Category: Conservation & Environment

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Fires Bigger than Ever

Fires like the Cerro Grande fire in 2000 and the Las Conchas fire of 2011 are knocking down even fire-adapted ponderosa pine communities. The Las Conchas fire burned through more than 43,000 acres in 15 hours.   Driven by strong winds that produced horizonal vortices (like tornadoes on their sides), the fire burned about an acre every second.

There is real chance that if fires like this persist that they will permanently deforest parts of the Southwest until recently covered by thick forests, converting them into bush or grassland, as forest gaps become so big that there is no seed source for regeneration or fire-prone brush burns so hot and so frequently that forests cannot reestablish.

Ponderosa pine are fire adaptive, even fire dependent. Fires are essential to the health of ponderosa pine forests. But it can get to be too much even for them. (The ponderosa ecology is analogous to longleaf pine, but the Southeast is not like the Southwest. Fire in the Southeast can destroy much of the above ground vegetation, but plants and trees will be back within a year or two. You can see the results of a prescribed fire in Virginia at this link. In the Southwest, the ground may stay barren for a long time. )

The hot fires in fire adapted ponderosa can be driven by winds up into the spruce-fir forests on top of the mountains destroying them too. Since these ecological communities are often remnants of climates of the last ice age clinging to “sky islands,” where altitude maintains the cooler climate, they may not come back until the next ice age.

Fires have been common in the Southwest for more than 10,000 years, but there is nothing in the historical record like the fires we have experienced in recent decades. They are altering rich ecological and cultural landscapes. We can blame climate change, and warmer and drier weather are certainly contributing to the situation, but changes in land management is the proximate cause, and would trouble even absent the climate changes.
Tom Swetnam, Professor Emeritus of Dendrochronology at the University of Arizona, studies historical ecological disturbances, using tools like tree ring analysis. He spoke at our National Tree Farm Leadership Conference in Albuquerque.  Using tree rings, scientists have mapped the changing climate and conditions in the Southwest with decent precision going back more than 400 years and make decent estimates farther back.

The tree rings tell a story of wet and dry years and fires that go with them.  Not surprisingly, fires are more common in dry years, but fire scars indicate that centuries ago fires were frequent but not very hot. The record of the area around the Jemez Mountains in northern New Mexico experienced frequent low-intensity burns until around 1680. After that, fires become less frequent but hotter. This fire regime persists until just before 1900, when fires are almost gone, until the serious upsurge a few decades ago. What happened?

The tree ring record fits well with the historical record if you know what was going on. Around 1600 Pueblo people lived in the mountains and on the plateaus, i.e. in the forests. They set fires to clear land, improve hunting or discourage insects, and sometimes cooking and campfires got out of hand. The Pueblo also used wood gathered from the nearby woods for fuel and building materials. They especially used small diameter wood for ramadas and roofs. In other words, they kept the woods clear of fuel that would drive large fires. The ponderosa pine forests of those days were open. We would call them park-like, with as few as twenty large trees per acre. When fires went through, they stayed on the ground, doing little hard to big trees, but conveniently marking them for our future study.
Spanish colonist and missionaries started showing up in growing numbers after 1600. This started to pull or drive some of the Pueblo out of their mountain homes. Others died of introduced diseases and later started to be the victims of raids by tribes made mobile by the newly introduced horses. No matter the reasons, the human population of the New Mexico mountains declined and so did the health of the forests. Fire became less common and more often ignited by lightning, but they were bigger and hotter.

(Nature does not always do better w/o human intervention. That is controversial, and it is my thought. I cannot attribute it to Mr. Swetnam. There is a dynamic balance to be struck.)
This less frequent but still common low-intensity fire regime continued until the late 1800s. That is when fire disappeared for around a century. We would be wrong to credit or blame fire suppression for most of this. It is true that settlers tended to put out fires and that roads and cultivated fields functioned as fire-breaks, but the big factor from around 1890-1945 was grazing. Sheep and cows grazed down the grass and w/o the grass to carry the fire, fires just did not get going.  After 1945, fire suppression became a bigger deal. Suppression was enabled by technologies and techniques developed during World War II. Aircraft could stop and fight fires even in remote regions. They could also parachute in fire fighters and general organization and discipline appropriate to the exigencies of war translated from fighting war to fighting fire. In fact, the Forest Service and others approached the fight against fire with warlike vigor and metaphors.

