GREG MOODY / Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

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Charting a course

In tough times, there is a natural tendency to stop thinking about the big-picture future. Survival becomes the central theme.

After all, if one doesn't get through today, tomorrow doesn't really matter. All the plans in the world are worthless unless we get there to make them happen.

But those who make their living planning -- whether their expertise is transportation, financial or recreational -- say that sort of approach only prolongs tough times.

In other words, a lack of planning leads to a lack of doing. Across Northwest Arkansas, the planning, dreaming and hoping continues in and for all manner of concerns.

In this final chapter of our annual special report that appears each Sunday in February, we turn to those who have their feet planted in today and their eyes on tomorrow.

But it's not as if this penchant for thinking about tomorrow is a newly formed idea. Northwest Arkansas residents have watched for the better part of 80 years as dreamers and planners -- Tyson, Walton, Jones, Hunt and more -- unveiled their visions and reshaped our communities.

It takes a certain audacity to dream as big as those folks did, and that spirit continues in the dreamers and planners that followed them here. After all, could one have really expected that Northwest Arkansas and the companies that blossomed here would become as important to the national economy as population centers 10 times our size?

Dan Sanker believes that Northwest Arkansas will again be the center of change, this time in the "sustainability" movement. Sanker, president of CaseStack, a logistics and outsourcing company, moved his family and part of his company here to foster this sustainability, which is the idea that commerce and conservation can mix for a healthier economy and environment. Sanker is among business and civic leaders who believe Northwest Arkansas will someday be known as "Green Valley," something akin to California's Silicon Valley, only with companies delving into this conservation commerce as its core.

But Northwest Arkansas' dreamers aren't solely focused on the profit-and-loss sheet. Groups across the region are considering ways to improve our cultural, social and educational offerings.

Piggy-backing on the expected success of Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the folks who operate the region's smaller museums hope enthusiasm for the new, world-class gallery will spill over onto them. And further out into the woods, another group is working to revert our national forests so they more closely resemble the land as it looked when Europeans first settled here.

Changing the look of the forest may take decades, and building a new regional industry based on conservation may take years. And who knows how long it might take to put our national and regional economies back on track? But one thing is certain: All start with a plan.

- Chad Hayworth