November 3, 2025 • 47 mins
Most Silicon Valley CEOs who cash out their stock options start another tech company. Yishan Wong planted trees instead. After helping build PayPal, Facebook, and serving as Reddit's CEO, Wong concluded that humanity's biggest challenge wouldn't be solved with algorithms or network effects—it would be solved by restoring the planet's forests at an unprecedented scale. Mitch Ratcliffe sits down with Wong to discuss Terraformation, the company he founded in 2020 with an audacious mission: restore 3 billion acres of native forest worldwide—an area larger than the entire United States.
Planting a trillion trees isn't just about seeds in the ground. It's about solving bottlenecks like funding gaps that leave 95% of qualified forestry teams without resources, seed shortages, lack of infrastructure and technology, gaps in tracking and verification. Terraformation built a support system that includes modular seed banks, solar-powered nurseries, open source forest management software, which is called Terraware and a seed to carbon forest accelerator that's modeled on tech startup accelerators. Since founding Terraformation, Wong has enabled the planting of over 4.7 million trees across 394 species, established 19 seed banks and 21 nurseries and created more than 798 jobs.
"We made Terraware not because this is the most genius piece of technology that will change the world," Yishan explains. "We said, hey, let's just help forestry teams achieve certain basic necessary activities." Unlike commercial timber plantations that prioritize fast-growing monocultures, Terraformation focuses on biodiverse native forests. Native tree species can support an order of magnitude more life than non-native species because they've co-evolved over millions of years. "Trees are the anchor species for a forest ecosystem," he added. "What you're doing is you're growing trees as the anchor species so that all of the other life in that forest ecosystem comes back."
Terraformation recently won the Keeling Curve Prize and the G20's RestorLife Award. The company also received recognition at the Global Sustainability Awards, winning SME Company of the Year. Yishan explains why a former Reddit CEO believes in low tech solutions that are the right approach to climate change, how Silicon Valley's lessons about scaling systems could apply to reforestation and what it takes to build an organization designed to be replicated rather than defended. You can learn more about the company at Terraformation.com.
Planting a trillion trees isn't just about seeds in the ground. It's about solving bottlenecks like funding gaps that leave 95% of qualified forestry teams without resources, seed shortages, lack of infrastructure and technology, gaps in tracking and verification. Terraformation built a support system that includes modular seed banks, solar-powered nurseries, open source forest management software, which is called Terraware and a seed to carbon forest accelerator that's modeled on tech startup accelerators. Since founding Terraformation, Wong has enabled the planting of over 4.7 million trees across 394 species, established 19 seed banks and 21 nurseries and created more than 798 jobs.
"We made Terraware not because this is the most genius piece of technology that will change the world," Yishan explains. "We said, hey, let's just help forestry teams achieve certain basic necessary activities." Unlike commercial timber plantations that prioritize fast-growing monocultures, Terraformation focuses on biodiverse native forests. Native tree species can support an order of magnitude more life than non-native species because they've co-evolved over millions of years. "Trees are the anchor species for a forest ecosystem," he added. "What you're doing is you're growing trees as the anchor species so that all of the other life in that forest ecosystem comes back."
Terraformation recently won the Keeling Curve Prize and the G20's RestorLife Award. The company also received recognition at the Global Sustainability Awards, winning SME Company of the Year. Yishan explains why a former Reddit CEO believes in low tech solutions that are the right approach to climate change, how Silicon Valley's lessons about scaling systems could apply to reforestation and what it takes to build an organization designed to be replicated rather than defended. You can learn more about the company at Terraformation.com.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you
are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability
in your ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating
the transition to a sustainable carbon neutral society, and I'm
your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
Most tech CEOs who leave Silicon Valley do so to
(00:31):
start another tech company, but our guest today, Yieshan Wong,
took a different path. After contributing to the growth of PayPal, Facebook,
and Reddit, where he was the CEO, he concluded that
the biggest problem facing humanity wouldn't be solved with algorithms
or network effects. It would be solved with trees. In
twenty twenty, Wong founded terror Formation with a mission to
(00:54):
restore three billion acres of native forest worldwide. That's more
land than the entire unit United States. Terraformation's goal is
rebuilt biodiverse ecosystems that take root at the speed and
scale that will actually make a difference to climate change.
