Fire and Fuels

Yes, we could move everyone out of the Interior West, I suppose, and hope that climate change would bow out long enough to return to “natural” fire regimes denaturalized by climate change, but that doesn’t seem very realistic. Other folks are dealing with making their communities fire resilient and working on evacuation.

Those of us who observed the Marshall Fire in Boulder County, Colorado, noticed what seemed to be a tension between current urban/suburban planning ideas (densification and taking public transportation) and dealing with wildfire (houses further apart and individual vehicles for evacuation). Meanwhile people like living where they do. This extensive article from the Colorado Springs Gazette talks about efforts to plan better for wildfire evacuations and also touches upon mitigation treatments. It’s interesting to me that fuel treatments don’t seem to be controversial here.. for one thing timber industry doesn’t make a good enemy, and most of these projects are on private forest land.

There’s quite a bit of interest in this article. I think you can get it without a paywall here, but if not, please let me know.  You might also be able to get it here.  It’s interesting as we’ve been discussing climate change and prescribed fires, how this reporter characterizes the “equilibrium”.

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Whereas a metric like the Forest Service’s “burn probability” estimates the likelihood that an area will burn in a wildfire, but does so without regard to where people might be affected, “exposure” shows where wildfire risk collides with communities.

Within the Forest Service’s five-state Rocky Mountain Region, Evergreen has the highest exposure risk. The second- and third-highest-risk areas in the region are the planning zones that occupy the rest of the Front Range between Evergreen and Colorado Springs. In El Paso County, the high-risk areas include Manitou Springs, the Ridgecrest area northeast of Garden of the Gods, and the Broadmoor neighborhood. Although their populations are smaller, some pockets closer to Boulder and Fort Collins also show high risk, around Estes Park and Cripple Creek and north of Lyons.

Population data from the U.S. Census Bureau, combined with geospatial roadway data from Open Street Maps, shows that more than 35,000 residents — not accounting for seasonal or weekend visitors — in the state’s highest exposure area, in Evergreen, have only a few possible evacuation routes, putting the number of people per lanes of egress routes near or above the number in Paradise, Calif., where residents burned in their cars trying to evacuate, depending on the particulars of a future fire’s location and behavior. Estimates that include more of the outlying areas put the possible evacuation total as high as 60,000 people for the area.

A computer program designed to simulate evacuations, called the Fast Local Emergency Evacuation Times Model (FLEET), operated by Old Dominion University in Virginia, similarly shows the Evergreen area has the longest evacuation time for wildfire-prone parts of the state.

Roxborough Park and Woodland Park are not far behind Evergreen, either for computer-simulated evacuation times or the simpler people-per-lane of evacuation rates ratio.

“There’s a heightened awareness of the wildfire danger here,” Chuck Newby, a resident of South Evergreen who was recently elected to the Elk Creek Fire Board in the southwest portion of the larger Evergreen area.

Conversations he’s had with other residents, he said, are more and more often about evacuations.

“After seeing the Camp Fire, East Troublesome, Marshall, these major fires,” Newby said, “you have people asking what would happen? What would happen if this happened here? What would I do?”

The buzz, flutter and gurgle of chainsaws pierced an otherwise calm June afternoon, emanating from the home of Rich Mancuso, in the Echo Hills neighborhood near the center of Evergreen.

Mancuso, who grew up in Staten Island, N.Y., and moved to Evergreen in 1980, watched as the crew from Lam Tree Services strategically felled trees on his property and prepared them for disposal.

Mancuso said he had his property’s vegetation thinned in order to keep his homeowners’ insurance, after his agent told him about the company’s new approach to proper fire mitigation in the high-risk area.

“They told us to do it,” Mancuso said, “or they would cancel our policy.”

The science behind mitigating fire-prone vegetation echoes the natural cycle of wildland fire and puts a mirror to the now broadly panned fire-suppression strategy of forest management deployed in the West for more than a century.

Without human intervention, wildfires burn through forests, destroying saplings but sparing the oldest and largest trees, which has the multiple effects of re-nutrifying the soil, clearing space around and strengthening the bark of the forests’ largest trees, and helping new seeds take root. The sparser forest left behind is healthier overall, and less susceptible to larger fires that spread through the forest canopy instead of closer to the ground.

