Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP/File

Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney testifies before a House Appropriations Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington. As acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, he has argued for greater restraint by financial regulators. The agency will survive under a reform of Dodd-Frank that passed the House Tuesday.

Congressional action to ease US bank regulation may prove both its fans and critics right. It may achieve its goal of helping smaller banks even as it also weakens oversight of America’s overall financial system.

Translation: Loans may flow a bit more freely, and small and midsize banks may soon be able to better compete against larger ones. But as the new measure erodes provisions in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, it could also heighten the risk of a financial crisis in the future.

It’s notable that the banking bill won some Democratic as well as Republican support as it passed the House Tuesday and the Senate in March, even though it dials back regulatory safeguards that President Obama pushed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Even some supporters of the law agreed with arguments by the bank industry that Dodd-Frank was too onerous for smaller banks. President Trump is expected to sign the measure soon. 

Some analysts say they expect the benefits of the reform will outweigh the costs, because the bill leaves the wider structure of US financial regulation largely intact.

“It'll be a while before you see the difference, but it should free up lending at small and midsize banks as well as credit unions that previously had been hemmed in by regulatory and compliance overhead,” says Greg McBride, who analyzes financial conditions at Bankrate.com.

Nevertheless, the loosening of restraints on lending for small and midsize banks won’t necessarily lead to a flood of new borrowing, economists point out.

“Yes we’re doing that [loosening] on the regulatory front, but it’s also coming at a time when the Fed is tightening, credit conditions are in general tighter, and the [business] cycle by most accounts is fairly mature,” says Michael Gapen, chief US economist for Barclays in New York. The big exception is home mortgages, where interest rates are rising, but lending standards have not tightened, he adds.

That doesn’t mean the banks will have to cope with an immediate downturn, he adds. For at least the next 12 months, the double-barreled stimulus from the Trump tax cuts and the recently passed federal budget should buoy the economy.

The US still has some 5,000 commercial banks, plus many credit unions, but the trend in recent years has been toward mergers and consolidation, as lenders seek economies of scale. One reason is the rising cost of regulation since 2010.

“I've seen small banks that have 10 to 15 percent of their staff devoted solely to compliance,” says Mr. McBride at Bankrate. That makes it hard to compete with bigger banks, which can spread their compliance costs over a much bigger base of business.

One example of how the new law may free up more lending: The bill loosens an "ability-to-repay" rule for mortgage loans issued by small banks, if the loans are retained on a lender's books (rather than sold after issuance to an agency like Fannie Mae). [Editor's note: The prior sentence has been updated to reflect that the rule change relates to mortgages made by small banks.]

“That's music in the ears of somebody that's, for example, a sole proprietor and has wildly fluctuating income” from that business. For such borrowers “it's been very difficult to get a loan” since the Great Recession and Dodd-Frank, says McBride.

Still, core provisions of the bill (officially called the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act) worry some experts on financial regulation.

Most notable: Enhanced regulatory standards will now apply to banks with $250 billion or more in assets, rather than $50 billion. That, says Gregg Gelzinis of the liberal Center for American Progress, means that 25 of the 38 largest US banks will no longer have to maintain as much capital on hand as a cushion against risk, or create “living wills” – plans for how to unwind themselves in a potential collapse.

Even without further reforms of Dodd-Frank, conservatives are pushing against regulations from the agency that Dodd-Frank created, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. On Monday, Mr. Trump signed into law a repeal of the CFPB’s moves to mitigate racial discrimination in auto loans. (Republicans point out that the agency ducked the formal rulemaking process to push through its guidance to lenders.)

Also, the agency under Trump appointee Mick Mulvaney appears to be pulling back from overseeing institutions making and servicing student loans. In a letter Friday, Senate Democrats asked Mr. Mulvaney to explain how the agency would fulfill its statutory obligations.

Another target for conservatives is the CFPB’s stiff regulation of payday lenders, who have sued the agency for relief. Mulvaney has not made clear whether he will contest the suit.

In the end, the action in Congress showed the ability of Senate Democrats to block the more sweeping Dodd-Frank rollback that Republicans, especially in the House, were seeking. It also showed the capacity for bipartisan cooperation at a time of stark political divisions.

“Working with Republicans and Democrats, we wrote this bill to defend Montana businesses from overreaching government regulations,” said Sen. Jon Tester (D) of Montana, who played a central role in negotiating the bill. He said the goal was “to boost access to the capital needed to fuel our small business economy, and to create more jobs.”

