These articles are the kickoff of a New England Futures Project aimed at identifying key 21st century challenges facing the six-state region. Citizen reaction and participation, leading to a shared regional agenda, are key to the project. Your input is welcome at www.newenglandfutures.org. Journalists Neal Peirce and Curtis Johnson have reported for newspapers on the unique strategic issues facing two dozen metropolitan regions nationwide. Peirce is a syndicated columnist (Washington Post Writers Group) who also has written two books on New England. Johnson is a public policy analyst and a former community college president and Minnesota government official. They co-authored the book “Citistates.”

Are New England’s best days behind it? Is it fated to be an old, blue, cold and complacent corner of a red-hot America?

Some indicators suggest so. The six states are barely holding their own in population; Massachusetts is actually slipping backward. Each year the merger mania of big companies seems to snap up a famed New England corporation – a Hancock, Fleet or Gillette – only scrappy fights stem closure of the region’s principal military bases, an anchor of its long-standing defense economy. Despite the remarkable surge of biotech research and corporate spinoffs in the Boston region, the overall economic growth rate is anemic.

Check around New England, as we have in hundreds of interviews over the past three years, and you sense little of the dynamism of the American South and West. The region’s congressional strength is dwindling, and it won no favors in Republican-led Washington with its six-state sweep for John Kerry in 2004. Right now, states like Massachusetts and Connecticut look strong in national rankings of education and income, but the trend lines are down as competitors nip at their heels.

But is decline inevitable?

We argue “no.” This is a region with stupendous assets. It has smart and resourceful people, great places to live, world-famed universities, lively self-governance, and a leading edge in critical 21st century technology skill sets. It’s attached at the hip to metropolitan New York, a linchpin of the national (and global) economy.

New England’s environmental consciousness, its tradition of political independence and self-reliance, suggest character and strength, whether capitalizing on good times or coping with disasters. And in a nation being engulfed by faceless cookie-cutter development, the images of New England seascapes, farmlands and hills, the region’s historic towns and cities, tug at heartstrings, generate envy across the continent.

So what stands in New England’s way?

The region’s own mindset, we suggest. New Englanders themselves are first to tell one what a hopelessly disjointed, every-town and every-state-for-itself region they live in. The attitude we heard everywhere: “Our towns go back to 1630 or before, our states almost as far; we’ve done fine each town or state going its own way, so why collaborate now?”

Each time we heard that, we wondered to ourselves: “What century do these folks believe we’re in?” The islands of time and space that once separated this lovely corner of America from the maelstrom of global reality are gone. No more waiting decades, if not centuries, to recover from such crises as the rise and fall of clipper ships, or the flight of textiles to the American South, or the loss of high-tech eminence from Route 128 to Silicon Valley.

The region must sink or swim in an era of instant global communications, finance and warfare. It faces profound peril from likely storms and floods intensified by global warming, from energy shortages and terrorism that respect no borders. It can expect little help from an increasingly debt-ridden and war-distracted national government.

Historically New Englanders have innovated, thought anew to reposition themselves for new eras’ challenges. But in these years when precedent-shattering collaborations for survival and progress are being forged around the world, is New England in the game?

Is there matching New England effort, for example, to the inventiveness of the European Union? Nations torn for centuries by bitter and bloody warfare have made remarkable progress through a common passport and currency (the euro). Plus, they’re working very closely together on such issues as energy, transportation and special help for ailing countries and regions.

Couldn’t the six states of New England, “divided only by a common language,” be as inventive? With its wealth of talent, what better region in America to mount team approaches to energy, education, transportation, health care? We discovered some highly creative networking – grassroots groups impatient to move ahead on “green” energy initiatives, to compare notes across state lines on “smart growth” strategies, to measure progress and set goals in every area from job growth to health to housing. They’re impatient to see how their communities, and New England as a whole, are performing, and might excel.

If that kind of fresh thinking means reversing 400 years of New England “I’ll take care of myself” stoniness, so be it! Conservative grassroots organizing altered American politics in recent years. The Howard Dean presidential campaign and a flurry of activist “dot org” groups have disrupted old top-down ways of doing things. Citizen-backed nonprofit groups, linked by the Internet, may be poised for major impact.

Amazingly often, we found, “official” New England lends a tin ear to fresh ideas and initiatives, even when they come from prominent regionwide organizations. The congressional delegation focuses sporadically, at best, on New England-specific issues.

The New England Governors Conference meets infrequently, doesn’t even emulate groups like the Western Governors Association with a shared research staff to analyze challenges and propose strategies. Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney actually withdrew Massachusetts from the conference, purportedly to save dues.

The result for New England: one missed opportunity after another. Consider tourism, a “clean,” multibillion dollar, job-generating industry that also draws potential future residents. It’s true: many visitors do now flood into Vermont, Cape Cod and the Maine coast. But overall, New England tourism is underdeveloped. Yankee Magazine underscores the region’s potential draw: more than half of its subscribers live outside the region. A national survey by the business-led Team New England group found outsiders have a higher positive image of New England as a whole than any of its individual states. Yet the six states keep going their own way, refusing to promote New England jointly – except to foreign markets.

And if the states have a tough time making common cause, it seems even tougher for New England towns to drop their prickly go-it-alone mindsets and collaborate for mutual gain. Though when they do, the gains can be big.