And it seemed to work. Fires were suppressed most of the time.  Trees grew thicker than ever and that seemed a good thing. Managing forests like a factory fit in well with organizational theories of the time. But fuels were building. Fire can be avoided and postponed but not banished.

This brought us to where we are today. Western forests are overgrown with trees and brush. We have come to see this as natural, but it is not.  In a robust ponderosa forest, there are big trees and not much else near the ground. Over the last century, brush grew and wood lays on the ground. Beyond that, there are lots of trees of various heights.  This provides ladders to pull fire from the ground to the canopy, where whole trees, even big ones are killed. This sets up a negative cycle, where the hot fires kill the big trees, allowing brush to grow in thick fueling other hot fires.

Managing this flammable situation is exacerbated by people moving into the woods and building homes, sometimes expensive ones, that need to be protected against the old nemesis of fire.

This is often called the Wildland-Urban Interface or the WUI (pronounced WOOEE). Most forest fire managers dislike WUI because it complicates their burn management and risks the lives of civilians and firefighters.

Swetnam, however, thinks that people can live in harmony in the woods, IF they do it right. The Pueblo lived in these fire-prone woods for hundreds of years. Their villages seem never to have been overtaken by fire. Their success depended on managing fuels, as described above.  The Pueblo also practiced seasonal movement. During the winter, they hunkered down in central areas, but in summer they dispersed around the countryside.  The result was fuel management, whether that was the goal.

The good news is that we can manage fire. If we recognize that we cannot banish fire, we can manage it.  We can build in lots of places but not in all places.  The bad news is that it is hard politically and socially to do the right thing even when we are reasonably sure we know the right thing. We will also almost always lack the public resources to do all that we can or should.

Above are notes and thoughts from todays Tree Farm National Leadership Conference and speaker Tom Swetnam.

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Valle Grande

Valle Grande is a big grassy valley in remains of a caldera of a super volcano. You can see various views in my first three pictures. The last picture is Frijoles Canyon taken from one of the Pueblo dwelling in the cliff. See my earlier posts re.

Visiting the Pueblo ruins at Bandelier National Monument. I always enjoy seeing the remains of the past. It is interesting what people could do with simple tools. But you wouldn’t want to live in these places. The little cave in the picture was interesting, but then I thought about really living there.

Pre-literate, prehistoric societies are fragile. Oral history is always unreliable. (Well,so is written history, but at least you have a reference.) We sometimes overlook one of the biggest problems with lack of literacy. That is, things get lost.

One generation might develop wonderful skills or knowledge, but if nobody transmits it to the next generation, it is lost forever. Nobody can find the old text and create a renaissance.
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link and if a link is missing, there is no chain.

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A study of history at Bandelier National Monument

“We live in a continuum that began when we emerged from the earth and continues with our descendants. That is why time has no boundaries for us & why it is so irrelevant. We are not here to make history. We are here to live and continue history.” This is from the Affiliated Pueblo Committee and sums up their view of history. I read it at the museum at the Bandolier National Monument.

I studied history and anthropology in college and especially enjoyed the classes on theories of history. We contrasted cyclical theories of history, where history repeated in great circles to a progressive theory of history, where history was moving forward. The latter implied a beginning and an end, while the former just churned. The progressive view of history tended to be favored by adherents of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), since they were informed by their faiths that God created the heavens & the earth at a specific time in history, that at least some humans had duties and tasks to perform and that history was moving toward an end and a day of judgement. The ancient Greek historians were examples of believers in cyclical historical theories.

All Western historians, however, shared the idea of change and development, whether or not they thought there was progress toward an end. In fact, one of the definitions of history was that it was written by historians who analyzed trends and change. Absent this, we might have antiquarianism or chronicles that just recorded events, one darn thing after another. That is why we called Herodotus the “father of history.” Others had written before he did, but they did not look for patterns, trends or change.

Our history theory classes back in the 1970s were still very Western-centric. We did not consider Chinese, Indian or other perceptions of history. Had we done that, I don’t think we would have found them that surprising. My subsequent study of history indicates that Chinese history theory, for example, would fit mostly into the cyclical pattern, with good times followed by bad and the mandate of heaven falling moving but not changing. I don’t pretend to be an expert, but what I see I can fit into my earlier studies.

