Finding Pathways through Polarizing Times

By Ryan Golten

When people are in conflict over high-profile public issues, it can be difficult to imagine getting anywhere through face-to-face discussions, let alone to a tangible, durable resolution. And in our current climate, the idea of sitting down with your opponents to seek common ground on high-stakes issues can feel impossible.

It’s true that sitting down together under those conditions can be a tall order at best. Equally true is that once parties do, all manner of meaningful dialogue is possible. The first steps into thoughtful discussion and listening can be a giant leap, inspiring a sense of hope that people can solve problems together. Truthfully, this is a big deal: those in conflict can get to know one another, experience one another suddenly, as people rather than mere opinions, and talk about something that had seemed too explosive for meaningful dialogue.

This year, I saw how game-changing those first steps can be during an effort to address the complicated, polarizing issue of wolf restoration in Colorado. Gray wolves, native to Colorado, were hunted out of the state by the 1940s, but in 2020, the Colorado voters passed Proposition 114, which calls for the reintroduction of gray wolves in the western part of the state. The proposition passed narrowly: those who lived and worked where the wolves would be reintroduced—a minority of the state’s overall population—tended to vote against it. The divisions on the issue, then, matched the growing sense of polarization between the state’s urban and rural communities, the metropolitan front range and the western slope.

On the ranching side in particular, participants did not come into the process with much hope for success. The dominant mood was skepticism. Wolves were coming their way no matter what, and they would just have to live with the predation on their livestock and the costs imposed on them, in their view, by the voters from the population centers of the state. Meanwhile, those in favor of wolf reintroduction had seen it work, at least to some extent, in northern and farther western states (Washington, Oregon, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho), and they believed it could work here with the right policy, planning, and management. Many reintroduction advocates believed ranchers were just dragging their feet, avoiding change, and even trying to sabotage the program. 

Once wolves began to kill livestock, the simmering conflict exploded – in the news, on social media, in legal requests to the state for document disclosures, between community members and state agency staff, and within rural communities themselves. The growing conflict implicated legislators, the Governor’s administration, and all levels of state government. Most Coloradans soon had a vehement opinion depending on where they lived and got their news.

The state decided it was time to try to bring down the temperature and find a way through the conflict. My fellow mediator Dan Birch and I started with a simple plan for three meetings, involving a small group of eight key stakeholders representing ranching and wildlife interests, plus top-level agency officials. The hardest part was creating a safe way for the invited members of the ranching and advocacy community to participate while: 1) maintaining credibility with their own constituencies; 2) setting sideboards that gave the group a clear purpose and scope; and 3) minimizing conspiracy theories about what it was up to, given the level of public scrutiny involved. 

With that structure established, conversations started, and things began to happen. What was initially supposed to be three meetings turned into more because—finally—people were talking face-to-face about the issues, listening to one another, and, after working at times through tears and frustration, brainstorming about ways to address the conflict. The group’s substantive discussions quickly broke through the urban-rural divide that so often polarizes us. The group got there simply by sitting at the table together for a half day at a time, month after month, having honest and personal conversations about an incredibly difficult and divisive issue. The group always broke bread together, too, and at one meeting, we got in UTVs and toured one of the member’s ranches together. Always we asked people to be honest with each other, and they were. This would have been hard to imagine six months earlier.

Colleagues of mine have seen similar turns, with dramatic results, even at the intensely polarized national level. CBI’s David Fairman facilitated conversations between Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress, in the wake of January 6th, 2021—a time of severe partisan division. The goal was to help the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, which was made up equally of Democrats and Republicans. After carefully structured conversations, emphasizing listening to and acknowledging one another’s perspectives, the committee found ways to move ahead and become, as Amanda Ripley noted in the Washington Post, “one of the most high-functioning bipartisan workplaces on Capitol Hill.”

In contentious conflicts, just getting people talking, listening, and trusting one another can be a profound achievement. With the wolf restoration work group in Colorado, our goal was to bring down the temperature on a divisive subject so that better collaboration could be possible—without giving the parties reason to go to their respective corners to defend their positions and think the worst of their opponents. If a major recommendation or decision had resulted too quickly, media attention could very well have cranked up the temperature, intensifying divisiveness. Instead, we fundamentally needed to establish that people on different sides of the issue were capable of sitting together and talking. Once they were able to share their hopes, fears, and experiences with one another, tough as that sometimes was, common ground and real ideas quickly followed. All of this contributes to a growing sense that a solution might be possible. 

Through this work, we’ve seen that once people are talking, there’s a chance to nurture a more hopeful future. This hopeful turn matters. It can mean a broader shift in thinking, the kind that arises when relationships are built (even modestly) and possibilities emerge (however small) like light through a crack in a door shut tight.