The numbers tell a sobering story. Since the dawn of
(01:14):
the industrial era, the Earth has lost half of its
forest to degradation and destruction At current reforestation rates, it
would take about one thousand years to restore even a
third of what's been lost, but Long argues we have
only a decade to establish forests that can mature into
a meaningful carbon sink by mid century, when nations have
committed to reaching net zero and we are not on
(01:36):
track to meet those goals. Planting a trillion trees isn't
just about seeds in the ground. It's about solving bottlenecks
like funding gaps that leave ninety five percent of qualified
forestry teams without resources, seed shortages, lack of infrastructure, and
technology gaps in tracking and verification. Terraformation built a support
(01:57):
system that includes modular seed banks, solar powered nurseries, open
source forest management software which is called Terraware, and a
seed to carbon forest accelerator that's modeled on tech startup accelerators.
Since founding Terraformation, Wong has enabled the planting over for
four point seven million trees across three hundred and ninety
(02:19):
four species, established nineteen feedbanks in twenty one nurseries, and
created more than seven hundred and ninety eight jobs. Terrorformation
recently won the Keeling Curve Prize and the g twenty's
Restore Life award its first carbon credit sale based on
a mangrove restoration project in Ghana, is bringing jobs and
(02:39):
coastal protection to local communities at a carbon offset price
just shy of fifty dollars per ton. In an industry
built on intellectual property and competitive advantages, Terrorformation wants to
be copied. Wong has said he wants a thousand copycats,
arguing that climate change is too big for any single
organization to solve. So this is an open source undertaking
(03:02):
and he believes the only path forward is mass innovation.
We'll talk with Yeshan about why a former Reddit CEO
believes in low tech solutions that are the right approach
to climate change, how Silicon Valley's lessons about scaling systems
could apply to reforestation, and what it takes to build
an organization designed to be replicated rather than defended. You
(03:24):
can learn more about Terrorformation at terrorformation dot com. Let's
see what the possibilities that we can grow are. Right
after this quick commercial break, Welcome to the show, you, Shan,
(03:45):
How are you today?
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Great? Thank you for having me well.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Good to have you here, and thank you for taking
the time to talk with the audience. You know, I
wanted to start off by asking about the fact that,
you know, you spend a decade or more building some
of Silicon Valley's biggest companies. Was there a moment or
a revelation that made you think, gosh, I should do
reforestation instead. Uh?
Speaker 2 (04:09):
You know, yeah. I didn't come from what you would
call it, you know, traditional environmental background. So I came
up through engineering, and especially engineering that worked on very
large scale projects. I worked on a number of the
like PayPal, Facebook, and then and read It and those
(04:29):
are just some of the companies that operate like at
the limits of what we know of in terms of
what we can build at scale. And so that's actually
informed that informed a lot of my thinking, but but
in a way that I didn't totally understand at the time,
because you know, when you're a fish, you know you're
in the water, you're I think the things like you're
(04:50):
in water, you don't know what water is, right, So
I always thought of it as a very large scale problem.
And so in fact, it was one of the times
in between jobs when I was in Hawaii and it
was it was very hot. Now it's it's supposed to
be warm in Hawaii, that's why you go there, right,
But it was crazy, unseasonably hot, right, And and my
(05:14):
my local friends were there, they were they said, like,
you know, it's never been this hot. This is this
is not historical, like we've never seen this, right, Like
I live up in the mountains where it's always cool,
but it was super hot and like no one could sleep.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
And that was just this kind of moment where I
was like, you know what, this climate change thing has
got to stop. We have to solve this. And so
I thought of it not from the perspective of how
I think a lot of what you might call the
environmental establishment things of it, which is like there there's
a conventional answer, which is like, well, we need to
reduce emissions. Okay, yeah, so we need to reduce emissions.
(05:48):
So that's that's the conventional answer. But at the time,
even now, you know, we weren't doing a very good job.
So I thought of it as like, okay, well, so
what if the world fails to reduce emissions, is there
a no other way to address this at scale that
is commensurate or at least we'll like make the problem better. Right,
Because sometimes when you have a very very big problem.
(06:09):
People often get intimidated and they say like, oh, we
can't solve it, right, Like, if you can solve twenty
percent of it, you can solve fifty percent of it.
You still made it better, and you also make a
good start. That's an important part of it. And there
are these just different mindsets about tackling problems at scale.
And so that's how I started just doing a whole scale,
you know, full scale survey of all of the proposed
(06:33):
geoengineering methods that people had come up with for solving
climate change at scale. And it turns out if you
look at all of them and then you evaluate them
and you sort of think about, like, Okay, what criteria
really makes a solution that can be done for real,
Like if you're really going to do it as opposed
to it, because a lot of climate change solutions discussions
are kind of like those are like dinner party conversations,
(06:55):
Oh this would be cool and make a giant space mirror.