An irresistible force – President Trump’s trade agenda – has met an immovable object known as China Inc., and the result is an uneasy truce.

Both sides over the weekend backed away from threatened tariffs. China agreed to buy more US energy and farm goods and, on Tuesday, cut its tariffs on imported cars from 25 percent to 15 percent.  

The challenge for both sides is that the nub of their trade conflict – technological prowess – has no easy answers. The United States relies on its technological edge and its huge market to keep ahead of its economic rivals. China, which is by some measures a larger economy, is determined to rival or surpass the US in key technologies, such as artificial intelligence and robotics. For now, say trade analysts, this tension will likely play out as a soft rivalry rather than a trade war, as Mr. Trump had threatened to unleash.

The confrontation is part-and-parcel of the duel between two economic and political systems, one with lots of government control (China) and the other (the US) more market-oriented. And it’s unlikely to be assuaged by a face-saving trade deal, no matter how many Illinois soybeans China might purchase to try to reduce the US-China trade deficit.

“The trade imbalance, that’s the surface of the cannonball, but at the core of the cannonball is this techno-nationalism,” says Erik Lundh, senior economist with The Conference Board in New York. “There’s a little phrase that I’ve been hearing [in trade circles] and it goes: ‘No trade war but no trade peace.’ “

Technological tug of war 

The current tug of war over China’s ZTE Corp., a telecom manufacturer, has come to symbolize this technological conflict.

For the US, ZTE reflects the kind of double-dealing typical of China when it comes to keeping its word, in this case sanctions. After China pledged to uphold US sanctions against Iran and North Korea, ZTE nonetheless sold US technology to both nations from 2010 to 2016. The US Commerce Department investigated and last year ZTE agreed to pay a $1.2 billion fine and discipline the employees involved.

When ZTE didn’t discipline them and tried to hide that fact, the Commerce Department responded in April with a seven-year ban on buying US parts. That pushed ZTE to the brink of collapse because without US parts it couldn’t keep manufacturing its telecom equipment and mobile devices. Its Hong Kong-listed shares were suspended last month.

In an apparent move aimed at securing Chinese support for a planned North Korean summit, President Trump said last week the US penalty was too harsh on ZTE.

But he got a sharp bipartisan rebuke from Congress. On Tuesday, the Senate Banking Committee unanimously passed a bill prohibiting the administration from softening the ZTE penalties as well as imposing stricter export controls and national-security reviews of Chinese high-tech deals in the US. The same day 27 senators, including leaders from both sides of the aisle, wrote a letter urging US departments to reject any easing of tech-export controls in any future US-China trade deal.

China may draw a different conclusion from the ZTE debacle.

That one of its technology stars, employing nearly as many people as Google, could implode because of US policy serves as a reality check. For all its prowess in artificial intelligence and supercomputing – where experts say it may be a year ahead of US challengers – China remains woefully behind in other aspects of technology, such as specialized microprocessors. That means redoubling efforts to boost its own technology base to reduce its reliance on key parts from the US and Europe. 

“This punishment on ZTE does not encourage but forces the Chinese government and Chinese companies to depend on themselves more, because we have lost our trust in this global value chain,” says Tu Xinquan, executive dean of the China Institute for WTO Studies at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing. “That's really serious….It will [erode] trust in the global value chain, especially in the US supply.”

But neither China nor the US can turn their backs on their technology trade without important economic consequences.

For the US, China serves not only as a source of finished goods – think cellphones and TVs - but also for low-cost tech components in complex global supply chains. And especially in the Chinese tech sectors that the US Commerce Department had targeted for tariffs, a large chunk of China’s exports to the US are really sales of components from US-owned or affiliated companies in China, according to new research by the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Thus, the lion’s share of China’s high-tech exports are not coming from indigenous companies like ZTE but from foreign firms ranging from Apple to Cisco Systems that have expanded their manufacturing operations in China. And any tariff on those imports will be a tax on US or other foreign companies and their global supply chains, writes Mary Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute. “US firms rely on global supply chains to remain internationally competitive.”

Fewer joint ventures for technology transfers

China, too, can ill afford to go it alone. Research published earlier this year shows how Chinese companies in recent decades have improved their technological know-how via mandatory joint ventures with foreign firms, such as US and German automakers. That practice has come under sharp criticism recently from the US.

