the great forests of the world, and especially in the Western US, where most supposed Bigfoot reports come from, are not unexplored and not pristine by any stretch of the imagination,” he says. “Most of our primary forests have been logged more than once.”

The insistence that there may still be something lurking out there in the woods, says Dr. Prothero, is perhaps a reaction to the very scientific advancement that continually debunks Bigfoot and other cryptids.

“Mystery is part of what we need to believe about the world,” he says. “And science has of course been ruthlessly stomping out mystery for a century now at least.”

[Editor's note: An earlier version of this story included an incorrect reference to the Biblical story of Jacob and Esau.]

AP

South Korean soldiers patrol along a barbed-wire fence near the demilitarized zone (DMZ), which separates the two Koreas,

One reason for a decline of armed conflicts in recent decades has been the use of an important tool in peacemaking: buffer zones between militaries. They cool off hot spots. They replace fear with patience in working on a negotiated settlement. Most of the time, they maintain a temporary peace.

Turkey and Russia just agreed to a zone in Syria’s Idlib province. Under a new peace pact, once-warring Ethiopia and Eritrea are dismantling a zone set up in 2000. And over the past four years, a buffer zone in Ukraine has prevented war between Russia and NATO.

Of all the buffer zones in the world, the most famous may be the one that has divided the two Koreas since a “temporary” truce ended a 1950-53 war. The 160-mile-long demilitarized zone (DMZ) has been a constant scene of tension and occasional violence, filled with land mines and heavily armed guard posts. On either side of the 2-1/2-mile-wide zone is one of the world’s most heavily militarized frontiers, sustained by fears of invasion and threats of nuclear escalation.

Now, as the result of a Sept. 19 agreement between North and South Korea, the DMZ could be the starting point for finally achieving denuclearization of the peninsula.

The two sides agreed to dismantle several guard posts, start removing land mines and other weapons, halt military drills close to the zone, and take other steps by the end of 2018. The proposed moves could help reduce the risk of miscalculation and surprise attack. They reflect a shift from managing war toward managing peace, from strife toward respite.

The ultimate goal is to create confidence-building measures that will ensure enough cross-border trust for difficult negotiations on nuclear weapons. 

Suspicions of North Korea remain high after its scuttling of previous agreements about ending its nuclear program. Yet if its current leader, Kim Jong-un, is sincere about opening his closed nation for economic development, he has been given an opportunity by South Korean President Moon Jae-in to prove it. Good buffer zones can make for good neighbors.