Half Public, Half Private, One West: Innovation and Opportunity Across Boundaries
Welcome by Courtney White taken from Program:
"Welcome to The Quivira Coalition's Fourth Annual Conference. We're glad you're here!

"The theme this year is 'Half Public, Half Private: One West.' For too long, we believe, the West has been artificially divided in half. Nature, for instance, stubbornly refuses to acknowledge fences, as many ecologists and conservation biologists having been pointing out. But emotionally too, the divide is an unnatural one.

"Where, for example, does 'wilderness' begin or end really--at a fence line? Does 'wildness' exist on one side of the divide and 'commodity' on the other? Where do private rights stop and public responsibilities begin?

"In his poem 'Mending Wall,' Robert Frost wrote the famous line 'Good fences make good neighbors.' But the line is spoken not by the narrator but by his neighbor, a farmer, and it is the only thing his neighbor says in the entire poem. It's left to the narrator to muse over its meaning, as well as over the stone wall that separates them, noting 'Something there is that doesn't love a wall.'

"Gravity, for example.

"For Frost, the fence was not as important as the process of mending needed to keep the wall whole. That meant working on relationships with neighbors.

"The time has come in the West to focus on the 'mending,' and not on the wall that separates us. It's one West after all--physically, historically, and emotionally--one community, where both private rights and public responsibilities are firmly rooted. But like Frost's metaphorical New England farm, western neighbors must get along--mend together--if the community as a whole is to remain healthy.

"This Conference is all about mending. We respect the fence, and the opinion of our neighbors, but we also recognize that we must work together for the common good.

"Good fences might make good neighbors, but a handshake is much better.

"Thanks for attending."