A panel discussion during the recent Biennial of the Americas in Denver.
A panel discussion during the recent Biennial of the Americas in Denver. (John Leyba, The Denver Post)

It's an eternal question, and no one has the answer: How do we improve our homes, neighborhoods, cities, nations to create better ways to live?

So when the Biennial of the Americas held a public symposium on July 17 titled "Re-inventing Communities and How We Live" — a panel of six men with impressive cross-cultural professional accomplishments, and Arianna Huffington as moderator — I wondered if they might have a clue, if not the fool-proof answer.

The Biennial, which ran from July 16-20 in Denver, was Gov. John Hickenlooper's effort to focus our perspective on our neighbors to the north and south rather than looking to the East and the West. It's an interesting, provocative idea, one that is long overdue.

More than 953 million people live in the Americas. Its mainland is the world's longest north-to-south land mass at 8,700 miles, covering almost a third of the Earth's land areas.

A huge area — and most of us have ignorance to match.

The panel didn't have The Answer, but their experiences showed ways that could help re-invent our communities and lifestyles, economically, socially and culturally.

"Around the world, four times the population of the U.S. doesn't have clean water, food, electricity, energy," explained James Rogers, chairman, president and chief executive of Duke Energy. "We need to do the right thing for the planet, not for profit. Too many decisions are made within a short time frame, without a long term view."


Parks, open space, the arts and culture are important, but empathy is needed too, to help understand problems people face and then try to solve them, several panelists noted.

A most challenging effort has been in Colombia, reeling from 60 years of conflict with drug dealers and rebels — a conflict that has claimed more than 5 million victims. The very poor have been pushed out of the cities into mountainsides, with hours of difficult travel to jobs. A new partnership brought hope, building escalators and cable cars at very steep sites, cutting travel time from hours to minutes. That's a true urban improvement.

"Nothing is more important than peace to a nation," declared Carlos Urrutia, Colombian ambassador to the United States.

"What kind of community do we want to build?" asked Alberto Aleman Zubieta, former chief executive of the Panama Canal Authority. "We need to quit looking at the poor as part of the problem, and know they want to be part of the process. We need to find the leaders to change things."

"There's a deficiency of knowledge, of history. We don't share knowledge," suggested Ken Salazar, former secretary of the Interior and U.S. senator from Colorado.

I was amazed and puzzled that there were no comments on the homeless and and very few on water, critical issues here and around the world.

Homelessness in the U.S. is most often caused by the economy. Abroad, the homeless are victims of natural disasters, wars, terrorism and other endless dangers.

Water supplies are shrinking everywhere with widespread drought, and pollution from industry and oil and gas drilling — which uses millions of gallons of water. Farmers have no water for crops and livestock. Seemingly there is no thoughtful protection for a diminishing and absolutely essential ingredient for the good life — or for life itself.

Applying the symposium's comments to metro Denver, I thought how decisions seem to increasingly be made for how much money a developer might make, not how a proposal would improve quality of life for residents, or fit into the city's master plan.

Or, as a reader wrote, "The Queen City of the Plains is turning into Los Angeles." Not progress.

Huffington's final question: "We all know what we should be doing. Why aren't we doing it?"

Why, indeed?

Joanne Ditmer's column on preservation and environmental issues began in The Denver Post in 1962.