In the American West, however, the longstanding forest management that favored rapid fire suppression led to forests that are denser than they would be naturally, making fires more intense and harder to fight.

Forest management practices have begun to move toward allowing the natural fire cycle to play out, but it’s estimated that millions of acres of forests in the western U.S. would need to see small-scale fires that naturally restore forest health, in order to get back to equilibrium — a dangerous prospect, given the proclivity of the forests to burn more intensely, because of the misguided policies of the past.

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And a quote from FS retiree Bernie Weingardt

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The Evergreen Fire Protection District’s wildfire protection plan, updated in 2020, includes a roadway analysis that estimates “non-survivable” evacuation routes are spread throughout the area, meaning the roads risk putting drivers adjacent to 8-foot or larger flames, based on the fuels along the roads.

Bernie Weingardt, an Evergreen resident who worked for the U.S. Forest Service for 37 years, said the report told him and other residents what they had long suspected.

“They ran the simulations on it, and in Evergreen, you see it will bottleneck really fast,” Weingardt said. “Just a normal day out here, with everyday traffic, you have cars backed up at the main intersections. So the small roads feeding into the main arteries, they’ll end up gridlocked, with traffic backed up into the neighborhoods.”

The plan goes on to show where traffic-pattern analysis suggests congestion could form, based on the roadway capacity and number of possible evacuees.

“If high congestion and non-survivable roadway are in the same place,” the plan explains, “there is a high risk to life safety.”

The plan’s introduction nods to the most prominent example of such conditions, when the Camp fire devastated Paradise, Calif.: “Failed communication, poor evacuation routes, and unmitigated vegetation were all contributing factors in the 83 casualties that took place in November 2018.”

Having perused perhaps zillions of news stories since the inception of TSW, I would have a request of media folks for the betterment of understanding, dialogue, and all that. Please use the word “some”! As in “some” foresters think, “some” ecologists think and so on. I know that’s difficult because it raises the question “what do the other ones think?” I can safely say that in no group with which I’ve been affiliated, that means, my scientific discipline, my professional society, the Forest Service, and our retirees’ organizations… does everyone agree.. pretty much about anything. This thought was triggered by this article on the old “PB vs. mechanical treatments” discussion. This article tends to highlight the “scientists know best and they want PB” view.

Forest restoration versus wildfire mitigation
At its core, the debate between thinning and prescribed fire is one of purpose.

Thinning can achieve what it is intended to do, which is reduce wildfire risk, but it cannot be a replacement for fire and does not address forest restoration, said Bill Baker, an emeritus professor of ecology at the University of Wyoming who wrote the book “Fire Ecology in Rocky Mountain Landscapes.”

“If the goal is restoration, the problem mechanical thinning has is that we don’t have a very good understanding of what those forests really looked like, historically,” he said.

(some) Ecologists believe that mixed conifer and ponderosa pine forests evolved a particular organization called the “ICO structure.” ICO stands for individual, clumps and openings, meaning that forests evolved to have areas with gaps between individual trees, areas where trees of different sizes were clumped closely together and openings where there were no trees.

That structure represented a “healthy” forest.

But after European colonization and the drastic reshaping of the West’s forests, in part for timber production, ecologists and forest managers have little sense of what that looked like locally in Southwest Colorado’s forests.

Of course, there are differences about the whole concept of “forests” evolving. We know species evolve, but there are basically two schools of thought. 1. Species come together through space and time and evolve genetically as they perceive the environment. This could be called the Dynamic Species Assemblages point of view 2. There is a correct way of which species are there interacting, which I think either goes back to holism or some other philosophy, which would be interesting to discuss. Whatever it is, without a mechanism, it’s not science even if scientists talk about it, seemingly authoritatively.

I don’t know about the “drastic reshaping” of Colorado’s forests for timber production. Trees don’t grow very fast in most of Colorado; hence people cut them down at various times in the last 100 years (for mining or railroads or fuel) or so and they may not have had time to grow back to timber-ish size.

This story, developed by Searchlight New Mexico can be found in Rolling Stone and the Guardian US among other outlets.

It touches upon the history of the land grants of New Mexico, as well as issues of how the Forest Service works with local people, and indeed the role of local people in managing federal forests.