This practice has waned since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. One reason is the rules of the WTO. Another is that fewer companies were investing in China, says Wolfgang Keller, professor of economics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “If you require a domestic partner, you will have … fewer takers.”

While the initial tech transfer from joint ventures proved extremely useful, China – in an increasing number of areas – has allowed multinationals to set up their own operations.

These trans-Pacific realities make a trade war less likely, despite the current confrontation. “I don’t think this is going to be a sea change one way or another,” says Mr. Keller. “It’s going to be an evolving process.”  

Lead “guide” Anne Lacey sits on the rug, giving a lesson to a wiggly cluster of first- to third-graders. She’s white, with wavy hair and glasses. Robert Nelson, the assistant guide (a Montessori term for educators) is folded into a tiny chair at the back of the room, checking a boy’s math, when a girl wearing a cat-eared headband pounces on him for a hug. He’s African-American, with a shaved head and black beard.

At City Garden Montessori, a charter school not far from a prominent botanical garden here, the students, staff, and even the children’s drawings reflect the racial diversity of the nearby neighborhoods that get preference in the admissions lottery.

The everyday moments hint at the pioneering nature of this place – like the time during a frigid January indoor recess when some children found popsicle sticks and decided to make mini “Black Lives Matter” signs.

Their older elementary peers organized a march last September after the acquittal of a local white police officer who had killed a black man. The school is less than 20 miles from Ferguson, Mo., where the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014 sparked a national movement.

Even before that, a desire for racial equity motivated people at City Garden to rethink how they do education, and to live their commitment in a deep way. The journey to becoming truly integrated has forced them to call upon reserves of hope, moral courage, and perseverance.

City Garden’s mission includes not only racial and economic diversity, but also “anti-bias, antiracist” education, or ABAR, a term used by the Illinois-based Crossroads Antiracism Organizing & Training, which has helped with staff development.

“We no longer have the privilege of pretending that race doesn’t matter,” says Nicole Evans, the school’s African-American principal, who greets students in the morning with hollers and hugs.

“We tell every parent that comes in: This is not just beautiful words on the wall…. This is a matter of life or death for some of our students. Forget about leveling the playing field; this is about being invited to the game,” she says.

Ann Hermes/Staff

Student writing on the wall at City Garden Montessori School in St. Louis. The charter school is less than 20 miles from Ferguson, Mo., where the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014 sparked the 'Black Lives Matter' national movement.

Montessori is a child-centered educational approach that started in the tenements of Rome. The United States has an estimated 4,000 Montessori schools, 500 of them public. Among those, about 55 percent are charter schools, according to an analysis by Mira Debs, executive director of the Education Studies Program at Yale University.

“There is a lot the public Montessori sector has accomplished in terms of being a model of diversity over the last 50 years,” but tensions have arisen over “equitable access and the experience of students and teachers of color in those buildings,” Dr. Debs says.

City Garden is one of 125 US charter schools identified as “diverse by design” by The Century Foundation in a first-of-its kind report May 15. Eight Montessori charter schools, and about 2 percent of charters overall, met the criteria. 

The small numbers show that school integration hasn't been a priority for the charter sector. That's partly because of “a real absence of leadership in federal law and state charter law to give schools guidance or any kind of incentives to promote diversity,” Debs says. But such grass-roots efforts are important to highlight because they show how charter-school flexibility can be leveraged.

Interest in anti-racism work in Montessori schools is growing. Hundreds of people now attend the annual conference put on in various locations by Montessori for Social Justice, a group that City Garden leaders helped create, and for which Debs has served on the board.

It’s “inviting people into the conversation about what education can be … and how it can contribute to this broader movement for equity and liberation,” says City Garden executive director Christie Huck.

Ann Hermes/Staff

Elementary students attend class with instructor Jori Martinez-Woods at City Garden Montessori School in St. Louis.

Bringing race to the surface ‘gets messy’

City Garden started in 1995 as a private Montessori preschool. In 2008, black and white parents, including Ms. Huck, helped create the charter school to offer an integrated public Montessori up through grade 8. The city schools had large concentrations of students of color, while the local Catholic schools skewed white.

Last December, it became the first charter in Missouri to gain a 10-year renewal, based on high marks in a quality review. One commitment in its new charter: taking specific steps to try to close racial gaps on state tests.