Very different would be the theory of history outlined in the Pueblo theory above. It is not a progression view of history or even a change one. Rather it is a kind of steady state, timelessness.

I mentioned that I studied history AND anthropology. One of the books assigned in anthropology was called “Language Thought & Reality” by Benjamin Lee Whorf. Whorf postulated that structure of language influenced perceptions of reality. Some scholars think this idea has been debunked and others think the debunkers have been debunked. I don’t know about that, but I do recall that he used the Hopi language as an example. He said that the structure of the Hopi language made it much easier to view time as a continuum. Western languages, on the other hand, were structured with various past and future tenses. Maybe that influenced our view of history as having a past and a likely future and featuring changed


The Pueblo idea made me think about this. I can see value in this way of thinking, but also many drawbacks. It is contemplative and that is good.

I have been thinking about the Pueblo settlements, as I visited some of the ancient sites. Yesterday went to the Pecos villages. Today we visited the ruins of villages of Ancestral Pueblo people who built homes in Frijoles Canyon at the Bandolier National Monument. They lived in the canyon for around 400 years until they exhausted the resources and abandoned the land by about 1550.

My first picture shows Chrissy with a piece of Tuff. That is compressed volcanic ash that the ancestral Pueblo used for building material. The other pictures show runs and the hills of tuff at the Bandolier National Monument.

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Ponderosa Pine in New Mexico

Ponderosa pine is certainly one of my favorite ecosystems. It can and sometimes does grow in lowlands, but it dominates the “montane” ecosystem, in this part of New Mexico from elevations of around 7000 feet to about 8000 feet above sea level.

It is a semi-dry ecology that tends to burn. Before European settlement, ponderosa pine forests burned every 5-15 years. These were usually low intensity fires that cleared up the brush and thinned the forest but did not harm to the big trees. This changed when settlers cut trees and then excluded fire. The ponderosa pine grew back much thicker than before. Where there previously were as few as 20 big trees per acre, there were now 600-700 little trees too close together. Fire was excluded as much as possible, but when it inevitably did come, it came hot because of all the fuel and the tight forest. The fires were hot enough to kill mature trees.

This is where we find ourselves now. Our forests are too thick and too prone to disastrous fire because we have refused to thin properly and tried to exclude fire for 100 years. It is not easy just to change these old policies. We run risks during the changeover. One of the most destructive fires in the Bandelier NM (where we were travelling) was the Cerro Grande fire in 2000. This was set by the Forest Service trying to set a prescribed fire.

The guys who did it were acting responsibly and with the best science available, but they took the blame. One reason why fire professionals call the fires they set “prescribed” and not “controlled burn,” as some outsiders do, is because they know that no fire is ever 100% controlled. It takes courage to do the right thing. If things go wrong, you will get all the blame. If things go right, you will get none of the credit. It is well worth the risk from ecological and economic point of view. I would compare it to an operation. In my example, if you do nothing you have a 95% chance of death and a 5% chance of survival. With the operation you have a 95% survival chance to live and a 5% chance of death. You would take that risk, right? But that 5%.

Fire cannot be avoided. Forests will burn. We can do our best to choose the time and place where destruction will be minimized and where ecological benefits will be greatest. If we do nothing, we still get fires, but we almost always get them at the worst and most dangerous times, since those are the times of greatest fire activity, and the ecology will be harmed by the hot fires.

My pictures are from the Bandelier National Monument. My first photo is me in front of the sign talking about the need for diversity in the ecosystems. Next are some big ponderosa pines. You can tell an old tree not only by its size but also the color of the bark. Young trees have dark bark. When they get to be 100+ they start having a orange-yellow bark. In the third picture, you can see the black marks from a fire, probably the 2011 Las Conchas fire. The big trees were unharmed by the fire, but it cleaned out the brush. After that show when a very hot fire goes through. I think that is aftermath of the disastrous Cerra Grande fire of 2000. This is so different from Virginia. After 17 years, we would have profuse growth, even from a hot fire like that. We get a lot more rain. The last picture are spruce with a few ponderosa pine at higher altitude. Spruce are not adapted to frequent fires the way ponderosa are.