In today’s fire zone, the descendants of the dispossessed are among the Forest Service’s sharpest critics. They are joined in their distress by villagers, small-scale farmers, loggers, foragers of traditional food and medicine, Indigenous peoples and acequia parciantes, caretakers of the age-old irrigation ditches now compromised by flames. The USFS has fallen short of its commitment to the land and those who live alongside it, they say.

As the conflagration whips through public and private lands – as of 6 June, burning nearly 500 sq miles – anger, frustration and grief define the tenor at public forums, in evacuation centers and on social media. Some locals say that, if given the chance, they would have practiced far more sustainable forest thinning in partnership with the USFS, thereby lessening the impacts of a catastrophic fire. Others criticize the way fire crews heavily relied on backburning, a fire-suppression tactic that involves starting smaller fires to deprive a larger wildfire of fuel.

And yet, is it also possible that some ENGO’s, perhaps with a mesic-against-corporate-logging mentality, were partially responsible for these policies (thinning is really logging in disguise, etc.) To what extent are these folks recolonized by the Coastal view of how forests “should be” managed? Does our current “policies based on litigation” system disenfranchise some voices?

The forests belong to the people, as San Miguel county commissioner Janice Varela puts it.

“We locals, we feel like, hell yes, it’s our forest,” says Varela, a longtime water activist. “Yeah, we let the forest service manage it and we let everybody in the world come here, but it’s our forest. We have ownership from our proximity to it, from our history and cultural connection to it, from our heart.”

If we feel sympathy with those folks, would we equally feel sympathy with folks from “red” counties in other States? Is it because of their party affiliation (we all know that R’s are Bundys-waiting-to-happen) or because of their historical claims? And of course, what historical claims do we think are valid, and on what basis? And how does this fit with the concept of “environmental justice”?

There are concerns about the use of backburning..

Back-burning, however, has caused the greatest enmity. To fight ferocious blazes, wildland firefighters are trained to set small back fires to burn grasses and other tinder, starving the larger blaze of fuel.

In Mora, back-burns were set without private property lines in mind, says Patrick Griego, the owner of a small logging business who stayed behind to protect his property. He saw several of his neighbors’ lands get back-burned and, determined to save his 400 acres (162 hectares) from a similar fate, cut an extensive fire line with his grader. The wildfire was still distant, he says. To his shock, wildland firefighters appeared one night and back-burned a swath of his property anyway. He recalls watching, seething and feeling helpless, as they set his land on fire. The flames shot 30 feet high in places. Forty acres (16 hectares) were gone in 15 minutes, he says.

“I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to say.” He calls the people who set the back-burn “arsonists”.

 
More history…

The ever-present past

Recovering from the fire will depend to a certain extent on extinguishing pain from the past. And the past can seem omnipresent in northern New Mexico.

Over the past 60 years, intense conflicts have erupted over how the USFS has managed the forests, limiting people’s ability to graze livestock, hunt for food and repair acequia headwaters. Some of the protests are still talked about.

In 1966, land-grant activists occupied part of the Carson national forest, declaring that the land had been appropriated; a year later, they carried out an infamous armed raid on the Tierra Amarilla Courthouse, attempting to win the release of fellow activists.

Even a casual conversation in the fire zone can suddenly pivot to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which promised – and failed – to protect the rights of land-grantees and allow them to keep their commons.

Today, almost one-quarter of the Carson and Santa Fe national forests are made up of former land-grant commons. In other parts of the state – in a district of the Cibola national forest, for example – a staggering 60% is made up of these commons, research shows.

The forest service has taken local needs into account, spokesperson Overton wrote in an email. For example, people with permits are allowed to cut firewood in designated areas, she notes. Many employees of the Santa Fe national forest are members of the community, she adds. “They grew up here, they have the same ties to community and cultural heritage as their neighbors.”

But today, this offers little comfort. Pola Lopez can still remember how her father, the late state senator Junio Lopez, made it his life’s mission to reunite the dispossessed with their land. He was unable to produce wide-scale change, however, and the purchase of the 157 acres (64 hectares) now blackened by the fire was a kind of consolation prize. That land, his daughter says, “became his sanctuary”.

In 2009, Pola had the property designated a conservation easement, to protect the forest from development for what she thought was perpetuity.

Now, the willows and scrubby oak are razed and the stream that once flooded the banks of the canyon are completely desiccated. But Lopez is most brokenhearted by the loss of the old-growth forest, the “grandfather trees”, as she calls them. Some were scorched so badly that only holes full of ash remain.