When Dr. Evans arrived, the school had recently begun anti-bias training among the staff, but it still needed to break out its data by race and take a closer look at “the educational debt” black students were accruing relative to whites, she says.

Evans had also been hearing from parents of color, “We don’t feel like we have a seat at the table.… Our voices are being drowned by white voices.”

Sometimes they meant it literally. She tells of a white father who would come to meetings “and scream and express his disagreement in ways that, quite frankly, if a black man had done it … [some parents said] police would have been called.”

Eventually school officials told that parent he could no longer attend meetings. He and a few other white parents took their children out of the school.

For staff, the journey has involved about 20 hours of anti-bias, or ABAR, training each summer, and professional development sessions during the year. Parents and community members have been welcomed to facilitated “Colorbrave” conversations for several years as well.

“It gets messy sometimes, because this is not easy work or comfortable work,” says Faybra Hemphill, City Garden’s director of racial equity, curriculum, and training.

Ms. Lacey recalls how her first ABAR training prompted “a desperate need to fix everything.” It uncovered her “oblivion,” she says. “I am questioning every decision I make. Every time I raise my voice, every child who gets in trouble, every child who gets praised…. I used to keep tally marks.” 

Talking about race openly

Even in a place explicitly countering it, racism still crops up among students.

“Sometimes people, they don’t try to be racist, but sometimes they are,” says McKenzie, a fourth-grader who’s nibbling on pizza during lunch with Black Girls Rock, a group that meets once a month for a field trip or a discussion in the school’s central “living room,” to counter negative social messages.

“One time [a boy] said, ‘How come black people can have their own lunch but white people can’t have theirs?’ ” McKenzie says. “We tried to say that the whole world revolves around white people. And then he goes, like, ‘Well, yeah, because we owned them.’ ”

Although the comment was upsetting, McKenzie says, “I just walked away.” 

Ann Hermes/Staff

Principal Nicole Evans (l.) talks to students during a 'Black Girls Rock' session at City Garden Montessori School in St. Louis. The charter school's mission includes not only racial and economic diversity, but also 'anti-bias, antiracist' education.

Before the pizza, Evans read them a picture book celebrating the wide range of skin tones among African-Americans. A beam of sunlight cut through the circle, hitting a patch of sequins on a girl’s shirt and sending sparkles across her friends.

Evans passed a mirror around, asking each one to look in it and declare: “I’m a beautiful black girl.” Some did it hastily while others added in descriptors like “awesome.”

City Garden students say they do make friends across racial lines. “If there’s a thing that goes on with racial tensions [in the news] we’ll talk about it…. [The guides] handle it pretty well,” says Omar, a seventh-grader.

One teachable moment came up early in the school year. Some black students in a fourth- to sixth-grade class had gotten excited about creating a business to make play slime over the summer. They thought of it proudly as a black-owned business. Their enthusiasm spread quickly, though, and in the fall some white students wanted to be part of it.

Ms. Hemphill stopped by to help them talk it through, and “they had this very mature debate,” Evans says.

Some white students helped other white students understand they were overstepping, because the black students had expressed a desire to keep it black-run. (Earlier, students had already had some discussions about the need for whites to work in solidarity with people of color when they see injustice, but at the same time avoid taking over how a response should be organized, Evans says.)

Now, confronted with this business activity their peers were doing after school, a student suggested a solution: The business leaders could call upon other students as “consultants” when they wanted help.

“That was a courageous conversation about race,” Evans says.

Kim Dixon, a white mother, was impressed with her daughter's takeaways. “There are 30-, 40-year-old people that still don’t get that concept … that oppressed people need their own space,” Ms. Dixon says.

Students can handle the conversations, says guide Jori Martinez-Woods. “If we continue with this belief that children are too young to grapple with these ideas, then what we’re saying is, ‘We want to perpetuate this for another generation.’ ”

African-American mom Roni Rodgers is happy the school helps her children manage the dynamics of diverse settings. Parents of a City Garden graduate told her that when a racial issue came up in high school, people were “in awe of how that particular child handled that situation and was not in a fret,” because at City Garden they had seen “what love is, and … how to treat others as you want to be treated.”

Outcomes of successful integration

Nearby the school, old brick houses, some boarded up, sit adjacent to pricey contemporary homes. The neighborhood has been gentrifying, partly because of the school’s success.

For integrated charter schools, it’s a constant challenge to maintain diversity as word gets out and more affluent parents apply, says Debs, from Yale.