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Sintropia

“Sintropia” – I had not heard the word before. In this context it is used as kind of regenerative ecology. They are restoring ecological balance in the Brazilian state of Bahia. The article describes a farm that was ruined and abandoned. There were no streams on the farm and so no water.

This is the link to the article. It is in Portuguese, but you can figure out a lot just by watching.

A Swiss-Brazilian agronomist bought the land to put into practice his ideas on sintropia. This is using natural processes to restore the land while producing valuable agricultural products. After he brought back the forests, water came back too, as springs again became viable.

The title says why I like the idea, “Cultivated forests allow environmental recuperation and the generation of income.”  Land that does not produce some profit for the owners will not long be conserved. This does both.

I think of this in the tradition of conservationists like Aldo Leopold working with landowners in Coon Valley, Wisconsin to restore the land and cultivate it.

Living in harmony with nature does not means hands off nature. When we are doing the best, we are using human intelligence to find and harmonize with natural rhythms.
You can use Google translator to get the story and watch the pictures on the video. Especially interesting is that Globo Rural covered this same story in the 1990s, and you can see the great progress made since then.

Sintropia. It is a great word. Unfortunately, the English translation is the ugly “negentropy,” a word that has other meanings too that confuse it. I think that I am going to start using the word sintropia for what I am trying to do on my tree farms and encourage in general.

People will not know what it means, but then I can explain it. I have been looking for a word that combines restoration, regeneration, conservation and intelligent management. I will now add this word to my vocabulary and try to make it more known.

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More on preservation versus conservation

Finished the audio book version of “The Wizard & the Prophet” last week. It was a very interesting book and I recommend it. This week the author – Charles C Mann – is doing the full-court media press. This article covers the main points, so if you don’t want to read the book, this will do.

I wrote a note about the book here, if you want my perspective.
If you want to listen to the author interview, “On Point” covered it on January 24.

I think this is an important book about an interesting division in the environmental community. I think of it as the difference between conservationists & preservationists, but I do not think that a synergy is not possible.

For example, I believe strongly in protection, restoration and regeneration of soils.Feed the soils and the soils feed us. This is the Vogt perspective. On the other hand, I believe strongly in developing GMOs and using a variety of methods to regenerate ecosystems, Borlaug perspectives. Both can be used and should be used in an iterative, adaptive process. GMOs should be a part of organic agriculture, since they are organic, but they will not be a panacea.

Charles Mann says that it is a matter of values and not science. I see that too, but – again – I am a mixer and not a splitter. I believe in the decentralized, closer to nature lifestyles, but I see no reason why this cannot be done using science and productivity. Being close to nature is good, but in the old days life on the land sucked. It would be better to live close to nature w/o having to put up with all the bugs, diseases & backbreaking work.

My tree farms are mostly organic, but I use herbicides when I need them and I welcome genetically improved trees. So far, there are no GMOs available, but if they come along, I will assess them and if they are appropriate, I will have no hesitation in using them.

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Tree Farm Visit January 25, 2018

Went down to the tree farms, mostly just to look around.  Ted Garner, from West Fraser Timber, wanted to look at the farms. He read what I wrote about biosolids and wanted to see for himself. I am always happy to tell anybody willing to listen about the farms.

Trees are okay, although they are at their most unattractive at this time of the year. They have dropped all the needles that they will do and new ones are not yet grown in. Everything is a little dull for now but soon better.

Longleaf are looking good and you can see them more easily against the brown grass, as you can see in the picture. We will soon thin the 1996 loblolly nearby, so maybe next time I take this picture the longleaf will look the similar but the backgrounds will be different.

I did the usual vine pulling on the Chrissy’s Pond place. It is good exercise and gives me reason to be in woods.  Funny thing is that I “discovered” another stream management zone.  I mean, I knew it was there, but I never actually walked down there.  The CP place is 178 acres total, of which only 110 acres are loblolly pine. That leaves 68 acres of SMZ or wildlife plots. I have not explored all of the even now.

My pictures – the first shows the “new” SMZ. Next is the road out of CP, followed by the Brodnax farm, well thinned and ready to burn. After than shows a longleaf pine plantation. Unfortunately, other pines have grown in. A fire would rectify that.  Last is my Freeman longleaf pine stand.
 

