The Environmental Defence Society (EDS), in conjunction with other environmental groups, wants to bring together individuals and organisations with widely divergent views to see if middle ground can be reached on issues facing the region and possible ways to resolve them.
The task is a mammoth one because those views vary from Forest and Bird, which wants a dryland park established in the region, through to developers, who want to see dairy farms and widespread irrigation, transforming parts of the semi-arid landscape.
Then there are those in the centre, who see the need for some development so the region remains economically viable but also recognise the need to preserve the landscape.
Today's field trip as a lead-in to tomorrow's symposium will take in Omarama and Tekapo and the Ohau and Mackenzie Basins, not just the Mackenzie Country, which locals see as ending around about Twizel or Lake Pukaki. South of there are the Ohau and Omarama Basins.
Mackenzie Basin communities tend to look to South Canterbury and Canterbury while Ohau and Omarama align with North Otago and Otago.
The symposium has already hit a snag, with some farmers planning to stay away, objecting to "outsiders" coming to tell them what to do when they have struggled for decades with little help trying to control wilding pines, rabbits and hieracium.
That was reflected by Federated Farmers Mackenzie branch chairman John Murray, who said this week: "We are fighting for our existence, both financially and environmentally. I reckon we have done a pretty good job looking after the place and it's a bit on the nose when others want to come and tell us what to do and that we haven't done a good job."
Federated Farmers national vice-president Donald Aubrey is refusing to attend, despite having initially been listed as one of a speakers.
Without many farmers, the symposium faces a difficult task.
In contrast, former Act New Zealand politician, Roxburgh farmer Gerry Eckhoff, has a different view: "While I can fully understand and agree with the sentiments expressed by them [farmers], I don't agree with the approach.
Farmers need to turn up in droves and exercise their opinions just as the EDS people will undoubtedly do."
A farmers' boycott would play into the hands of the environmental lobby and the Government.
Mr Eckhoff has registered and asked to speak, being allocated to a panel at the very end - "pathetic really, but something is better than nothing, I guess."
EDS executive director Gary Taylor said the symposium was not intended to impose views on anyone. One of the key issues in the Mackenzie Basin was tenure review, and he was keenly looking forward to hearing directly from those affected.
"In their absence, we will have to surmise," he said.
The symposium was a beginning, "not an end in itself", looking at the issues and starting a process.
That will be part of the difficulty because views on the issues are wide apart.
Forest and Bird wants conservation and recreational drylands parks, a halt to tenure review in the region, "proper protection" for landscape and biodiversity on pastoral leases and an end to "ecologically destructive land use changes". It opposes new irrigation in the basin.
However, farmers and others in the community see development as vital to retaining the economic viability of farms and communities.
Some, who have given up land under tenure review, need irrigation to make their farms economic.
At the extreme are developers who have proposed up to 16 new dairy farms, running almost 18,000 cows.