In September 2008, New England's governors established a blue-ribbon Commission on Land Conservation to identify the most urgent land-conservation issues facing New England today and provide recommendations to the governors in September 2009. New England faces profound threats to its land and natural-resource base. As the nation urbanizes further, efforts to re-create elsewhere what New England has long enjoyed come at a time when their own qualities of the landscape are in peril. This is a critical time to engage the next generation of citizens of New England, to care about their future landscape and quality of place as an active duty of citizenship. A series of forums with concerned citizens across New England convinced the commission that New England may once again lead the nation, this time through a "collaborative partnership" among the public, private and non-governmental actors that are vital to land conservation in the 21st Century. The collaborative strategy that they propose is enabled by new technologies that allow much-improved cross-boundary analysis. The commission offers five recommendations on which to build a conservation legacy for future generations: (1) Keep Forests as Forests; (2) Keep Farmlands in Farming; (3) Connect People to the Outdoors; (4) Protect Wildlife Habitat; and (5) Safeguard Coastal and Estuarine Lands.