City Garden has been able to maintain a racial mix, with about 50 percent white students, but its low-income population, once more than half the school, has shrunk to 39 percent.

In response, the school formed an affordable housing task force, and it has lobbied the state legislature in the hopes that it will allow a weighted lottery to maintain a balance of low-income students. 

Ann Hermes/Staff

Robert Nelson, who works with lower elementary students at City Garden Montessori School, says he was pleasantly surprised by the school’s devotion to anti-bias, antiracist work.

Mr. Nelson, a teacher with decades of experience in regular public schools, took Montessori training over the summer and started at City Garden in September. He says he was pleasantly surprised by the school’s devotion to anti-bias, antiracist work.

Still, he says, “I’m waiting for the day that we don’t have to have ABAR training…. I’m hoping that these kids will take it there.”

Part 1: Desegregation stalls, but voluntary efforts to boost it show promise  

Dina Kraft

Tami Suchman, from Kibbutz Be'eri on the border with the Gaza Strip, says she is deeply disturbed by the loss of Palestinian life over the last several weeks of violent protests and says some of the blame falls on Israel. "Everyone knows that without negotiated deals there are no solutions,” she says.

Minutes after Imad walked into the kibbutz dining hall just over two weeks ago he was engulfed by a wave of Israelis hurrying to him with open arms, pulling him in for long hugs.

It had been over a decade since this Palestinian man in his 50s, a resident of Gaza, had seen these friends or stepped foot in this communal village where he worked most of his life.

A week later and a few miles away along the Gaza-Israel border, 64 Palestinians were killed and more than a thousand wounded by Israeli soldiers as protesters – demanding their “right to return” to Israel and an end to the crippling Israeli economic blockade of Gaza – surged toward a perimeter fence.

Between the Gazans and Israelis, animosity and distrust runs deep. Three successive wars in recent years between Israel and Hamas, the militant Islamic faction ruling Gaza, have left both sides battle-scarred. The Israeli blockade has left people in Gaza, especially the swelling ranks of the unemployed, reeling from shortages of fresh water and electricity.

Tami Suchman, a Kibbutz Be’eri member and friend of Imad (not his real name), is among the few who maintain ties with friends and connections in Gaza. Speaking to a Monitor correspondent days after the one-day surge in Palestinian deaths, which coincided with ceremonies in Jerusalem marking the relocation of the US Embassy to Israel, Ms. Suchman says she is deeply disturbed by the loss of Palestinian life over the last several weeks of violent protests.

Most Israelis blame Hamas squarely for the recent deaths, citing the militants’ calls to rush and breach the fence despite warnings Israel would use live fire to deter them in the name of protecting border communities like this one.  But Suchman is among a minority who also put blame on Israel itself.

“I don’t see anyone working on the diplomatic front,” says Suchman. “Even if there is war it will not solve anything. Everyone knows that without negotiated deals there are no solutions.”

Fear of tunnels, anger at fires

The Israeli communities skirting closest to the Gaza border are kibbutzim and moshavim, collectives that were originally agricultural villages.

Israeli soldiers are mobilized along the Israel-Gaza border in the name of defending them from infiltrators. Local residents fear the Palestinian militants who dig fortified tunnels in the sandy soil, attempting in some cases to burrow under their very feet in order to kidnap and attack both soldiers and civilians. And they grow angry when they see their own fields and groves scorched black by fires lit by burning kites that young Palestinians ignite and fly over the border.

But through it all, there are those who hope dialogue will eventually triumph over trying to impose a military solution. Maintaining personal ties with people on “the other side” is part of their quest for agency, for laying the groundwork for a change in approach, and for maintaining a sense of humanity and hope amid a situation they admit they cannot control but are convinced will eventually change.

“They teach their kids it is their land, but it is also our land. We have to share it. On both sides we need to digest that – if we want a future – so we can stop living by the sword,” says Suchman.

She scrolls through photos of Imad’s visit on her cell phone – images of him beaming with friends. Some he has known since he started work building houses at the age of 16 in this setting of palm trees and citrus orchards.

In the aftermath of Hamas’s violent takeover of Gaza in 2006, Israel, citing security concerns, imposed a closure on the territory, limiting the flow of some goods and putting an end to the flow of workers like Imad into Israel.