But if you actually think about whether or out there
they're really going to work at what would work? It
comes down to turns out the most effective geoengineering solution
is large scale native reforestation and and and that's so
that's that's how I got to it, right, It's like
what thing would actually work at scale, could be practically
(07:18):
done at the scale where it would have a planetary
level impact, right, And there's all these other considerations like
when you want to when you want to implement a
very very large scale solution, you need to use as
little technology as possible. That's like one of one of
the key factors that I learned in Silicon Valley. Like
(07:39):
Silicon Valley does very good technology marketing, right where make
you think that the marketing that the product is magical,
the technology is never going to fail, it's always going
to work and it's going to solve. But that's not
that's not the case, right, Like if you use a
new technology product as bugs and so if you want
to build something very very big, you have to use
technology that's like a few generations back, that's very very reliable.
(08:02):
And so when you look at all the solutions, then
reforce station sort of comes to the fore as like
the one that is the least infeasible is the way I.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Like to say, Well, so then you took that insight
and you built terrorware. Can you describe what that open
source forest management platform consists of I guess is the
best way to put it? And how is it being
used by more than three hundred different organizations around the world.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Yeah, it is. We are surprised at how many organizations
have taken us up. This is a significant fraction of
organizations that are working on reforestation. What we found is
that if you look at how technology has been adopted
throughout other industries, it's usually not some magical silver bullet
(08:50):
that just solves everything. What it really is is the
embedding of little pieces of tools or productivity suite. Right.
If you if you look at how you know, the
original really big thing that sort of moved the world forward,
Like Microsoft Office. You remember that, I'm kind of sort
of dating myself right now everyone uses Google? You know Google,
(09:14):
I was.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
There, don't worry about it.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Yeah. So like Microsoft Office, it's it's many tools, right,
and it's embedded within the entire workflow of information workers
in an office, right, spreadsheets, word processors, right, like slides, right,
Like there's a little database thing, right. And so what
(09:36):
we realized is that in terms of forest management, there
are many things that you need to do. You need
to track seed collection, you need to manage your nursery,
you need to monitor out planting, and those are all
like if you actually laid on, those are all different,
very different tasks. Right. So it's not just one product,
it's a suite of products. And you know, no one
(09:59):
was really making good software for forest management, right because
it wasn't it wasn't cool. And so we're like, well,
if we want to really help everyone do all of
this better, we have first we have to do it ourselves.
So we have an in house forest ROUTEAM that does
it so that we're not just writing software as outsiders.
(10:20):
That's one key part of it. And so we do
it so that we know, oh, okay, we're gonna need
a piece of software here to solve this very specific problem,
and we'll need another thing here, right. So terrorware is
not just like one little product. It's like many products
sort of gathered together in a suite, and we call
it this thing. We tell you we have this thing,
but if you're asked to use it, it does many
(10:41):
different things all along the pipeline of forest management. An
interesting point is that kind of sweet nature of terrorware,
but the other side of successful transitions in any industry
using technology is change management. How do you help these
organizations understand what they can do with it and develop
(11:01):
best practices. You know, there's one thing that we found here.
Here's another surprising thing that I kind of learned, which
is you don't really get people to change their behavior
by telling them what to do. Yeah, you get you
can't get people to change what they do by yelling
at them or lecturing them or whatever. Telling you really
just do it by doing it being successful and kind
(11:24):
of showing off. Right. You don't have to show off
really hard if you're successful, because usually people will notice
if you're successful, and then they'll copy you. Our our
primary strategy is actually to do it ourselves and to
be really successful at it so that other people copy us.