Many thanks to Anonymous for linking to this paper comparing what is known about health effects from wildfire compared to prescribed fire smoke.  I think it’s interesting how this recently became popular to study; it illustrates that absence of evidence was not evidence of absence. It was just a function of who is holding the science flashlight and funding.  This study was funded by the American Lung Association.  It also points to programs of interest to those who breath wildfire and prescribed fire smoke, which can be many of us as the summer sets in. It also makes us, of course, even more concerned about wildland firefighters’ exposure.

Here’s the prescribed fire part of the summary.

Page 6 | Summary
Prescribed fires are implemented under planned, predictable circumstances where additional measures can be taken to minimize exposures. While there are existing regulations, guidelines and long–term land management practices in place that aim to minimize the smoke impacts from prescribed fire, expanded prescribed fire activities should be coupled with additional policies and best practices to mitigate potential harmful smoke exposure. Effective prescribed fire policies and best practices should include consideration of: fuel type and loadings; ambient air quality levels; potential for air quality standard exceedances; proximity to residential communities and vulnerable populations; the availability of advanced warning and notification systems; more comprehensive air monitoring efforts; and forecasting tools for use in fire management planning. Additionally, future policies should encourage strategies to further mitigate potentially harmful impacts from prescribed fire smoke, such as: (1) improved prescribed fire management planning by conducting more air quality monitoring during burn activities and expanding prescribed fire reporting and public notification; (2) utilization and/or further development of tools to forecast potential prescribed fire impacts; and (3) implementation of interventions and other mitigation efforts that reduce exposures, such as portable air cleaners and residential heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, among others.

Further research is needed to evaluate comparative risks of prescribed fire smoke and wildfire. Research focused on the comparative health risks of prescribed fire and wildfire is currently very limited. Future research on the air quality and health impacts of biomass smoke should include an assessment of the health impacts from prescribed fire smoke.

The below is about “Smoke-Ready Communities” an EPA program:

The “Smoke–Ready Community” framework also provides a comprehensive approach to prepare communities for wildfire and ultimately reduce harms to public health and safety. As defined by the U.S. EPA, a Smoke–Ready Community is a community: (1) with public buildings equipped with filtration for fire smoke; (2) whose residents understand the health risks associated with smoke exposure and can readily access tools to protect their health; and (3) with available resources aimed to help those most vulnerable to smoke exposures (McGown, 2020; U.S. EPA, 2018).

Additionally, the U.S. EPA provides a “Smoke–Ready Toolbox” to prepare fire–prone communities for wildfire smoke events (U.S. EPA, 2018). This toolbox provides information, trainings and measures the public can use to understand and reduce potential health risks and reduce health impacts before, during, and after a wildfire event occurs (U.S. EPA, 2018). These include resources such as: online training for health care providers to better understand how wildfire smoke can impact their patients’ health; health and wildfire preparedness fact sheets, which provide information on how to reduce your smoke exposure, how to protect your
children, pets, and/or large animals from smoke and ash exposure, and indoor air filtration options, among others; information related to public notification systems and the best ways to stay informed during a wildfire event; and recommended supplies to take with you in the event of an evacuation (among others) (U.S. EPA, 2018). Measures identified within this toolbox can also be applied to help mitigate the impacts from prescribed fire events as well, and have been implemented in communities across the U.S., including in California, Oregon, and Washington (McGown, 2020; Troisi, 2021).

The below is only part of the table in the report..

The author of the Hotshot Wake Up has some interesting observations and questions about the narrative of the Calf Canyon Fire and what groups might be using the narrative to what ends.

You can get a free 7 day trial of the Hotshot Wakeup.. some excerpts below.

• Publications that have Government grant money and taxpayer money started to blame the environment for this fire and push a fear based narrative. This now just days before the Feds released their findings.

• All of these widely spread articles based their stories off the fires in New Mexico. Both now known to be caused by Federal ignitions.

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• Many political figures in the Federal Government used these fires as a launching pad for new talking points for policy change. When in actuality their employer started

  the very same fires.

Ironic, hypocritical, coincidental, inadvertent, knowingly?

