Portland wildfire expert wants to overhaul Oregon’s wildfire approach

Matt Donegan is a wildfire and land management consultant based in Portland. He’s also the chair of the Oregon Environmental Quality Commission. In 2019, he led a wildfire council convened by Gov. Kate Brown. Now, he says Oregon is behind on wildfire management and federal, state and private organizations need to come together to figure out the future of Oregon’s forests. Donegan joins us with more about why Oregon needs to overhaul the way it approaches wildfire and land management.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Matt Donegan says we need a new public works program in Oregon on the scale of the Bonneville Power Administration or the Tennessee Valley Authority. Donegan is a wildfire, land management and climate change consultant based in Portland. Six years ago, he led the wildfire council convened by then-Governor Kate Brown. Now, he says Oregon is so far behind on wildfire management that the public and private sectors need to get together to collaborate on solutions on the scale of those iconic New Deal programs.

Matt, welcome back to the show.

Matt Donegan:  Thanks for having me.

Miller:  So I mentioned that council that you led, six years ago now, that did put out a lot of recommendations, some of which turned into legislation. In the big picture though, how would you say we are doing as a state compared to 2018-2019?

Donegan:  In many respects, we took some very significant steps forward. Looking back to 2019, one of the big reasons why the council was convened was because suppression costs, firefighting costs were out of control and the incidence of wildfire had doubled or tripled, relative to prior decades. Yet, our firefighting force had shrunk and we were putting firefighters at risk, mental health issues and so forth. We took some very significant steps forward in correcting that by doubling the size of the state fire marshal’s office, as an example. So I think in a lot of ways, we addressed the fire fighting needs. Although I will say there are significant historic changes underway at the federal level right now that are introducing a lot of uncertainty there. So I don’t mean to say that we’re out of the woods there.

But the big areas where I think we have fallen behind are more in the realms of prevention and mitigation. So we’re doing well to respond and recover from wildfire, but we have not met our goals with regard to mitigation and investment, even as all the research is showing the costs of wildfire, the health costs, the human impacts are far, far greater than we ever imagined. The equity implications are disproportionately skewing these costs towards vulnerable communities. So there’s many cases to be made that we really need to get ahead, in terms of mitigation and prevention. And in that respect, we have really fallen behind.

Miller:  Can you outline the basics of what you’d like to see in terms of mitigation and prevention, making our state less likely to see truly catastrophic wildfires?

Donegan:  One thing that we have done, the science and technology is very, very strong. We’ve got outstanding geospatial technology that’s identified where the fire risk is really emerging. That technology is improving. We’re getting better at determining which communities are at risk and are we talking about health impacts, or impacts to infrastructure and so forth? We’ve actually gotten much better at identifying mitigation options like what you should do in terms of prescribed fire, mechanical thinnings and so forth.

So a lot of the information’s there. But when you look at the goals we’ve set, they’re literally 10 to 20 times … In other words, 1,000% to 2,000% over our current pace and scale.

Miller:  Meaning, 1,000 times more land needs to be thinned or had prescribed fire on it than we are currently planning to do?

Donegan:  Yeah, we have identified 13.1 million acres in the state of severely elevated wildfire risk. Over a 20-year period, we want to manage that land for vegetation, to mitigate the wildfires. That comes out to 650,000 acres per year, you have to re-enter sometimes. Let’s just say roughly, it’s a million acres per year that we should be treating. That would be easily tenfold what we are currently doing. There’s certain areas like down near Medford, which are very, very much at risk – they’ve done outstanding research down there. They are saying we need to increase the pace and scale by sixteenfold where we are right now.

Miller:  We recently went to Southern Oregon to see what this looks like on the ground and it’s just a kind of inch by inch thing. AI is not going to help us with this. This is just humans with drip torches, bulldozers or chainsaws going patch by patch. So are we looking at a funding problem, a people power problem, or a political problem, or everything put together?

Donegan:  I think the answer is yes. I think the three broad buckets that I typically think about are, number one, funding. That is a very significant challenge. Second one is what you would consider delivery or operations, things like workforce. You’re right, some of this can be addressed through technology. But a lot of this is just simply the workforce. We’ve seen massive attrition in the workforce, and then a lot of it is the downstream processing of biomass and perhaps generating electricity or power from that. And because we have not really de-risked this entire enterprise, there’s so much instability.

