"I've been in many situations where there's an old-time rancher in a room and he's not sure about all these 'greenies,' but after talking awhile everything comes out OK."

The conservation comes at projects with integrity and credibility, Barber said. "You don't end up in bloody battles and knockdown drag-out fights. They're just willing to do the work — to have a good project and have some land preserved at the end of he day.

"They are long-term in their planning focus," he said. The conservancy is currently involved in a major drive to protect the Colorado River corridor near Moab. It also is in the final stages of completing a new visitors center at the Great Salt Lake Shorelands Preserve, near Layton.

The next 20 years will be spent working on the next wave of concerns — and the Great Salt Lake is at the top of the list.

"They keep plugging away and plugging away," Barber said. "They know they're not going to do everything in one year, but they just keep plugging along."

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"Living in a desert, and this IS one, a beautiful desert, calls, I think, in the first place for a certain humility; a certain will to renounce some of the things that are possible elsewhere. It does call for adaptation to the terms the country enforces. It calls for a willingness to live sparsely because these are the terms of life. It calls for the sort of action that today's meeting celebrates, a willingness to leave some parts of nature, at least a sample, alone — to make room for the other creatures who share our living space and thereby, to make room for ourselves and to increase and improve our own living habitat." — Wallace Stegner, June 2, 1991, at a dedication of the Scott M. Matheson Wetlands Preserve.

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