When, because of the closure, Imad and three other Gaza workers were prevented from working at Be’eri, Suchman and a friend started a fundraising drive among members to help support them. The kibbutz also contributes, and the men have been sent 1,000 shekels ($280) a month each for the past several years.

For his recent visit, Imad was only given an Israeli permit to cross the border to escort his brother, a cancer patient who was traveling that day for tests at an Israeli hospital.

Advocate for dialogue

Nearby, on Moshav Netiv Ha’asara, Roni Keidar is sitting near an olive tree in her garden later that same day and fielding text messages from friends and contacts in Gaza.

One, from a young man, is a reply to her recent query into how he is doing. It reads, in English, “Hello aunt roni, im ok but feel sad of what happens 2 days later I lost two of my friends and there are many of them got wounded.”

Like other border communities, the moshav has been hit by rocket fire from Gaza, and two of its people have been killed, one in 2007 and another in 2010.

Ms. Keider notes that things have become quiet again on the border, at least for now. The sky is a pale blue; wisps of clouds float above. Nearby are tomato, pepper, and sunflower fields.

“People are saying, why is it quiet today? Saying it’s because we gave them a walloping,” she says. “But the pain and scars are there, the vengeance is there, and we have to really do something extraordinary to change that.”

She says she tries in her own way, using whatever connections she has to help facilitate travel permits for Gazans for reasons other than medical appointments.

Keidar is also a member of Other Voice, an organization of residents in southern Israel who advocate for dialogue.

It’s not easy, she acknowledges, staying the course. The flaming kites sent by Gaza protesters setting fields alight on her own moshav and others anger her deeply.

“It makes it more difficult for me,” she says, “and sometimes I want to say, ‘What are you doing?’”

The burning kites, the tunnels, she says, are “not the way we are going to get peace. I’m so sad, what can we do? Where do we go? Someone in Gaza wrote me and said she rented a house further from the border. Some ask if we can help them finance their dinners for Ramadan because they don’t have enough money.”

The weight of doubt

Keidar gets pushback about her ongoing ties with Gazans, even from close friends.

She blames fear for the lack of compassion among her fellow Israelis for civilians in Gaza.

“They are afraid,” she says. And she understands their fear, lives it even. Just the other night, she recounts, she heard a tapping noise she suspected could be the sound of tunneling underneath her living room by Palestinian militants. Her husband dismissed the thought, but still, she wonders.

She encourages her critical friends to read up, as she has, on controversial measures Israel has employed now and in the past. “When you see two sides, it’s difficult,” she says. “When you see only one side it is easy. With two sides there is suddenly doubt, and they don’t like to doubt.”

A plane flies overhead and she looks up, wondering. Later, a distant boom is heard.

“I am torn with fear for this side and that side,” she says. Mentioning the kites again, she says, “I wish to goodness they would not do this. But I keep remembering and cannot get out of my mind that these are desperate people. And desperate people are dangerous. So we have to give some sort of hope, some sort of light.”

Soon after he returned to Gaza, Imad contacted his friends on Kibbutz Be’eri to let them know he had arrived safely back. So did a large suitcase stuffed with supplies like coffee, sugar, flour, cigarettes, and snacks for his grandchildren that the kibbutzniks had packed for him, Suchman says.

She says Imad asked her to send him the photos she took. His family wanted to see for themselves who these friends are. He told her, “You don’t understand. There are 20 people here. And I’m telling them, ‘You are our family.’”

Jamie Moncrief/DePaul University

When Liam Heneghan cast a scholar’s eye on his favorite children’s books he found a common theme hidden between the lines.

What’s a common thread shared by “Peter Rabbit” and “Lord of the Rings,” “Harry Potter” and “Calvin and Hobbes,” “The Lorax” and “The Little Prince,” and “Where the Wild Things Are”? All these classics – along with vast swaths of children’s literature – have environmental themes. 

So argues Liam Heneghan, co-director of the Institute for Nature and Culture at DePaul University in Chicago, in his new book “Beasts at Bedtime,” in which he reflects on the animals, forests, and pastoral scenes that populate many beloved children’s books. The genesis of his book came when he was cleaning out his children’s bookshelves. “It wasn’t until I systematically inspected these books that I really understood how much environmental content there was,” says Mr. Heneghan. 

What started as a Saturday-morning project became a years-long investigation, one he hopes becomes a guide for sharing the joys of literature with children. Here, condensed for brevity, are some of his reflections.

Q: Why are environmental themes so prevalent in children’s books?

