Robert Frost, who spent his boyhood in Lawrence, wrote famously that "something there is that doesn't love a wall" in his classic poem about austere New Englanders believing good fences make good neighbors. He was ahead of his time.

Now come two experts on the life and ways of America to also challenge this barrier mentality, predicting the region will end up in the economic doldrums unless the historic walls that separate towns, cities and states come crumbling down in a spirit of wider cooperation.

Urbanologists-cum-journalists Neal Peirce and Curtis Johnson spent the last three years crisscrossing Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut and Rhode Island in search of answers to the combined loss of people and good-paying jobs since the 1990s. They interviewed more than 500 individuals.

Today, in this section, they discuss what they found and why attitudes need to change because 21st-century technology has made all corners of America more reliant on each other, and those regions that share costly resources are destined to prosper.

In places like the South and West, regionwide school, police, fire, water and sewer departments are commonplace. There is none of this every-town-for-itself pride that dates to our Colonial forebears and costs dearly in tax dollars to perpetuate.

"The islands of time and space that once separated this lovely corner of America from the maelstrom of global reality are gone," Peirce and Johnson conclude.

"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." Or the disappearance of the telecommunications industry from the Merrimack Valley in the last decade.

Peirce and Johnson are not doomsday chroniclers. They are tough researchers who understand the gestalt of numbers and demographics, what's important to calculating the impact of cumulative change on a geographic region. They have done extensive national studies on what works and what doesn't to create blended success.

Their warnings and solutions should waft like a siren song in the suburbs north of Boston. We are inextricably tied to the fate of the city and its metropolitan rhythms that reverberate from Providence to Worcester to Portland. Collaboration makes economic sense.

Yet local cities and towns share few services and facilities. The few regional school systems that exist in sparsely populated towns struggle to stay together. Even mosquito-control districts can't gather support. A spirit of harmony barely exists for such modest conveniences as parks and beaches, and never mind the more complicated issues of police and fire services.

Economic factors could force change. With the price of energy surging toward sky-high levels and uncontrollable costs associated with health care and pensions moving in the same direction, communities may find taxpayers so strapped that sharing fundamental municipal services is the only way to adequately provide them.

Mercifully, the structure exists to get people around. Regional transportation authorities function in the Merrimack Valley and on the North Shore, providing bus and train service between cities and towns, and into Boston. But even they could be expanded and improved for efficiency and to save money.

Deep down in our New England heart is a lack of conviction that collaboration can be helpful, and responsive to the needs of local residents. This attitude continues even as suburban sprawl and the high cost of living stretches the distances we travel to work, to shop, to play and to worship.

Evangelists for cooperation like Peirce and Johnson know we have lived so long with this subconscious thought that they set out to clearly define the obstacles to growth resulting from this go-it-alone tradition. More importantly, they have suggested ways to fix our deficiencies and reverse the frightful trend toward population loss, talent drain and income divide between the haves and the have nots.

In addition to today's report, Eagle-Tribune newspapers will publish further stories about the Peirce and Johnson study monthly through March. Subsequent chapters will deal with how to stop the flight of our youth, the opportunities in education, energy sources of the future, interstate teamwork and the revolution in health care.

Robert Frost had no idea what New England would look like in the 21st century when he penned "Mending Wall" so many years ago. But the homey message of that poem rings true today. "Before I built a wall," Frost wrote, "I'd ask to know what was it walling in or walling out?"

That's a question that requires an answer in cities and towns across the region.

William B. Ketter is editor-in-chief of the Eagle-Tribune newspapers. He can be contacted at bketter@eagletribune.com or (978) 946-2233.