There there is a there's a thing in tech where
a lot of times, whenever there's a successful tech company,
(11:47):
you get like a a copycat, right, like a Chinese copycat,
a German copycat. Right. It's like very there's actually like
an incubator in Germany that like produces tech copy as right,
And people don't like that. They're like, oh no, there's
a copycat, and they get really upset about it. In
our case, we want a thousand copycats. We've sort of
(12:08):
figured out the scale of what it takes to build
a worldwide movement, and that cannot be done by any
one company. If we were to try to be one
company to do that, it would be, you know, the
largest company like ever in history. It would be a
management nightmare. But we figured out that somewhere between like
a thousand or ten thousand copycats. Right, we just want
(12:30):
a whole bunch of organizations doing what we do. We
will do it as well as we can and say, hey,
we're successful. You can do this too it and we'll
show you how.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Right.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
So that's how we how we intend to act at scale.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
You've raised thirty million dollars. Was that thirty million dollars
impact capital that was intending to spread the word or
were they looking for a profit. I'm curious how you
pitched that.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
We said, hey, we have a solution where we're going
to solve climate change. We also think that solving climate
change is a highly it's a huge value creating act. Right,
you solve a big problem that people a lot of
people view as a problem. This creates value and the
one of the things that you sort of like learn
(13:16):
in Silicon Valley, or sort of taken on faith reasonably
so is if you can solve a really big problem
and you're the one closest to it, you can usually
monetize some part of it and make money up with that.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
So many of our investors, in fact almost all of
them come from Silicon Valiant to understand that notion, right,
which is you do not need your business model worked
out on day one, but you have to have a
clear sense of what problem you're going to solve, and
that it's valuable. Our capital was entirely venture capital, but
from impact investors. So there's kind of continuum of investors
(13:52):
where there's like pure philanthropy where you're kind of like
throwing money over the wall, right, you don't expectating, And
then there's irr focused investing, right like the oil is
in there in the ground, go get it and sell
it and they give me money. And there's the people
in between, right who want to make an investment but
are not irre focused. So what's interesting is all of
(14:18):
our investors have said to us, hey, if you come
back and make a billion dollars but you don't have
any climate impact, I'm going to consider that a loss, like,
that's a failure in my investment. But if you come
back and say, hey, we solved climate change when we
lost all your money, We'll be like, great, that's exactly
what I wanted to happen, right, And so that difference
(14:40):
is like, hey, solve this problem. If you return my money,
I'm happy because they put their money somewhere and it
solved the problem and it just came back.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
Right.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
But we do actually believe that this is a huge
value creating act, but it's also a very very long
term investment.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
You've also said that climate change is a physical problem
about moving atoms and not a political one or just
a political one. How did that engineering background that you
described earlier shape that perspective? And I guess the other
question I have is, and how do you ignore the
politics that are swirling around climate issues, and particularly in
twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Well, it's two questions, I guess I answer, but I'll
take them in turn. Well, I guess, like my career
experience has been watching technology and sort of products advanced
during a time where I mean even back then, I
(15:37):
would say, like much of my lifetime it's been a
very politically you know, right, now we consider it like
very politically crazy. Right, But in the in the twenty
years leading up to this, it's been.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
A little hectic.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
Yeah, it's been like pretty hectic. Right, Like if you
were alive in the eighties and nineties, it wasn't this bad,
and then after nine to eleven it was it was
getting crazier and crazy, and now it's like really right,
But what I saw was that huge advances in technology
really changed the landscape. Just what people are able to
(16:13):
do with a certain amount of energy and effort is
changed radically. And so when you make technological advances in
the world of atoms, it shifts the terrain, and existing
political forces are affected by that. Right, So you have
(16:35):
this sort of like more core layer that, right, Like
that you can do like if I were to say something,
if I do something like, well, okay, this was actually done.
If electric cars could be affordably made and they were cool,
like you know, they weren't like clunky or whatever hyper expensive,
(16:56):
suddenly the markets would change, like a lot more electric
cars would be sold, and you know, there would be
a lot less gas being used. Right, And then then someone,
a guy actually went did this, right, he's very famous,
very controversial now for all certain reasons.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
Right.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
But and then you know, if you there's lots of
politics around the space travel as well. But if you
suddenly make the cost of space travel like one tenth
of what it was before, suddenly a lot more stuff
can be done, right, And so changing certain physical realities
can have a huge, you know, sort of leverage effect
(17:30):
on politics. Was what I witnessed sort of like in
this span of my career. So so that was the
first thing that that sort of occurred to me, Right, Like,
if we can implement at any appreciable scale a useful
you know, affordable carbon draw down method, right that is
accessible to everybody, right, that changes the political conversation. So
(17:54):
that that's like the first private questions. The second part
is it is very very political. So it's like how
do you avoid that. You sort of have this choice
as like how you're going to participate in politics, right,
Like the winds are blowing one direction, there's another wind
blowing in another direction, and you can choose whether or
(18:15):
not you're going to go along with that. And I
would say that during this very chaotic time, that means
there's more room to say something new, and we say, look,
we are not, Like, our solution is not about your
(18:35):
politics being right or your politics being right. Like, we
believe this is important, right, this is a problem for
the planet. There's lots and lots of people who believe
in this who are neither Republicans or Democrats because they're
not in the United States, and they think you're both crazy, right,
but that these four ESTs are important, right, and I'm
talking about basically everyone is not right exactly. Who can
(19:00):
really hate trees? I've I've been surprised because, like, yeah,
in America politics, there's like hate for everything. Everything kind
of gets polarized, right, But like it's been hard to
find anyone who really hates trees. You know, you kind
of have some some people were like skeptics or this
and that, right, but like what they're trees. One of
the things about trees is that they don't talk, they
(19:20):
don't argue with you. They just grow and they help
the climate. Right, they're just quiet allies. So they're very
non objectionable. I try to speak for the trees, and
you can always say something different. When you know there's
a lot of politics swirling around, it's a sort of
it's up in the air. Reference of the day.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
My wife always says I should lean into that reference,
and I like feel a little funny, but I'm starting
to come around to it.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
So when you look at the math, what does success
look like? And what's the time frame for success?