A lot of the writers of our classic children’s literature and more contemporary works of children’s fiction ... had a naturalist’s inclination toward wild things. Beatrix Potter was one of the big rediscoveries for me. She was an accomplished mycologist, had written about fungal reproduction, and had a paper presented to the Royal Linnean Society, but being a woman was not allowed to attend that august society nor encouraged in her interests, and she turned her zeal for natural history to her art and writing.

[J.R.R.] Tolkien had a lifelong concern about the fate of trees and the fate of forests. It got so bad he would rarely visit a natural area because he suspected it would have been destroyed. So what he’s doing on the page with the “Lord of the Rings” books is mapping out these concerns. 

My intuition is that there is an environmental flavor to this literature because there was an environmental flavor to the writers of this literature. 

Q: How does reading fit into the broader message that kids don’t get outside?

I don’t want to be understood as haughtily dismissing the advances of the last 15 or 20 years of environmental education, which is coaxing kids from the soft comforts of home to get outside. But we should be thinking about ways of transforming the indoors, particularly the reflective component of it. 

It is worth our while pausing to think about the ways in which we can enhance the quality of children’s reflective lives.

Q: What books have resonated with you?

Some of my old favorites endured. The first book I remember owning was a copy of “The Hobbit.” All of the Tolkien stuff still resonates. Some things I reevaluated. “The Lorax” had been something that I found very important and still do, but now for very different reasons. I used to think the Lorax himself was the hero. Now I wonder whether Dr. Seuss was presenting us with the Once-ler as the hero. The Lorax epitomizes the figure of the hectoring, browbeating, generally failing approach to environmental policy, and the system ends up completely destroyed despite his fulminating against the Once-ler. The only expressions about the beauty of the system are when the Once-ler is thinking back to the first time he encountered the truffula forest, and he’s the one that ultimately hands over the seed of the truffula tree to the little kid with the idea that this is a system that could be restored. So it becomes to me a heartbreakingly optimistic story at the same time as being an anatomy of a system falling apart.

Q: Why do you think most adults feel so disconnected from nature?

I coined this term: toponesia. I think what happens is that as you turn toward adult concerns in your life ... there is a kind of forgetfulness about the importance of place to us.

Also, kids are being served up these extraordinary treasures with this abundance of environmental information, but unless there is somebody with them that can help illuminate some of these themes, maybe the full implications of them aren’t apparent to us as we read them. 

AP Photo

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, left, and South Korean President Moon Jae-in cross the border line at the border village of Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone between the two countries on April 27.

If President Trump’s anticipated summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un actually takes place on June 12, perhaps no one will deserve more credit than a person who prefers not to take credit: President Moon Jae-in of South Korea.

The former humans rights lawyer, whose parents were refugees from North Korea, has spent much of his first year in office using the soft diplomacy of warmth and praise to bring out the best intentions of both Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump. He describes his approach as “walking calmly but passionately” toward the goal of peace, falling not for hasty optimism or pessimism.

He also relies on humility to raise others up.

Even though Mr. Moon is the prime facilitator of the planned summit, he suggests Trump take the Nobel Peace Prize if peace comes to the Koreas. And he deftly used the Winter Olympics in South Korea to invite – and also pay for – North Korean athletes to attend. That generosity led to a successful North-South summit in April in which Kim was the first North Korean leader to set foot in the South. The two men appeared to get along.

Last year, when Kim and Trump were using threats and bombast against each other, Moon quietly advocated dialogue and reconciliation. He worked well with China and Japan to bring those big neighbors on board for the summit. “I am willing to go anywhere for the peace of the Korean Peninsula,” he promised last May after taking office.

Moon also knows when soft diplomacy needs a touch of hard power. When North Korea fired a test missile last year, he asked the United States to counter with a missile exercise. He also called for greater sanctions on North Korea.

But he relies more on the power of the carrot than the stick, more in applying balm than bombast. After decades of trying to end the North’s nuclear ambitions, South Korea perhaps has finally learned how to use the right mix of soft and hard diplomacy. 

More than anything else, Moon has turned Trump from a hawk on North Korea to a seeker of a peace deal. Trump now speaks of investing resources to “make North Korea great.” To reach this point, Moon has relied on acts of trust and contrition to create what may become a self-reinforcing loop of virtue.

If the summit takes places and leads to further diplomacy, Moon deserves much of the credit. But he may not accept it.