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Matt Donegan is working on a plan for Oregon’s forest problem.
In 2024, the state saw 1.9 million acres burn, an area more than twice the size of Rhode Island. And last year, the agency that leads firefighting efforts, the Oregon Department of Forestry, was beset by scandal, management turmoil, and near-bankruptcy from the cost of putting out blazes.
During the current legislative session, a lot of people—lawmakers, Gov. Tina Kotek, the state’s timber industry, environmentalists, electric utilities, and hundreds of thousands of beleaguered property owners—are all looking for a solution, even as the intractable impacts of climate change barrel down on all of us.
But as of this writing, the flurry of fire-related bills lawmakers introduced this session is going nowhere.
Donegan would like to change that.
A soft-spoken Florida transplant, Donegan, 57, moved to Oregon 20 years ago and plunged into the arcane world of managing forests for pension funds and other institutional investors. His firm eventually managed about 2.5 million acres in six states before he and his partner sold their company, Forest Capital Partners, in 2012 for what media reports estimated to be north of $2 billion. (It’s unclear how much Donegan netted.)
Since then, Donegan has devoted his time to public service and education (he is currently pursuing a master’s degree from Reed College). He chaired what used to be the Oregon Board of Higher Education, led Gov. Kate Brown’s 2019 Wildfire Response Council, and currently chairs the Oregon Environmental Quality Commission.
At the request of the Oregon Business Council, Donegan has recently turned his attention toward reducing the impact of catastrophic wildfires.
Donegan knows he’s walking a knife edge between conservation groups that zealously guard Oregon’s forests and a timber industry eager to increase cutting. He’s a free agent in a state where the timber wars never really ended.
Donegan’s theory goes like this: Fire is a natural and healthy phenomenon, and we need more of it to restore forest health. The problem is, the forests are so overstocked with dead, dry debris after a century of fire suppression that fires easily become catastrophic rather than restorative.
The Labor Day fires of 2020 and 2024 and recent blazes in Northern Canada, Maui and Los Angeles, to name just a few, add urgency to Donegan’s quest.
He says the status quo—simply reacting to fires—is unsustainable.
“If you kind of model out what the business-as-usual scenario is, it is horrific,” Donegan says. “And it’s horrific for our most vulnerable communities.”
Instead, he wants to bring analytical rigor to forest practices on the 13 million acres the state has already identified as being at high risk for fire. Donegan proposes to break off a small fraction of that amount for intensive management—thinning and prescribed burns—as a pilot project.
Susan Jane M. Brown, a longtime environmental lawyer and former aide to U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), says the state needs such decisive action.
“We know what the best available Indigenous and Western science has to say about restoring resilience to our forests, and yet we don’t seem to be able to move the needle,” Brown says. “It’s time for innovative new strategies to increase the pace, scale, and quality of restoration of Oregon’s public and private forests.”
Donegan recently sat down with the Oregon Journalism Project for a wide-ranging conversation about wildfire, climate change, the timber wars, and Oregon’s economy.
OJP: What exactly are you working on?
Matt Donegan: I’m launching an initiative right now where we’re going to model out what a 20-year management plan might look like. How much prescribed burning are we talking about? What’s going to be the smoke effects? What will be the thinning? How much of it’s commercial or not commercial? What is the workforce that we’re going to need?
We’re not talking about thinning out all 13 million acres, which is the current target set out by the state. What the research shows is that if you thin out like 30% to 40% of that, that will slow the fire down enough so that it’s not going to create this big storm and get up into the crowns and do these devastating fires.
The two major tools are going to be ecological thinning and prescribed fire.
What is the state doing in terms of wildfire mitigation currently?
We don’t do that much mitigation investment here in Oregon. All the efforts are focused on who can we raise money from to fight these fires? [Editor’s note: Oregon spent $350 million fighting wildfires in 2024.]
What would it take to do the kind of thinning and prescribed burning at the level you’re talking about?