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Ooh okay, So based on current emissions, there is is
actually there's an actual amount of forest and biomass that
would roughly offset those emissions. And I did like a
rough back of the envelope calculation and it's it's roughly
(20:19):
like the amount of new forests that would be covered
by about two billion net new forests. There are two
billion acres of net new forest and on a rough
order of magnitude estimate that that's about one trillion trees.
So you've probably heard of the one trillion trees program,
and it's convenient that that nice little number is on
the right order of magnitude. It's about two billion acres
(20:41):
at about I think like three hundred trees per acre,
which is like within the range is actually very very large, right,
like the one fifty to three thousand or something. But
we can take one trillion trees as a rough order
of magnitude goal. Because one of the things is if
we can collectively read one trillion. It's actually pretty easy
(21:02):
to then get to two trillion, because you've built the momentum,
the supply chain, the logistics, the cultural appreciation for that.
So I would say that one trillion trees within the
next decade is what success would look like. And I
think that's very possible for one very interesting reason, which
is that reforestation is highly parallelizable. It's wonderfully parallelizable because
(21:30):
you can be planting your one thousandth tree at the
same time that some other guy in some other country
doesn't have to coordinate with you, is planting the two
billionth tree. And so it really is a mass scale
problem and the work of one person doesn't really depend
on everyone else. It doesn't proceed in Cereal. It's just
(21:53):
a thing right where you spread the idea and you
spread the basic knowledge needed, and then once everyone is
doing it, it proceeds very quickly.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
We've reached a clearing in this forest. I want to
stop for a moment and take a quick commercial break.
We're going to be right back. Stay tuned, folks, welcome
back to sustainability in your ear. We're talking with Terra
Formation CEO Yeshan Wang, who previously was CEO at Reddit
(22:23):
about reforesting the planet as fast as possible. Yishan. One
of the things that's interesting about a lot of plantings
is they're sort of monocultures, and so you end up
with a canopy that's absolutely flat as you look at
it from far away. Most of the Pacific Northwest's replanted
forests look that way. For instance, you are trying to
(22:44):
plant a mixture of trees that are appropriate for whatever
setting they're in. Talk about how you came to the
conclusion that we need to think diversely, not just think
about planting a lot of the same kind of trees.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
The monoculture thinking comes from mostly from you know, commercial optimization, right.
You sort of pick the tree that uh, you know,
like most closely matches your whatever your desired I R
R and you know they're they're sort of growth characteristics,
(23:20):
and then you say, okay, well then we should plant
only this tree, right, And if you're doing a timber
plantation and you are trying to produce wood of consistent quality,
that makes sense, right, And and that's that's sort of
how the people have thought about uh reforestation in terms
of just like timber production, right. And and while while
(23:41):
actually that that gets like a pretty bad rap in
the environmental space, I think actually it's that's like fine
for a sustainable timber, because you know, we need wood
for things, and in fact, putting wood into furniture is
a good waves questering that carbon. But if you want
to restore forests for climate and in a resilient way
(24:03):
where you don't have to take care of it forever,
Like you want to be able to plant a forest
and maybe you work on it and take and watch
it and monitor for like maybe ten fifteen years, and
then you can like ignore it and restore it as
an old growth forest. You want a biodiverse mixture of
native species, and the reason for that is very interesting.
(24:26):
It turns out that trees are the anchor species for
a forest ecosystem. All of the other species that are
there generally sort of live off of the byproducts of
those trees, right, Like insects, fungi, bacteria, shrubs, grasses, they
all live off the byproducts of the tree.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
Right.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
And then eventually, on top of that you have like fauna,
you know, birds and animals such and native species. Native
tree species can support an order of magnitude more species
than and non native species. And usually when you optimize
for fast growing monocultures, you're taking like a foreign invasive
(25:08):
species that's very often like eucalyptus or something like that,
but those don't support as many other species around them.
And the reason for that is because the native species
have coevolved for millions of years with the other species
that are evolved in symbiotic relationships with them and feed
(25:29):
off of those byproducts. And so what you actually want
is you want to plant the tree species that are native.
