EXTENSION PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT: EVOLUTION IN CHANGING ENVIRONMENTS

As I was developing these brief comments, I considered using the title, We\u27re not in Kansas Anymore, Toto. While some of the things we need to do are the same ones we have been doing for the past 30 years, others are quite different—primarily the environments, audiences, or types of requests. Some of that is adaptive reiteration. We have needed to learn new things to treat the needs of new audiences. Perhaps we use wood duck nest structure experience to assist an urban homeowner in placing bat boxes, or answer questions about how to colonize a pond with snakes and frogs rather than managing it for fish production. Perhaps we hold for landowners meetings to a Wall Street hotel meeting room or to a Dallas convention center rather than to the willing minds and rough hands of dairy farmers, ranchers, and woodland managers. Perhaps we face hobby landowners who had wildlife conservation or some personal interpretation of that term on their minds. We employ the classical music approach of theme in variations by adapting presentations to the sites and the potential audience