The other thing we saw come out of this was the new “wildfire danger tool” that was pushed by media and politicians that inaccurately showed where housing danger areas were for wildfire. Many mainstream outlets referenced this site when they talked about the homes lost on the Calf Canyon and expressed the need for Government policy change to protect homes. As of today 761 structures have been lost from these Federally set fires.

Again, I am a huge supporter of prescribed fire. I know that mistakes can happen and unintended outcomes can have horrible consequences. What I expect to see is what I’ve seen before. A few regional level and forest level people will get thrown under the bus while DC policy makers continue on ops normal.

It’s amazing that the money being asked for in these policy agendas is a fraction of what it would take to adequately pay our firefighters fairly. Where is the push for this?! Why is this not at the forefront of these news stories? Many in the industry make the argument that the loss of long term qualified people has led to more tragic prescribed burn losses. As we all know staffing issues have plagued the agencies for the last 2-3 years. We have discussed at length why this is.

Things to think about:

• When did the Feds know the Calf Canyon was self inflicted?
• Were there any Government PR people giving talking points on policy change in this time period?
• Was the narrative orchestrated?
• Why?

My hope is that this creates conversation around how our industry is increasingly being used as a political pawn by both sides. It’s inappropriate and the manipulation of public view is becoming evident. The increased push for International oversight is also gaining media coverage. All things that need to be considered when trying to sift through the noise.

 

As always, you are welcome to add other stories and what you think about them.

This NPR story intrigued me. First the title: New Mexico wildfire sparks backlash against controlled burns. That’s bad for the West.

I think it’s supposed to be a news story not an op-ed. Somewhere along the line I guess it became OK for reporters to make normative claims. The story is fairly long and has a variety of perspectives.

When do we think it’s safe to do dangerous things and why? Nuclear power plants, air travel, pipelines and so on.
How are they regulated? Why do we mostly trust the regulators?

When do we have compassion for the people displaced by accidents? And when do we think that they and their elected representatives might be overreacting? Does it vary by what people caused the accident?

I’d argue that we can hold those ideas at the same time.
1. More prescribed fire would be good
2. Bad things sometimes happen when they get out of control, as bad as “real” wildfire (which we are trying to avoid).
3. The people who have suffered have a right to their emotions (is this one policy area where they are disregarded?) even if the suffering occurs infrequently
4. Ultimately it’s on the people who want prescribed fire to develop social license. Communication, transparency, openness, accountability about what went wrong and what they are going to do to change.

Also I’d argue that if you’re going to write about people impacted by disasters, and there is a substantial body of literature on the topic by social scientists, you might want to interview one.

Forest ecologists and other experts now worry it may prompt a backlash against prescribed burns in New Mexico and across the West, throwing a monkey wrench into this vital forest management tool that experts say needs to be massively scaled-up to help reduce the number, size and intensity of catastrophic fires across the region.

Record-breaking wildfires in California and other states underscore the need to expand intentional burn programs

“There’s already a tremendous amount of backlash,” says James Biggs, who teaches wildfire ecology and fire behavior at New Mexico Highlands University whose campus in Las Vegas, N.M., is near the southern edge of the wildfire.

Biggs says ironically the scale and impact of this blaze underscores precisely why the Western U.S. needs to do more intentional burning after a century-plus policy of suppressing nearly every forest fire, which has resulted in the build up of dangerous and untenable amounts of fuel across forests.

Now I am not a fire scientist, but I think the “scale and impact of this blaze” underscores that prescribed fire/pile burning is dangerous and folks need to be careful to create social license. Trust is about openness, transparency and accountability (and other things).

The New Mexico blaze is deeply concerning, says Rebecca Miller, a scholar with the University of Southern California’s The West on Fire Project. “Because we know that we need to be treating the massive amounts of vegetation that we’ve got across the Western United States, which is a direct result of historic wildfire suppression policies of the 20th century.”

“When we see a prescribed burn, as in New Mexico, that escapes and becomes a massive wildfire that threatens communities, that prompts concerns about the safety of these prescribed burns of this very, very important tool,” Miller at USC says adding, “the vast, vast, vast majority of prescribed burns are conducted safely, do not escape, and you’ll never hear about them.”

Hard data on just how often intentional fires escape their boundaries is hard to come by. But Miller says estimates from the early 2000s show that fewer than 1% of prescribed burns might escape to become a major wildfire. “So we’re talking a really, really small percentage.”