You want to plant a mix of them so as
to support the largest possible number of other plant, animals, insects,
fungi species in that ecosystem, because it turns out that
(25:52):
the real carbon sequestration is all of the life there,
because you have to remember, all life is carbon. That
is the real carbon stock in an old growth forest.
It's not just the trees. A lot of people think, oh,
you're growing trees. Know what you're doing is you're growing
trees as the anchor species so that all of the
other life in that forest ecosystem comes back. And that's
(26:14):
why it becomes a thing where it's not just like, oh,
the tree grows and then it dies. You know, there's
a subjections like, oh, when the tree dies or like
re releases the co two, But that's not where you're
going for. What you're doing is you're producing this real
self renewing, perpetual forest where the tree grows, it supports
other life. When it dies, the carbon goes back into
(26:34):
the soil into all the new trees, and you have
an ever deepening old growth forest. So that's that's the
whole trick.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
I really appreciate that because I've watched these kind of
single story canopies emerging with dismay, and you know where
I happen to live at the world inner urban interface.
It's it's a combination of ponderos of pine, dug fur,
and oaks, and they have to all be here otherwise
the wildlife is not going to survive. You mentioned in
(27:05):
a moment ago, but what is the role of forestry
companies in the reforestation equation?
Speaker 2 (27:11):
I think actually they have like a huge role to play,
and many of them are actually getting on board with
this reforestation. I think there's there's a little bit of
a fear that people have about forestry products, and you know,
timber companies like well, they're just like they're gonna cut
down all the trees or whatever. Right. I actually think
the the forestry product industry like timber is actually like
(27:35):
super super important because we need demand for forestry products
and satisfying the world demand for like wood products is
only a tiny percentage of what the total amount of
forest would be that you would need to that you
would need to plant in order to reforce the world.
(27:56):
It's something like less than one percent, right, Like I
think people maybe imagine like whoa, you know, like it'd
be like ninety percent of you know, like the planalliys
for us, and you cut them all the bounds, Like
that's not actually what would happen, right, if you were
to in fact reforce the world at scale needed to
make a dent in climate change, even if you then
involved forestry products as an industry as part of that.
(28:20):
Just the amount of wood and paper, you know, all
those things that we need that's like less than one
percent of those for us. But there's a huge benefit
there because those companies have a huge amount of institutional
expertise in how to grow and grow trees and manage
the land. Right, we really need that expertise, right, YEA.
(28:42):
I have a similar I guess you might call it
like environmentally politically incorrect view about oil companies, which is
I think like the drilling from oil company the technology
from oil companies drilling would be really useful to use
for thermal like for geothermal.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Drillingurpose repurposhing it.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
Yeah, absolutely, Yeah, Like pirthly like that, there's a lot
of technology from one to the other, and we shouldn't
like just have this kind of vibes based like, oh
that's bad, so we shouldn't do this, right. I think,
like timber companies have a huge amount of institutional expertise
when it comes to like how do you grow a
healthy forest? Right? How do you manage it?
Speaker 1 (29:16):
How do you monitor it?
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Right? And I would like to see more of that
expertise sort of move into the environmental restoration movement. And
I don't think that there's there's a lot of good
synergies there.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Some of the some of the conflict we were talking
about before, It has to debate in order for that
to really happen. But I do agree that we're going.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
To say it's everyone's planet, right, Yeah, so every everyone
has a state in.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
This so let's change the subject a little bit and
that and talk about how you've invested in creating economic
opportunity as well. So and in the Reda Project, which
is a mangrove restoration project in the an low wetlands
of Ghana, you created more than three hundred and fifty jobs,
many of them held by women. And you're bringing sustainable
aquaculture and beekeeping and other services to communities that contribute
(30:05):
to the biodiversity of their environment. How important is that
climate solutions also address economic equity.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
I think that this is a funny view for someone
who works in nature to have. Maybe I think people,
human beings are the prime driver of what happens on
this planet, for better or worse. We are now the
most powerful and influential species on this planet, and what
we do is going to matter. And so what we
(30:35):
found is the success of a reforestation project is most
heavily affected by whether or not the community that lives
there buys into the project and supports the project and
wants the reforestation to happen. That's really really key. In
the past few decades, there have been a few projects
(30:55):
that weren't where basically some like big oil company went
and bought a bunch of land somewhere and then fenced
it off and said to the people who lived around there,
you can't come in anymore. We're planting trees. So that's
not going And that doesn't work because you can't actually
enforce laws from far away, right, Like if someone lives
(31:15):
next to a forest and they need to cut down
the forest where their livelihood, they will cross the fence
or bribe the guard and they won't cut down the forest.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
And the history is replete with examples of that.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
Yeah, exactly, the forest actually belongs to whoever is living
closest to it. That is the real truth of ownership.