Take Maine’s twinned, historically cantankerous cities of Lewiston and Auburn facing each other across the Androscoggin River. They’re collaborating creatively to rebuild economies devastated by the loss of textile and shoe factories. Old downtown mill buildings are being handsomely restored, arts, culture and health care are thriving, new industries have been recruited, and the cities have concluded 23 intercity service agreements. Leaders of these historic rivals hurry to tell visitors, with immense pride, of how much they’ve gained, how much more confidence they feel, as a result of working closely together.

And they’re not alone. “New England’s Knowledge Corridor,” a first-ever Springfield- and Hartford-rooted development alliance of businesses and famed Connecticut River Valley universities, is striving to make inroads against the big psychological barrier of the Connecticut-Massachusetts border.

Rhode Island has largely abandoned its selfish “Mass Exodus” campaign to snitch jobs from the neighboring Bay State. Instead it now affirms, even advertises, its identity as the southern anchor of the Greater Boston citistate with its amazing pool of universities and entrepreneurial networks. There’s really no longer any such thing as a separate Rhode Island economy, says Rhode Island economic development leader Kip Bergstrom. “We’re a lot better off defining ourselves as part of an integrated metro area with 8 million people, instead of a separate place of 1 million,” Bergstrom said.

But scattered islands of collaboration need to grow if New England is to deal with tough economic perils:

. Population loss. In the 1990s, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Maine all saw more people move out than in. Today, even as national population levels surge forward, New Hampshire (fed by Massachusetts migrants) is the only New England state showing appreciable increase.

Does stagnant population matter? The answer is yes: Taxes are higher for the people left. Fewer people mean a smaller work force, a red flag to any corporation deciding where to locate or expand. The resulting danger, says Doug Fisher of Northeast Utilities, is “loss of vibrancy and hope.”

. Talent shortage. This emergency was cloaked in the 1990s, when foreigners accounted for all of New England’s labor force growth. Without the immigrants who came to get a New England university education, the region today would have a critical shortage of physicians and skilled laboratory researchers.

But post-Sept. 11 security concerns have thrown a shadow over the immigrant welcome mat, for the skilled and unskilled alike.

Even with foreign enrollment, the count of students earning scientific, engineering and information technology degrees in New England universities – the lifeblood of the region’s vaunted high-tech economy – actually declined in the 1990s.

. Flight of youth. Even while New England “grays” faster than any other U.S. region, its young people are fleeing to the Atlantas and Phoenixes of America. New England lost a stunning 20 percent – twice the U.S. average – of its 20-to-34 year-olds in the last decade.

. Deep income divisions. There are millions of financially secure New Englanders – but also disturbing numbers, native or immigrant, caught in distressed mill towns, remote rural areas or troubled inner cities, unprepared to prosper or contribute without dramatically broadened education and community-building initiatives.

. New England is high-cost country – to live, and to do business. Decent incomes are offset by high housing, transportation and energy costs. And businesses constantly cite thickets of rules and regulations imposed by the six states’ 3,700 local governments – raising the cost of everything they do.

In a recent report for the New England Council, the nationally-known consulting firm of A.T. Kearney reported that measured by cost of living, New England’s current level of prosperity is only average in the United States. “Boston and expensive are all too frequently uttered in the same breath,” it observed, pinpointing high wages and housing costs, taxes and utility rates.

In Team New England’s survey of business executives from outside the region, 27 percent volunteered they’d never do business in New England at all, preferring areas with lower taxes, energy and housing costs and a growing work force. As one of the survey’s sponsors lamented: “New England’s image is of a costly, tightly regulated historic theme park, (and by the way bring a parka!)”

So what’s to be done? In this series, we’ll identify challenges that can best – or only – be solved when New England starts acting like a team, faces the world as a coherent entity, like a single state.

November 2005: Take the offense on energy. The days of easy-come oil and gas are fast-disappearing. Imagine a coordinated New England energy security strategy that pushes hard to assure outside supplies but also focuses on smart self-help – conservation, developing bio-fuels, wind farms, building efficient new “green” buildings, retrofitting old ones.

December 2005: Play a smart new education card. New England, America’s Athens, faces fierce university competition, from Chapel Hill to Bangalore. Tuitions are soaring, attendance is static, public universities undernourished. Why not imagine all New England as one great campus, with a radical new way for students (local or across the world) to tailor their own New England education, in classroom or online?

January 2006: Growth gamble. Even as New England hemorrhages youth – the seed corn of its future – many towns resist families with school-age kids. Simultaneously, sprawl development imperils the region’s world-signature countryside. But six-statewide actions could avert what demographers see as “slow economic suicide.”

February 2006: Connect to compete. To compete, New England needs border-to-border broadband – soon. And to score, it must turn earliest-possible attention to glaring deficiencies in its transportation system – roads, rail, air, water and interconnections.

March 2006: Health – consumer as captain. New England’s teaching hospitals and laboratories are world-famed. But high-tech medicine alone is failing to deliver healthy lives. Prescription: a New England-wide agenda to make consumers co-healers with their doctors, computer-based scorecards on results, a big push for healthy lifestyles.

Can New England conceivably pull together to face its 21st century priorities? No choice, as we see it. Or as our friend, the late, great civic leader John W. Gardner put it: “What we have before us are some breathtaking opportunities disguised as insoluble problems.”

The sponsoring Partnership for New England includes the Vermont-based Institute for Sustainable Communities (which will coordinate follow-up public debates across the region), the New England Council, the New England Initiative at UMass Lowell, Mt. Auburn Associates, the New England Association of Regional Councils, and the Orton Family Foundation. Financial backing comes from community foundations in all six states, the Bank of America Foundation and others (full list at the Web site).