Shifting the conversation around wood burning

Multnomah County recently tightened its rules around wood burning in an effort to improve air quality. County leaders say what we really need is a societal change in public attitudes, similar to what we’ve seen with smoking or drunk driving. If it’s not your primary source of heat, what would it take for you to rethink using a fireplace or backyard fire pit? We hear from listeners as well as Lauren Frank, associate professor of communication at Portland State University and Troy Hall, professor and head of the Forest Ecosystems and Society Department at Oregon State University.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller:  As we talked about recently, Multnomah County has changed its messaging around wood burning. It is no longer going to give people a figurative green light for fires in fireplaces or backyard pits. Fires won’t be prohibited on those days. Just discouraged. As county commissioner Jessica Vega Pederson put it to us, she wants to create a societal change, a shift in public attitudes like what we saw with cigarette smoking or drunk driving. That got us wondering what it would take to foster a major shift in the way people think about fires to go from associations like coziness and camaraderie and warmth and fun to pollution and sickness.

I’m joined now by two people who have thought a lot about messaging and human behavior. Lauren Frank is an associate professor of Communication at Portland State University. Troy Hall is a professor and head of the Forest Ecosystems and Society department at Oregon State University. Troy, your work revolves around social psychology and what motivates people to change their behavior. What do you find are the biggest motivators?

Troy Hall:  That’s a great question. People are motivated by taking actions that align with their values. When we’re talking to people and trying to convince them, like in this case, to change the behavior that is deeply held, being able to align with the values that they care deeply about will be much more effective than standard statistical types of messages - the kinds of messages we often see on websites and things like that. People are motivated by empathy and I think probably we’ll talk about that a little bit more in terms of how it might play into this kind of messaging campaign.

Miller:  Lauren Frank, you studied public health campaigns and social norms. What goes through your mind when you hear Multnomah County officials saying they want to change hearts and minds when it comes to wood burning?

Lauren Frank:  First, I think social norm change is a really good way to change things long term after a campaign has actually ended. But at the same time it’s an extremely slow process. So when we think of examples like drunk driving or cigarette smoking - those are things that really changed nationwide and over decades - it’s not something where we can simply message quickly and change things.

Miller:  If Multnomah County or the state of Oregon came to you and said we want to create a marketing campaign to get people to even just think twice before they have a fire in their fireplace or backyard (and I should say they’ve been clear that we’re talking about recreational fires as opposed to people who have no choice but to heat their homes with wood) But if they said we want your help with a marketing campaign, where would you start?

Hall:  I would start with understanding who the audiences are and what they currently believe and think about recreational burning and what alternatives there might be, how it’s linked to their daily lives. I think in this particular case the behavior is challenging because, as you mentioned in the lead, backyard burning is something that might be tied to people’s family customs and traditions. It’s cozy, it has all these benefits that we see and at the same time it’s a classic free rider problem where I think, ‘gosh, my little input has no real effect’. So it’s not really salient to them. So [it’s important to] understand who the audiences are, who is going to be a credible source with a different audience, what’s going to be a credible message. The choice to frame a message as - ‘save your lungs, save a life’ versus ‘if we don’t clean up air quality, we’re gonna lose jobs in the county’. Those are very different messages that would resonate really differently with different audiences. So [it’s] important to really understand how people are going to receive the different kinds of messages and who’s providing that message.

Miller:  We asked folks what they thought about this issue and what it would take to get them to change the way they think about wood smoke. We got a ton of different responses and I want to play a variety of them for you in this conversation. We’re gonna start with this one.

Connor from Malala:  (with clearly labored breathing) Yes, I’d be willing to give up my backyard fire pit burning because I have acute asthma and wood smoke makes it very hard for me to breathe and exacerbates my condition. Since I live in Clackamas County outside of Portland, I also wish discussion would be had about slash piles after logging, since I live in a rural community surrounded by tree farms where there are slash piles waiting to be burned this year.

Miller:  What do you think about the idea of an ad campaign that would feature someone like Connor or a story like his to put a human face on this issue?

