About the O'Connor Center
The O’Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West serves as a nonpartisan and trusted clearinghouse to help decision makers, stakeholders and the general public understand key issues in the Interior Rocky Mountain West of North America. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the OCRMW seeks to use scholarly and science-based approaches to convey the cultural, social, historical, economic, ecological, and climate-driven forces that influence the region’s remarkable landscapes and human communities. These efforts include a diversity of voices across the region.
Principles and Values
- This mountainous, trans-national region of the Rocky Mountains is unique and requires special attention and study as a region.
- Understanding the region’s cultural and natural history and diversity is essential to having a clear and shared regional identity.
- Regional awareness, knowledge, and perspective are essential in understanding our past and present condition and in visualizing future trends and directions.
- True and lasting economic, social, and environmental health for the regions and communities can only be found in scenarios that provide for the careful use and protection of the region’s air, water, and land resources.
- An optimistic belief in the future of the Rocky Mountain West.