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Green city Washington

Washington has become one of the world’s “greenest” cities in the last few years.  The city won a LEED Platinum rating last year, the first in the world, for its commitment to sustainability.  Being green means lots of things, but it generally is good management of buildings and land.

I went down to the National Building Museum for a program by Jay Wilson,  Urban Sustainability Administration at DC Department of Energy & Environment, who talked about some of the things Washington has done and will do.

Washington sits on the confluence of two rivers, the Potomac and the Anacostia, much of the area is covered with pavement or buildings and lots of the land is flat and low.  This means that storm water management is a key management concern.

Much of Washington’s sewer system was build a century ago.  They did a wonderful job back then, but their situations and goals were different.  For example, sanitary and storm sewers are combined.  This seems like a bad idea today, since rainwater is fundamentally different from sewage and why overload the system?  But the system was designed with horses in mind. In those days, streets were covered in horse manure. The rain washed this into sewers and so rain runoff in those days was not so different from sewage.  The combined sewage system made sense in those days.

Rain gardens and green roofs are important ways the District address storm water management today.  Both these examples of green infrastructure filter and slow water flow, making it available to plants, enhancing groundwater and mitigating overflow into the sewers.  Green roofs and rain gardens are also beautiful, provide wildlife habitat, and like most green infrastructure they are to some extent self-renewing.

Washington is trying to become more bicycle friendly and I can attest to the fact that they have done a good job.  I have been riding around the area for more than 30 years, so my opinion was based on experience.  However, improvements make people demand more improvement.  I don’t think that many bicyclists are quite as positive as I am.  Most bicyclists are younger than I am and may not remember how it was before and us old guys sometimes forget.

The National Building Museum is a good venue for programs like this.  This is the place where I got my first good look at Cross Laminate Timber, during the Timber City exhibit and heard some good lectures about it.  One of the great things about Washington is all these sorts of programs available free or at low cost.  A big part of quality of life for me is this kind of opportunity.

We have grey infrastructure, green infrastructure and intellectual infrastructure.

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The Year of the Fire

The year is up; the cycle finished. We burned the longleaf pine in February 2017. I have documented the changes over the year from what looked like a charred and dead mess, to a verdant summer bursting with life, to winter waiting the next growing season.

I have included all the pictures at the end except the first one above. Click on the picture if you want to read more. It is easier to see them in relation to each other if they are stacked. The pictures tell most of the story, but let me add a little background beyond what you can see.

Longleaf pine ecosystems were dominant on SE coastal plains for at least 10,000 years and precursors go back much longer. Scientist think that the original longleaf range was the coastal plain that extended dozens or hundreds of miles into what it now the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea when sea levels were lower during the ice ages.

Important to remember that a forest is more than the trees. The wonder of the longleaf ecology is the diversity of plant and animal life, not only the trees. A longleaf pine forest is more correctly characterized as a pine savanna, a grassland with trees. Grasslands tend to dominate where rainfall is insufficient for trees to dominate. There is more than enough rain in southeastern North America to support dense forests. The reason such forests did not dominate was fire that burned through the landscape every 2-5 years. These fires were caused by lightning and then set by Native Americans. Fire kept the forest open, allowing light to penetrate and forbs and grasses to grow. Longleaf pine is a dependent ecology, with its profusion of grass and wildflowers and will not thrive when fire excluded.

The longleaf pine trees themselves fire to compete. Longleaf sends down a deep taproot and grows down before it grows up. This makes longleaf pine very resilient to drought, but it also means that species the grow faster toward the sun will shade them out. Fire tips the balance toward longleaf.

It might be useful to use an analogy of a top, a keystone predator to describe fire. Ecologists know, and even ordinary people can observe it in all the deer destroying their gardens, that if we remove the keystone predator, soon the balance is lost. Other species, not longer kept in check proliferate eventually enough to destroy the environment on which they depend. Aldo Leopold describe it more evocatively in his famous essay “Think Like a Mountain.” We can understand it in a homelier wisdom, “when the cat’s away, the mice will play.” Modern humans often removed fire and things got out of hand.
Let me finish by explaining that I try to see my land holistically.  A part is given over to longleaf and the fire regime, but I also have a lot of deep shade hardwoods near the streams that we protect from fire as much as I can. I love my longleaf forests and my groves of beech, maple and oak. It is great to be able to walk between them. The key to joy in ecology is diversity, lots of variety mixed and matched. I am grateful for those things that love fire and for those that do not.