So far, the New Mexico fire has burned more than 300,000 acres, torched hundreds of structures and displaced thousands. The fire is just over 30% contained. The blaze is closing in on 500 square miles burned.

It’s always interesting, as we’ve observed before, when people from elsewhere dismiss people’s concerns with “it doesn’t happen that often.” This is a case where something right goes wrong. Certainly nuclear accidents are rare also, as are gas pipelines blowing up, and so on. Would we dismiss concerns, say, about discrimination, if it “didn’t happen that often?” Also I think other metrics could be used.. like economic damage, health damage, and acres burned up unintentionally. For example, 300K acres is the size of some Ranger Districts.

Biggs, the forestry and fire behavior expert at New Mexico Highlands University, says he understands the angst and frustration. Many of his students and colleagues have had to evacuate or had property damaged.

“Either their homes have been lost or the families’ homes have been lost. We’ve got faculty and staff that have lost homes and it becomes very chaotic and there’s certainly periods of going through this shock,” he says, “and so it’s very difficult to cut through that.”

But Biggs and others are calling for cooler heads to prevail.

“Let’s wait for all the facts and the science” to come out in an investigation, he says. “The backlash that we’re seeing in the media and by the politicians is right now a very emotional argument. The one thing that’s for sure is these are not controlled laboratory experiments,” he says. “And so sometimes these things, you know, are just unpredictable in terms of the weather patterns, and this weather at times was unprecedented.”

I’ve been thinking about trust quite a bit, mostly with regard to prescribed and Wildfire With Benefits. But then the First Street Foundation study came up.  I discovered on Twitter an interesting substack called The Hotshot Wakeup.  The person who runs it has a unique and interesting take on this. Check this podcast out around 21:38, or start sooner if you’re interested in wildfire news. I was unable to find out who this individual is (nor their pronouns) so.. I will call them THW and use they/their pronouns until I find out differently.

THW questions the FSF study and let’s look at some of hizzer concerns.

1. It came to our attention through a focused media push via a great variety of outlets.. blizzardy.  That takes money and influence. So who is behind it and to what end? He mentions bot accounts. As an Old Person, sadly, I don’t understand how that might work.

2. It came through a foundation that has traditionally not been in the fire space. It is interested in “climate risk” and has previously been interested in coastal flooding.

3.  It does not seem to ground-truth well.

4. “THW describes how outlets and other folks have interpreted it. Shouldn’t let people live there until we can take their ignorance away” “too late to have the public learn about these things” I don’t know which stories he read but he mentioned people quoted in California and Montana, but I am curious.

5. THW mentions UN Wildfire Policy which had had covered elsewhere in another podcast but I couldn’t find.- They suggest FSF study kind of pushes the same policy.. shouldn’t live in rural areas, should tax people if they want to live in those areas.

The way the actual information is carried forward seems to be promoting a agenda of.. well, listen to the way he tells it. Then there’s those who think it’s for insurance companies to raise everyone’s rates, and so on.

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So what could they have done to build trust? I’m not a trust expert, but here are some ideas. You are invited to add yours.

1. Be open about their goals before they start.  You are entering the fire modeling science space, already occupied by numerous inhabitants funded by a plethora of different government agencies and others.  Why? That way people can track whether your actions and approach follow from your stated goals.

2. Be open about funding sources. No one wants to read 990’s.

3. When you enter someone else’s space (unless you are intending to invade in the name of Climate) be polite to the natives. Enlist existing experts on a broad scale (social scientists, fire behavior folks, practitioners) for advice prior to generating models.

4. Use open peer and practitioner review of models and conclusions. I’m not sure how comfortable scientists feel critiquing something now, when it’s effectively too late.  Peer review by journals doesn’t actually impress many of us who have observed this.

5. Ground truth openly before release.

6. Be open about what’s not included.  Especially when that includes human behavior (aka ignitions, suppression), new suppression technologies, and other adaptation strategies.  To say things like “climate will make it x% worse (future prediction)” without including “but these other factors will also change (future predictions) is really, really common in the climate space.  I think it’s because people are difficult to model, or that it’s easier to invade the wildfire space from the physical model world which tends to ignore the social science world.

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If these had been done, you would arguably have not needed a media push, as the information would be integrated into communities via their own trusted sources and opinion leaders.  This is the way of helping people learn that the technology transfer and extension communities have worked with for years.