Michael Last founded the Santa Fe Council for Environmental Excellence in 1991 in order to provide an innovative forum for conflict resolution with respect to environmental and sustainability issues by bringing together historically contending constituencies, including government, industry, environmental advocacy organizations and academics.

Each program sponsored by the Santa Fe Council involves a retreat-style setting attended by no more than twenty-five participants representing each of the interested sectors. In order to encourage creative thinking and consensus building, the program utilizes an innovative format which starts out on the first day with a round table discussion to explore the topic being discussed.

Not surprisingly, the participants often encounter roadblocks which are created by their respective perceptive sets and the way they have traditionally approached the problem being discussed. These barriers frequently stand in the way of more creative communication and group problem solving.

On the second day, the formal discussions are temporarily set aside in favor of a day outdoors led by John Stokes, an internationally recognized tracker/naturalist, which emphasizes enhanced awareness and offers the opportunity for the participants to communicate informally with each other.

This enables the participants to set aside the more fixed agendas of the first day; to expand their awareness; to suspend more adversarial stands; and to share informally with each other.

Then, on the third day, the group reconvenes in a conference setting, considers what they experienced and drew from the second day outdoors, and then starts to apply the insights and inspiration gained to the problem at hand.

Invariably, there is much greater willingness to listen openly to each other, and to embrace new ideas, since there is considerably enhanced trust and a shared belief that all parties are trying to work together for common solutions.

The key, as is the case in more traditional mediation/facilitation approaches, is to move beyond conventional ways of looking at the problem at hand and to work together to think outside the “box”.

The Santa Fe Council’s approach is aptly characterized in the following excerpt from a newspaper article describing the Santa Fe Council’s Fall, 1993 program, which appeared in the November, 1993 Albuquerque Tribune:

“Participants included such diverse folks as oil industry executives, environmental activists, a public radio broadcaster, three American Indian elders, a literature professor, government bureaucrats, an official from the WIPP site in Carlsbad and a former member of a girls street gang.

Just the right combination for an old-fashioned brawl, right? Wrong.

No, at council gatherings something really radical takes place – people listen to each other.

Joseph Broz, an executive with the Houston-based Tenneco Gas company, marveled at the fact that for three days people with such different views were able to talk with each other ‘without anyone going off the rails.’

‘I was struck by the openness and atmosphere,’ Broz notes, crediting Last for skillfully shepherding the group through thickets of potentially explosive disagreement.”