Technical note – the trees were four years (four growing seasons) in the ground when we did the first burn, in the pictures. The site was prepared with fire in 2012, before being planted with longleaf. The longleaf are northern progeny from North Carolina, north of the Neuse River

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Getting the forestry message out

Persuasion

I am writing a presentation that I will deliver at one of the breakout sessions at the Tree Farm National Leadership Conference, in Albuquerque, New Mexico – January 31-February 2. The topic is “Using more wood for the love of forests: getting the message out.”  This is background for the “getting the message out” part. I am overdoing it a bit.
Don’t worry; this is not the text for the talk.

For anybody who plans to attend the session, don’t worry. I am NOT planning to deliver this in the talk and I will talk more about forestry. All this exercise is to build the background for a couple of slides and all this will be reduced to a few sentences. BUT … I will be ready for any questions and I wanted to put this up as reference so anybody interested in more background can read it.

My method for talk preparation is odd. I write all this kind of stuff and read a lot. Then on the day before or even the day of the event I write what I am going to say – long hand – in my pocket notebook. That makes it flow, since I leave out details. I often change the talk even as I am giving it, depending on audience reaction. This was a problem for me in State Department, since my text “as prepared” was often significantly different than my talk as delivered.

My PowerPoint Presentation The slides are included below. They will change before the presentation. It is heavy with pictures, since I don’t think PowerPoint should be text heavy. But that might make it download slower.

John-Matel-_Virginia_Tree_Farm_Foundation_presentatio_Jan-7Download

Everything is always becoming something else
We always have always and always will live in a dynamic environment. Our efforts to understand and act within it change it, so that we never really face the same challenges twice. There is no finish line; there is no stable end goal. Success means sustainable change.

Portfolio or Toolbox Strategy (for an uncertain world)
No technique or media tool will work in all situations. That is why we need to deploy the whole panoply of tools and techniques and know which combinations are best. This is more art than science.  The key is flexibility. Don’t get too enamored with any one thing or develop strategies around one platform. We don’t want a Twitter strategy. We want a strategy that may use Twitter as one of many tools. Carpenters don’t have “hammer strategies.”  They have building strategies that may involve hammers as one of the many tools in the box.

The human equation: bridging the last three feet
When I worked in public diplomacy, our patron saint was Edward R. Murrow, the famous journalist & the greatest director of the United States Information Agency. He observed that our communication technologies could span the globe, but the real persuasion took place in the last three feet – human contact. He lived in the days before Internet. IMO, internet can (although less easily than people think) create or at least sustain the kinds of engaged relationships Murrow was talking about, but we still must build those relationships. There is a cognitive limit to human engagement. We can only keep in real contact with a couple hundred people, although new technologies may expand that number, it does not reach into the millions or even the tens of thousands. That is why we must set priorities. We just cannot love everyone equally and any strategy designed to reach everybody will satisfy nobody.

There is no garden w/o a gardener  
We cannot outsource or compartmentalize our brains or our engagement. The person the communicating must be involved in decisions involving it. There just is no way around this. If we don’t get involved, we cannot make good decisions. Too often, we just try to hire consultants.  Many consultants are good and are worth the money we pay them, but others are like the guy who borrows your watch and then charges to tell we what time it is. If we outsource our decisions, we essentially outsource our intelligence. Then THEY know what we need to know. It is a lot like hiring a guy to look after your spouse. Even if it seems to make her happier, maybe you are not doing playing your part.

BTW – be very wary of pseudo-experts who claim to “speak for” large groups of people or have some kind of inside knowledge that cannot be replicated or properly explained.  If they cannot explain it to we even in broad strokes, they probably don’t understand it themselves and often they are just hucksters protecting their phony baloney jobs.  We have too many such people hanging around us not to trip over them occasionally.

Leverage existing systems and products
Speaking of gardens, we can have a great garden w/o the walls. There are existing communities where we can participate and after we have participated maybe invite others into our own system to participate with us.  Remember that there are always more smart people outside our group – any group – than within it.