The land version of whatever like possession is nine tenths ownership, right.
And so what you really need to do is reforestation
projects need to be designed as projects that benefit the
(31:50):
communities around them. And it turns out this is not hard.
You just have to sort of have this like reorientation
of your view because there are many communities who remember that,
you know, in the time of their grandfather, there's a
great forest here, and you know they're like really good
fishing in this area, or you know it was just
like a richer place. But now the land has sort
(32:12):
of become you know, like dried or whatever. The forests
have died off. And so there are many communities who
want to reforest, they want to restore those those ecosystems,
but they are they're missing some technical knowledge, some infrastructure assistance,
right like some some financing or whatever. Right, So there
are many communities who want to do it, and engagement
(32:33):
with those communities that value the forest, that want the forest,
and if the forests were restored, would play an active
role in maintaining and growing the forest. That is the
primary driver of project success. So we don't do it
in order to you provide economic benefit. We do it
(32:56):
because it would provide economic benefit, because that is what's
good for the project, right, what's what's good for humans
is what's good for the project. And that that's how
that's how everyone like these are all stakeholders, right, So
if you do something for the planet, has to benefit all.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
The stakeholders in some way.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
And so that's that's how it works with projects as well.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
I was really intrigued by the price of your initial
carbon credit sales at around fifty dollars a ton. That's
a lot lower than a lot of other forms of
carbon credit that are emerging right now, could you raise
the price a little and share some of that income
with those communities in order to drive even more work
that involves caring for the forest.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
Yes, but the pricing is a little there, there's a
lot of different pricing pressures. So fifty dollars a ton
is high compared to previous forestry projects, where the where
the sort of the willingness of the market to pay
was just much much much lower, right, like board dollars eight,
(34:02):
really really low, and it made it very very hard
to in fact, like provide any or much of that
funding to any of the local communities. In fact, we
push the price up precisely to do that, right, We
insist that in the price there's a significant fraction that
goes to the communities, and we say to funders, this
(34:24):
is because the community must benefit from this to have
buy in. And the increasing awareness of this, it was
it was actually a key research result that was like,
you know, there was like what is the primary driver
behind reforestation project success? And I found out it was,
in fact the community involvement, right, So he said, look
at look you want this project to succeed, this is
what makes it succeed. You have to pay for this
(34:45):
as part of the price. That's why it's fifty dollars
a time. It's considered a very high price.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
For forest granted. On the other hand, draw down into frustration,
programs are pricing somewhere between three hundred and six.
Speaker 2 (34:59):
So they are, and those are high and small and
slow volume is sort of the the reason for that,
I think, like engineered carbon capture has still been extremely
extremely expensive in our pricing. We try to point to
that and say like, hey, you're paying this much for that, right,
(35:21):
like you should pay you know, conmensarily more. And part
of the difficulty is engineered carbon capture gives much finer accounting, right.
The counting of molecules and trees is much more difficult
and fuzzy than the counting of molecules moving through an
airstream that you can directly quantify. And it turns out
that like when the finance people have their say they
(35:44):
want an exact number, right, you end up paying a premium.
You end up taking a premium in like what you
can charge when your reporting is not able to be
as precise. And so that's some of that cost difference.
The other cost difference is that for very engineered carbon
countries is like very small, low volume. You know, there's
(36:04):
only a small segment of the market that's willing to
pay that much. But we definitely point to that price
and say, like, look, you're meaning they're inted dout a ton, right,
this is the same carbon, and so we've moved it
up from like twelve to fifty right with our reasoning,
and I agree it should move up.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
You're making me think of something that I had not
anticipated talking about, but that is the impact of AI
data centers on carbon emissions. But there's a commensurate concern,
which is we're all going to lose our jobs and
AI takes over. Can you imagine an economy in which
those companies that are generating so much carbon are paying
(36:42):
enough that many people could be compensated simply for caring
for nature.
Speaker 2 (36:49):
I can. And what would be surprising some people is
that those very companies that are currently driving the data
center boom are are some of the best buyers. They
are currently some of the ones who are most active
in and most interested in paying for carbon removal, especially
(37:12):
nature based carbon removal. They are in fact already doing it.