There’s three things you need. The first is money. The current estimate is $7.7 billion. The second one is operational capacity. You have to have the workforce. You need the biomass waste disposal. If you’ve got biomass now all over the ground, you have to have some place to put it. Finally, you need to have enabling policies at the state and federal level. All across the board, we’ve got major bottlenecks.
State or federal?
Both, but mostly federal. [Note: The federal government owns a larger percentage of Oregon (52%) than all other states except Alaska, Idaho, Nevada and Utah.]
Some people say Washington is doing a better job at tackling wildfire risk than Oregon.
They do have dedicated mitigation funding. That came from repeated efforts from the legislature and from the governor to get that dedicated funding, and we haven’t had that. And California has dedicated $500 million a year to thinning and prescribed fire—matched by another $500 million from the federal government.
What are the other barriers to what you envision?
NEPA—the National Environmental Policy Act—is often cited as being kind of the single regulation that prevents a lot of larger-scale forest management. The reason for that is that it allows citizen lawsuits so citizens can sue the federal government over things like insufficient planning. And that has extraordinary impacts throughout the entire system. Federal agencies will choose projects that they feel won’t get litigated as opposed to projects that really need to be done for ecological restoration. Second, there’s just so much uncertainty in that system that you can’t attract private investment.
So, just to be clear, when you say increase the pace and scale, are you talking about thinning and management, or are you also talking about commercial harvest?
I’m talking entirely about ecological thinning and prescribed fire. Within that, though, there’s a potential to offset the significant part of these costs through having some sort of a commercial component to these thinnings, because a lot of the trees that need to be removed are larger-diameter trees that do have commercial value. You still have folks that would like to see a return back to the good old days of clear-cutting and old growth and all that kind of stuff. They’re just not a serious part of the conversation.
Can you talk about prescribed fires as a means of thinning the forests?
They do a lot of prescribed fire back east. I actually worked my way through college with the drip torch doing prescribed fire in the Southeast. There’s a movement here to bring that out west. Indigenous practices rely on it very, very heavily. I am concerned that we’re not going to be able to do it at nearly the scale that we hope to do it, in part because the weather conditions here are very, very different than you have back east. There’s a tiny window in the spring and fall where you can do this, and all the climate forecasts are that those windows are actually going to just go away.
So is this an Oregon problem?
No, it’s all across the West. All across the West.
Does Oregon make it worse?
I would say the political environment here is particularly challenging. Probably more challenging than any other place that I’m aware of. I just think the timber wars here are still very much alive. If you look back at the timber harvest in Oregon versus Washington versus California, we’ve just absolutely dwarfed everybody else. The level of clear-cutting, the level of timber production that we had here was huge. That created a lot of consequences, including the fact that the environmental community has pretty recent memories of what large-scale clear-cuts do to ecosystems. And I don’t question their fears about if you start attracting hundreds of millions of dollars and billions of dollars of capital investment in mills, that’s going to create conflicts of interest.
Beyond the possibility of litigation, what are the difficulties you foresee?
A lot of the species east of the Cascades [where the fire danger is greater than on the west side of the Cascades] don’t have great commercial value. Small-diameter ponderosa pine, which is probably half of the volume there, is not a great commercial species. Very knotty, not very strong. There’s a lot of juniper, with virtually no commercial value. So there’s really not a scenario where you’re going to be generating tremendous timber revenues. And getting these mills to come back into these rural areas in the inland West, where there’s workforce issues, there’s risk issues and a lot of headwinds getting folks to invest.
For people who might not think much about forest policy, put this in broader terms.
You’re basically talking about a massive public works project, the kind of thing that we used to do like the Tennessee Valley Authority or Bonneville Power Administration. Can our country do this kind of thing any longer? It’s actually fairly straightforward what needs to be done. I mean, you build out the management plan and establish some sort of a new government structure, something where you’re able to attract private capital, but with appropriate public oversight.
We have finite resources that are probably going to get more finite. And we are going to have to get really, really good at pinpointing our public investments.
Correction: This story originally included an incorrect description of how Washington funds wildfire mitigation. OJP regrets the error.
This story was produced by the Oregon Journalism Project, a nonprofit investigative newsroom.