Miller:  What do you mean we haven’t de-risked the enterprise?

Donegan:  What I mean by that is if you look back at the literature, these calls for an increase of pace and scale have been around for decades. I mean, for decades and they haven’t been heeded. This is why I come back to this call to action to think about something like one of these iconic public works projects. Can the country still do these sorts of things, because these calls for action have been around for decades. Because of that, you haven’t seen delivery on a lot of the existing policies. You’ve seen attrition in the entire ecosystem that does this type of work. So if you’re going to attract people into the workforce, if you’re going to attract businesses to make these investments, there has to be many more assurances that you’re actually going to follow through on the goals and policies that you’ve set out.

Miller:  I don’t think, to my mind, there is a better example of big federal government than New Deal programs. It’s the 20th century example of a gigantic expansion of the federal government’s power and spending. Can we accomplish what you’re talking about with a federal government that is literally going in the opposite direction?

Donegan:  I think there’s a couple things that come to mind there. One of the sources I think of very helpful information that I found recently has been – Ezra Klein who’s written about this – we used to look upon the government as an agent of positive change and solving big problems. Somewhere along the way, we’ve come to see the federal government in particular, but the public sector, as potentially a threat. And we’ve hobbled the public sector through a lot of regulations and laws. And Ezra Klein says that that has slowed. And I think he’s right. The build out of the green economy to address climate change and given the pace with which climate change is taking off, we don’t have the luxury of this kind of hobbling. We need to accelerate the positive work of the public sector.

I think there’s an analogy here where so much of what we have done, in the wake of the timber wars and so forth, has been intended to slow down the federal government in particular, but the state government as well. That is slowing our response to wildfire, which I would argue is a symptom of climate change. So to the extent that you need to build resiliency to climate change, we also need to stop hobbling the government and allow the government to respond to this.

So that’s kind of the long term. Here more recently, what we’ve seen is a lot of changes underway at the federal level that are really in play right now and I think the most honest answer is there’s just a lot of uncertainty as to how that’s going to play out. I don’t know anybody who has a really great crystal ball to where that’s going. But it is a lot of uncertainty right now.

Miller:  Am I right that a lot of what you’re talking about is not going to be money generating? There may be some biomass that can be turned into electricity here and there. There may be some trees that can be cut down, especially on the west side of the cascades, that might be monetized. But a lot of what we’re doing here would be pure public or private expenditures without a payoff. How does that affect what you’re talking about?

Donegan:  I think that’s exactly right. I think there needs to be a quest for overall increase in funding. And yeah, there can be some offset, the costs that come through timber harvest and so forth. But I think the bulk of the new funding is going to have to come through mitigation of public health costs, of property costs, of economic damages. So we’re going to need to develop new funding models that are going to try to invest in an ounce of prevention as opposed to a pound of cure.

Miller:  How do you do that? In other words, what you’re saying there is a little bit complicated. But you’re saying yes, there actually is money to be made here. But it’s in savings from the catastrophe of bigger wildfires, as opposed to an obvious profit on some profit sheet?

Donegan:  That’s exactly right. I mean, these are generally monetizing avoided public costs, is really what the entire North Star is all about. As I was mentioning, there are reports out of Congress that estimate that current public costs from wildfires are approaching $1 trillion per year already. And those are expected to double or triple again between now and mid-century. So the idea is to invest in mitigation so you can offset a significant portion of those trillions of dollars.

Miller:  If you could get the governor, business leaders and legislative leaders, simply in Oregon, to do one thing together over the next year, what would it be?

Donegan:  Well, what we are trying to do is look at some of the really strong work that’s underway across the state. I mean there’s heroic, really strong work being led by groups like the Nature Conservancy and others who’ve done fantastic science. We know what needs to be done. We’ve got goals to achieve these increases in vegetative management and really dissect what the bottlenecks are to achieving those goals, whether it’s funding, again workforce, inviting private investment, through biomass and things like that. Look at some of these high opportunity projects that are out there and create some demonstrations that we can export to other parts of the state.

Miller:  Matt, thanks very much.

Donegan:  No, thank you.

Miller:  Matt Donegan is a consultant who advises a number of nonprofits and government groups about wildfire, climate change and land  management.

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