Frank:  I think that’s exactly the kind of direction that will be hopeful in terms of starting initial conversation. Because right now for many of us, we don’t actually see a link between recreational wood burning and our own either susceptibility or severity of how bad it would be for health effects. Some of my colleagues at Portland State actually did a survey on this back in spring 2020 and found that while air pollution is seen as one of the biggest environmental concerns, most people in Portland didn’t see it as something that they personally could be affected by. And so including these kinds of individual stories might actually change that understanding around that susceptibility [to the] link to health effects

Miller:  Troy Hall, another issue though, that he brought up in the second half of his voicemail was being in a more rural area. I should say he’s calling from Clackamas County, so not the most rural part of Oregon but how do you think this question of encouraging people to have fewer recreational fires would play out in rural areas compared to urban areas?

Hall:  I think it could be a challenge. I think, for a variety of reasons, rural residents are often used to backyard burning frankly, and in Oregon, maybe not in Multnomah County so much but in a lot of the state, we’re encouraging people to remove brush to cut down trees to get rid of flammable material around homes and often we burn it. And so just like Connor said, we have slash burning, we have smoke from wildfires, we have smoke from prescribed fires. So it’ll be an interesting challenge to differentiate the message around the effects of the smoke that is going to come from your backyard fire pit versus this larger environment in which we have lots of smoke and lots more of it. Additionally, one other thing about knowing your audience and the credible messengers is [that] if people from any political persuasion associate this with some kind of political position or view or ‘the government telling me what to do’, that can create defensiveness and reactiveness to the message, in which case you’ll have a real challenging time.

Miller:  Along those notes, given where we are now, it seems very hard for me to imagine that this wouldn’t be seen broadly as people in government who come from some progressive point of view saying ‘this is an appropriate decision that we should take’ in terms of either regulation or suggestion and the pushback that would come from people who are more from a conservative point of view, saying, ‘don’t tell me what to do’, Am I wrong?

Frank:  No, I absolutely agree with you. I think what we have seen over the past several years is that increasingly lots of public health issues are becoming politically polarized in such a way that we automatically either think this sounds more like a liberal viewpoint or this sounds more like a conservative viewpoint. And that means that when we’re getting messaging from the government, we will automatically have people dividing themselves into groups of - ‘this is speaking to people like me’ or ‘this is speaking to other people’ and they’ll react accordingly. Either saying yes, that means great, I’m part of the audience and I’m going to adopt this behavior and stop doing recreational wood burning or they might go and do the opposite and actually we could see people who feel really turned off by messages end[ing] up increasing their recreational wood burning. If they feel upset and defensive about the kinds of requests they’re hearing.

Miller:  Let’s listen to another voicemail.

Joanna from Portland:  Hi, my name is Joanna. I’m calling from Portland and what I would like to have to support my inclination to stop using the fireplace are facts. Let’s have some facts. What does the fireplace put out? How many fireplaces are estimated in Portland? What would a decrease result in? How does it all work together to make the planet healthier?

Miller:  We haven’t talked about this yet and I’m curious what research shows in terms of the value of facts, in terms of moving the needle. And we are talking in terms of changing public perception or even more, changing public action. I’m not asking if facts matter broadly,but if being told facts changes what people believe?

Hall:  Sadly, I would say generally no. There are folks for whom the facts are important to them. The kinds of folks who might be really invested in the topic. Like it sounds like Joanna is. For most people, the facts are just a kind of background. And in this particular case, it might in fact be that the facts could mitigate against message acceptance. If we were to think about the contribution of smoke from recreational burning compared to the density concentration of smoke during a prescribed fire, if the actual amount is actually fairly small, it’s very easy for people to counter argue and say, ‘wow, it’s just a drop in the bucket’. It’s an important drop in the bucket. And it’s one that we can control perhaps a lot more easily than wildfire smoke, but you have to be fairly careful with relying solely on the facts. People are swayed a lot by emotion as we all know. Just witnessing what Lauren said about the politicization of communications, people are taking the same facts and interpreting them in really different ways.

Miller:  We’re talking right now about what it would take for there to be a big shift in the way people think about burning wood in fireplaces and backyard fire pits were talking with Troy Hall, a professor and head of the Forest Ecosystems and Society department at Oregon State University and Lauren Frank, an associate professor of Communication at Portland State University. Let’s listen to another voicemail.

