Natural Allies

In Natural Allies, Soo Hong offers a paradigm shift in how we think about family engagement with schools. Hong challenges the conventional depiction of parents and teachers as “natural enemies,” and shows how, through teachers’ initiative and commitment, they can become natural allies instead. Based on a three-year ethnographic study, the book features the experiences and motivations of five urban school teachers who have successfully created meaningful, productive relationships and partnerships with students’ families. In Natural Allies, the teachers’ personal narratives are juxtaposed with rich descriptions of their interactions with families and children. The book explores how the dimensions of race, class, culture, and family history shape the interactions between teachers and families, particularly in schools where teacher-parent dynamics may be fraught with distrust or misunderstanding. The book demonstrates how commitment to families and community can become a central part of educators’ development as professionals. In addition, the research provides new insight and seeks to merge the study of family engagement with the field of culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies. Offered with optimism and urgency, Natural Allies addresses an area in which many educators feel ill equipped and unprepared. Readers will emerge from a reading of the book with new ideas on family engagement that are grounded in an analysis of the deep contours of the parent-teacher relationship.

No two nations have exchanged natural resources, produced transborder environmental agreements, or cooperatively altered ecosystems on the same scale as Canada and the United States. Environmental and energy diplomacy have profoundly shaped both countries’ economies, politics, and landscapes for over 150 years. Natural Allies looks at the history of US-Canada relations through an environmental lens. From fisheries in the late nineteenth century to oil pipelines in the twenty-first century, Daniel Macfarlane recounts the scores of transborder environmental and energy arrangements made between the two nations. Many became global precedents that influenced international environmental law, governance, and politics, including the Boundary Waters Treaty, the Trail Smelter case, hydroelectric megaprojects, and the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreements. In addition to water, fish, wood, minerals, and myriad other resources, Natural Allies details the history of the continental energy relationship – from electricity to uranium to fossil fuels –showing how Canada became vital to American strategic interests and, along with the United States, a major international energy power and petro-state. Environmental and energy relations facilitated the integration and prosperity of Canada and the United States but also made these countries responsible for the current climate crisis and other unsustainable forms of ecological degradation. Looking to the future, Natural Allies argues that the concept of national security must be widened to include natural security – a commitment to public, national, and international safety from environmental harms, especially those caused by human actions.

To what extent are Canada and Mexico "natural allies" in continental and world affairs? How will this relationship unfold in terms of security issues in the aftermath of the Cold War? These questions were the focus of a workshop held in Mexico City in 1994 from which this book took its themes: historical context, American influence, and potential cooperative security options. A process of redefining "security" concerns in a changing hemisphere is clearly underway, and Natural Allies? examines economic factors, drug trafficking, questions of autonomy and strategic alliance, and defence priorities as intersecting interests in the Canada-Mexico dialogue. This is volume two in CHANGING AMERICAS, a series published in collaboration with the Canadian Foundation for the Americas (FOCAL).

Natural Allies, based on painstaking research begun more than 30 years ago when Anne Frior Scott was preparing her now-classic The Southern Lady, is clear and highly readable. It will appeal not only to historians and sociologists but also to anyone working with or studying voluntary organizations. "Both an engaging survey of existing scholarship and a plea for additional research. . . . With wry humor and impassioned scholarship Anne Frior Scott teaches us that the more we are able to learn about women . . . 'the more we will understand about the society that has shaped us all.'" -- New York Times Book Review

Indo-American relations increasingly comprise expanded strategic and economic ties. India's government, led by Prime Minister Mamonhan Singh, has stated it intention to intensify these ties with America. Clearly the Bush administration agrees. For example, President Bush has indicated his intention to sustain the gains achieved since 2001 as a priority. Prime Minister Singh has invited the President to India. President Bush has indicated his intention to go there, leading Indian analysts to expect that, "What we are going to see is a consolidation of Indo-U.S. ties on a range of strategic issues. We may see a greater emphasis on economic ones as well. The Bush administration is prepared to make a major offer of arms sales to India. This deal has many repercussion across the entire range of Indo-American relationships and of India's relationships with a host of important foreign governments like Russia, China, Pakistan, and Israel. Undoubtedly, a reinforcement of the economic foundations of bilateral amity would be desirable for many reasons. This book-length monograph seeks to illuminate India's rising power and capabilities with regard to the key regions on its periphery: the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, and South East Asia. The author also considers the major issues pertaining to India's bilateral defense agenda with the United States. By revealing the dimensions of India's growing capabilities and interests, he provides a strategic rationale developing the U.S.-India partnership further.

Contributors to this volume explore the dynamic between war and the physical environment from a variety of provocative viewpoints. The subjects of their essays range from conflicts in colonial India and South Africa to the U.S. Civil War and twentieth-century wars in Japan, Finland, and the Pacific Islands. Among the topics explored are: - the ways in which landscape can influence military strategies - why the decisive battle of the American Civil War was fought - the impact of war and peace on timber resources - the spread of pests and disease in wartime.