JANIE LEASK: Good morning. In the interests of time we're going to go ahead and get started with this morning's program.

Welcome to Commonwealth North's early morning forum. Appreciate those of you who have gotten up and out and hit the streets this early in the morning. I'm Janie Leask, the manager of community relations for Alyeska Pipeline Service Company and president of the board of Commonwealth North.

Before we start today's program I would like to give the cell phone announcement. And for those of you who do have cell phones, please, either put them on silent or turn them off completely as a courtesy to those other guests in the room.

Today we have with us several participants from the Sixth Annual -- Malcolm, I can't believe that, Sixth Annual Talkeetna Dialogue. This is one of the first ones I think that I've missed.

And at this time I'm going to turn the program over to Malcolm Roberts. And Malcolm has been at every single one of them, organized them, kept everybody on track, and it's been a wonderful dialogue.

Malcolm is a senior fellow for the Institute of the North. And he's going to explain the purpose of the Dialogues, he's going to introduce the head table and then tell you about the format of today's program. So, please, help me welcome Malcolm Roberts.

MALCOLM ROBERTS: Well, thank you, Janie, and it's a great pleasure to be here. The Alaska Dialogues were started in 2000 and it was really a -- we were inspired by the Aspen Institute. Now how many of you have attended Aspen Institute events, anyone here? Oh, Mead (Treadwell) has, Ira (Perman), (Jordan) Marshall.

Our founder -- the Institute of the North's founder, Governor Hickel, for many years attended those events and was a close friend of Robert O. Anderson who was the chairman from 1963 to 1987 of the Aspen Institute. Anderson, as you probably all know, is the founder of Atlantic Richfield and was the head of it at the time of the discovery of Prudhoe Bay, has a long history with Alaska and is one of the people I really consider in America, even in his senior years, is a truly renaissance man.

And part of that broad thinking was his leadership of the Aspen Institute. And that Institute brings together leaders of government, labor and corporate America to get them to take a fresh look at the philosophies that undergird America, that should or do undergird corporate America and to look at public policy issues in a safe environment. And they created this safe environment by saying all right, we want you to come together, we want you to tackle this really tough issue, whatever it is, and there's going to be no attribution, there's going to be no one saying you said this idea, so it's a chance to come together and be creative about really tough issues.

And those of us at the Institute of the North felt that it was time that Alaska had a similar meeting place where we could in a nonpartisan way look at really tough issues that face us. But we're very distinct from the rest of the country and we should do it here. And we picked the Talkeetna Alaskan Lodge which I'm sure most of you know, it's really a fabulous spot looking out at Mount Denali, to look at some really tough issues.

And I'd like now just to quickly have everyone raise their hand who was at the Dialogue this year or has been to one in the past? All right. Okay. So about half of you know what it's all about. And I see Margie Brown just coming in and raising her hand, the head of CIRI who was our host at the lodge this year and was one of our sponsors.

And we started -- we've done a series of these Dialogues looking at really tough issues, why is Alaska so polarized and what can we do about it? Can we do anything about the age old war between environment and development?

And with the Aspen Institute's help we invited 20 senior environmentalists from around America to join us in Talkeetna to talk about Alaska's future. It so happened that was 2001 in September, it was right after the terrible events on the east coast so only nine were able to attend, but still it was a fascinating session.

And although we discovered there was no way we could agree about ANWR, we found a tremendous amount of support for natural gas and getting Alaska's natural gas to market. We found tremendous admiration for our fisheries management systems that Alaska's pioneered that are really the envy of the rest of the country. So we began to build some rapport there. Then we've looked at issues of sustainable communities, things that are very, very tough to talk about some ways in public.

And this year we tackled planning for the next boom and it was our most successful Dialogue, we had 117 people involved. And Duane Hyeman who is the former Executive Director of this organization said you've got to do a report this time and you've got to present it to Commonwealth North. So we've never done a report before, but you have one before you and we're honored to be here to present it.

And I have a number of the key presenters and participants in the Dialogue this year and I would like to start with one of our panel moderators, Gail Phillips, three times speaker of the House, Executive Director of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Council and a close friend, I'm sure, of all of your's. Gail, welcome.