Erica from the metro area:  Hi, my name is Erica Morrison. I’m a lung and ICU doctor in the metro area and I grew up in Oregon loving a wood burning fire and loving a fire pit on the beach. And the more I practice pulmonary medicine and see how my patients are affected when they can only use burning wood for heat, how when their neighbors are burning things it really makes their breathing worse, I just really don’t think, anymore, that burning when it’s not absolutely necessary is responsible. So we have really quit doing any kind of decorative burning in our own home and I really advise most of my patients to see if they can, at all, avoid lighting things on fire in their home. It’s going to be a lot healthier for their lungs and their family. And we need solutions for people to get clean heating in their homes. And really the rest of us need to take a hard look at burning wood, you know smoke is smoke right? And putting it in the air and putting it in people’s lungs, it’s just not healthy. So I really think it is time for us to shift away from lighting things on fire and then healing them.

Miller:  I’m struggling to figure out which category to put a voice like Erica’s a healthcare professional in in terms of the context of what we were hearing earlier from Troy Hall is her voice here or in the kind of voice that you could imagine in a public health campaign? Is she the credible source that we were talking about earlier? Is she a kind of charismatic personal story? Or is she somebody who brings facts in a way that human beings often don’t want to reckon with great questions, so when we think about what it takes to be a credible source, we can actually have somebody like Erica who both has knowledge in her role in the medical field, but also from her own personal experience. Because those are different kinds of expertise she brings that can allow her to be a credible source in both ways. And that kind of story could both serve as an example for us of how we might change and also give us motivation of why in terms of understanding what she’s seen with her own patients. And so that can be a very powerful kind of voice in terms of the messaging that we’re hearing and that both works from a larger messaging standpoint. But also if she was a friend or neighbor of mine who I was speaking to and hearing this kind of information, that one on one interaction is especially powerful.

Miller:  We got this voicemail from Toby Pantene who lives outside of West Linn in the Stafford Hamlet.

Toby from Stafford Hamlet:  My mom and I are relatively poor and the least expensive way to keep warm is to have a fire in our fireplace. So all through the winter months, usually from October until the beginning of May. All day long and all night long, we have a fire. For me to no longer use that and depend exclusively upon electricity is going to be extremely expensive and as I said, we’re relatively poor. We can’t really afford that.

Miller:  What do you see as the class issues at play here?

Hall:  You hit on a really good point. Ordinances and the recommendations clearly privilege those who are able to heat and cook with sources other than wood and it’s a good aspect of the ordinance that it clearly exempts people whose only source of heat is wood, who need to cook over wood. The care will need to come in, not stigmatizing people. If we do end up with developing more of a social norm around not burning, then, just as is the case with tobacco and drunk driving, those behaviors become stigmatized. And for people who quite legally are using wood to cook with or heat with, we want to be careful that they are not being stigmatized and looked down upon by their neighbors.

Miller:  We have one more voicemail. We have time for one that gets to the interpersonal issues involved here. Let’s have a listen.

Richard from Portland:  My name is Richard Maloy and I live in Southeast Portland. You know, people look me in the face and tell me, ‘well it’s my individual right to burn’. What about my individual right not to have smoke in and around my house? There was smoke. It’s, to me, astounding, the lack of interest. And I think it’s probably because there’s so many people burning that nobody wants to step up. Well, I’m the idiot that has stepped up and I’ve gotten threatened, I had my door kicked in, I’ve gotten in a fistfight at the end of summer, I’ve been yelled at, I’ve been called every name you can possibly imagine. Just when I go over and say God, you know your smoke, I can smell it at my house, I can smell it all over the place. I try to be friendly and I get nothing but resistance.

Miller:  What stands out to you in that message?

Frank:  That is such a difficult problem because it can be so challenging to go and talk to people directly if you know you have differing viewpoints. One of the things about wood burning is that it is so public and one person’s choice to burn wood recreationally is going to create that smoke for others. One of the things that messaging can do is allow for people’s choice not to. People like Richard [could] try to make their beliefs equally public either through something like lawn signs, which Multnomah County is making available, or if there were social media posts, things like that to start a conversation in a way that hopefully would be allowing for more supportive responses and not in that same direct confrontation manner. That can be quite challenging and can make many of us feel more scared that we shouldn’t speak up, even if a number of us actually agree with Richard.

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