I make an effort to write comments on articles about forestry or fire. I am not usually very original or profound. I can usually use the same things over and over. It may seem banal to me, but for most of the readers it is the first time they saw it.

Give up some control
This goes with the above about using and sharing platforms. If you want to influence others, you have to be prepared to be influenced by them. My way or the highway works only in rare instances and if you demand what you think is perfection; you may soon find that you have that perfection all to yourself, since everybody else has wandered away from you.

Be platform flexible
Again speaking of platform sharing, your message is important, not the medium it is delivered on. You have to be flexible enough to choose the appropriate delivery mechanisms and not fall in love with any one of them. They pass quickly. Just ask Jeeves.

Try lots of things and know that most of what you try will fail, usually publicly, sometimes spectacularly
Revel in it. Embrace it. It is impossible to predict outcomes in the new media. Even if you had perfect knowledge of the current situation, it will change in unexpected and unknowable ways. The best strategy is a statistical one of spreading your bets and then responding to changes as they happen, rather than try to set out with certainty in advance. Those who try nothing, get nothing and it is small consolation that they are never wrong.
So, let me sum up before I move on. Technologies are new; human relations are old. Our “new” methods return to an earlier age when communication was engaged, individualized, personal, two-way and interactive. And the lessons of anthropology (people) trump technology (machines.)

How can we make this work?
Forget about mass marketing & advertising analogies. We are not selling something as simple as a can of soda (soda-pop, pop or Coke depending on your part of the country) and we do not have the resources to engage mass markets.

What I am talking about a mass networking proposition, where we build key relationships with opinion leaders and use leverage to allow/encourage others to reach out, who in turn reach out … We cannot reach THE common man (because he doesn’t exist) and we should be careful not to mistake A common man for THE common man.

There are thousands of books and experts who will point to the example of the obscure person who did something great. They are right; but it is easy to pick Bill Gates out of the crowd AFTER he has been wildly successful.  Then it is easy to explain why he succeeded. Of course, millions of others did similar things and did not become the richest man in the world.

They call this survivor bias. In many ways it is like a lottery. We can be sure that SOMEBODY will win the lottery, but we cannot tell who before the drawing. So, we have to play the odds and we cannot treat everybody who buys a lottery ticket like a potential millionaire.

Humans are social creatures who make decisions in contexts of their culture & relationships
We make a big mistake if we treat people as members of undifferentiated masses. Human societies are lumpy. There are relationships that matter more and some that matter less. And they are in a constant state of flux. People make most of their important decisions in social contexts & in consultation with people they trust. Later they might go to some media sources for confirmation or details. Probably the biggest decision we have ever made was buying a home. Did we just read some literature and make an offer? Or did we ask around and talk to people we trusted? How about our cars?  We like to explain our behavior rationally, but looking relationally will provide more reliable assessments.

Information is almost free, and a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention
We now must find or create social context for our message to get attention.  I always laugh (at least to myself) when I hear someone say that “we got the message out” or “We reached a million people”. I am going to start calling this the barking dog strategy, because like the dogs, we just shout “I’m here; I’m here; I’m here. It doesn’t matter what we say; it is what they hear that counts.  If our message does not say the right things, if it doesn’t fit into their cultural and socials contexts and if it is not delivered in an appropriate way, it doesn’t get through.

“Men do not think that they know a thing until they have grasped the ‘why’ of it.” – Aristotle 
Understand – Everything has rules and patterns
I mentioned Aristotle. Let’s go a bit farther east and think of Lao Tzu. He talked about the need to understand the “Tao”, the patterns and logic in all things. Understanding these things could make the most difficult tasks fluid and easy. There are usually easier and harder ways to do things. Sometimes we CREATE more resistance and make less progress by pushing too hard. We should try to understand before we try to persuade. If people have been doing things for a long time, there is a reason. Figure out what that is and persuasion becomes much easier. And always look for the links and relationships. People may not be aware of what drives their own behavior, but it is often linked to social acceptance, and a person’s outlook often changes more based on the perceived future than on the present reality. Aspirations often motivate more than current reality. Find common aspirations.
Let me digress with a fish story from my time in Iraq.  During the late unpleasantness, Coalition forces had to ban fishing on the Euphrates River to prevent insurgents from using the water as a highway. But fishermen didn’t return after the ban was lifted, even though the fish were plentiful and bigger given the no-fishing respite. We thought of helping them buy new boats, nets, sonar etc. But the reason that they weren’t fishing was much simpler – no ice. The ice factory had shut down and in this hot climate if we cannot put the fish on ice, we cannot move them very far or sell them. We helped the ice house back into operation and the fishing started again.

ENGAGE – influencing our community but also being part of it and willing to be influenced 
This story shows the importance of engagement. We also have to get out – physically – and meet people where they are.

Inform & Interpret – turn information into useful knowledge
Engaging is fun and essential, but if we are not doing what we set out to do if we don’t inform and persuade. Since information is almost free, what do I mean by inform? This means turning raw information into useful knowledge and narratives. Even simple facts must be put into contexts. What if we didn’t have any dresser drawers or hangers in our closet? What if we didn’t have any bookshelves or cabinets and all we stuff was just lying on the floor. It would be hard to find things and many things would not be useful.
Turning information into knowledge is like putting things in some order. This usually means framing and narratives.  People understand stories and until they have a story that makes sense, information just sits there, useless as the shirt we cannot find under the pile of dirty clothes. Analytical history, BTW, as opposed to antiquarianism or chronicles is depends almost entirely on framing. The historian must choose what to put in and what to leave out and that makes the story.

So, if we are talking about actual persuasion, it probably won’t help just to make information available. Providing information was a key to success in the past because accurate information was in very short supply. Today what matters is how that information is put together – the contexts, relationships and the narratives.

As persuaders we need to acknowledge what we know, what salesmen and marketers have long understood and what theories of behavioral economics are now explaining. We are not in the information business. Information and facts are part of our raw material, but our business involves persuasion that is less like a library and more like a negotiation paradigm and rational decision making is not enough to achieve success.

I mentioned framing, but I should say a little more. The frame is how we characterize information or events.  If we want to be pejorative, we can sometimes call it spin, but there is no way we can understand complex reality w/o some kind of frame. Most of our frames are unconscious, but that doesn’t mean they are not powerful or pervasive. Think of the ubiquitous sports frame. Describing something like American football, (i.e. centrally planned, stop and start with specialized plays and players) versus football other places (i.e. fluid, fast breaking with the players less specialized) makes a big difference to how it will be perceived. Or think of how we try to frame our presidents. We want our candidate to be in the frame with Lincoln and Washington, Warren G. Harding and Rutherford B Hayes, not so much.

Build a community & be part of a community
Figure out what we can contribute and do it. Remember people make decisions in the contexts of their relationships. Also make sure that we get something back.

The basis of almost all human relationships is reciprocity. All human societies believe in reciprocity. It has survival value. We want to be able to give to our fellow human and expect that he will do the same when we are in need. When that breaks down, so does civil society. It is probably a good idea to be SEEN to get something in return anyway, since if we don’t others will impute an ulterior motive anyway.

I know that this sounds crassly materialistic, but the reciprocity need not be material. We might help a person in the “pay it forward” mode, assuming that when he gets the opportunity he will help somebody else. The reciprocity might just be gratitude. But when a recipient is left w/o some way to reciprocate, a good person feels disrespected. At first, they are happy to get something for nothings, but they soon learn to despise their benefactor. And maybe they should, since his “generosity” is taking their human dignity.
A simple rule in persuasion is that it is often better to receive than to give. Let the other parties feel that they have discharged their social obligations, maybe even that THEY are the generous ones. We notice that the most popular individuals are rarely those who need or want nothing from others, even if they are very generous. And one of the most valuable gifts we can receive is advice and knowledge. Let others share their culture and experience.

Just a few more short points …

Inclusive & Exclusive 
Communities are inclusive for members and exclusive for others. We attract nobody if we appeal to everybody. We must earn membership in any community worth joining.

Personal – or at least personalized
Editors and marketers have tried for years to homogenize for the mass market. That’s how we got soft white Wonder bread and Budweiser beer. Niche markets – and social media is a series of niche markets – require personality.

Reiterate
Success is continuous learning – an iterative  process- not a plan – and a never-ending journey. As I wrote up top, we never get to the end. We must learn from our failures and our successes and move on. The best we can do is make our own ending worth of the start.