Part of it is doing it is because they have
the profits to cover it. Part of it is that
they are very forward looking. They're forward looking both when
it comes to tech. They're forward looking when it comes
to climate and long term planning. Whether or not that
ends up balancing out exactly is a different question, because
(37:34):
you know that often that often comes down to sort
of specifics. But I think in broad strokes, matching those
two things up is something that's that's already happening and
likely to continue.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
You Sean, this is a fascinating conversation. I wanted to
close with a last question, and that is to ask
you about one of the core values that Terror Formation
has published, which is we are ancestors. I think that's
a profound way to think about the company's role in
the world as you look forward to leaving a forest
legacy for future generations. I'm wondering what gives you hope
(38:07):
and what's keeping you up at night when you think
about those future descendants.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
Oh well, well, what's giving me up at night literally
is just drinking too much caffeine in past five pm.
But yeah, okay, So so I'm a I'm a technology person,
and so I read a lot of science fiction. And
if you if you look at the science fiction stories
(38:32):
of the future right where mankind has spread to other planets,
other you know, other star systems, there's there's often there's
like two different visions of that, often of what happened
to Earth. In some of them, Earth is like this toxic,
post apocalyptic wasteland. You know, maybe it was nuclear war,
(38:55):
maybe it was pollution, whatever. Earth is largely uninhabitable and
you know, like humans just managed to get off of
it and now we're on other planets so we're kind
of okay, but oh man, we really messed up Earth,
right like that. That's one of the visions. Another one
is Earth is a beautiful Eden. It's like the blue
green Jewel, the cradle of mankind. And the you know,
(39:17):
the people who are living in the frontier colonies where
you're right like you're gonna recycle all your water and whatever,
you know, they tell their kids like, oh, Earth is
this great place. You know, one day we're gonna go
back to Earth and visit, right, and it's just like
wonderful place that mankind came from. There's like blue skies
and there's like oceans of water and it's all green.
Is beautiful place, right, and you look back on Earth
(39:38):
with the sense of awe, like the original birthplace. And
we're on the stars, on other planets, and you know,
some of the plants aren't super habitable, but Earth is great.
So there's those two visions of future humanity. And I
think we can choose which one we have, right, and
and I want to and so it's clear which one
(39:59):
is better. Right. You want the Earth that you look
back on with pride and joy. And if you think
about how much more human history there is in the future,
you realize that there's millions of years of future human history.
And you know, we've only had sort of, depending on
(40:19):
how you measure it, right, a few thousand years of
human history since like civilization or agriculture, we can and
if you measure look at those two numbers, you realize today,
in our hypertechnical age, we are still living in the
dawn of time. This is the dawn of civilization, the
dawn of human history. And so if you think about that,
(40:41):
you naturally think you can make a big difference right
now with the decisions that you make. The decisions you
make are very consequential. And so when we say we
are ancestors. I really mean that if you were to
look at the entire lifetime of human history from outside
of it, everyone living today is one of the great
(41:01):
ancestors of the millions of years of human history, and
what we do now is really going to matter.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
It also is important that we recognize we're going to
make a lot of mistakes, and somebody from Silicon Valley
knows that better the faster you make those mistakes, the
faster you learn. Are we making enough mistakes and learning
fast enough.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
Well, we've made a lot of mistakes.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
In terms of trying to make it better, not just
in terms of running the environment into the ground.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
I think what's like really really important is to make
mistakes consciously and to do it with this mindset of like, Okay,
I'm going to do this thing, and i don't know
if this is right, but I've got a good idea
of what correct looks like and what mistake and looks like.
And so you've got to do this with this full
consciousness of like evaluating what you've done. And a lot
(41:59):
of people when they do when they do something, even
when they do something big, if it goes wrong, they
don't want to face up to the mistake. This is
kind of they don't want to think of it as
a mistake. I want to deny its mistake firms. But
the mindset you really want is you want to clearly
identify did this thing go well or was this a mistake?
Because if you identify that something is a mistake and
you learn from it really well, then from then on
(42:21):
you and everyone else who makes that decision will never
make that mistake again. So you can then make that
decision ten times correctly if you recognize the mistake the
first time you made it. And we sort of have
this view in the company which is like, hey, we're
going to make some mistakes and this is going to
be hard. But remember we're like scaling, and so if
we recognize and learn from this mistake, we'll be able
(42:43):
to do it ten times. We'll be able to make
that key decision ten times, and we'll make it correct
every time after that if we properly acknowledge and learn
from mistake and what caused it. So there's a sort
of mindset around like how to consciously make mistakes in
order to write one percent, ten percent of time it's
an error, ninety percent of time it's correct. Right, and
(43:04):
that's like a pretty good success.
Speaker 1 (43:06):
So how can folks keep track of what Terraformation is doing.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
Oh, well, we have social media. You should follow us
on social media LinkedIn and Twitter or x as it's called.
These days are sort of wareworth the most active, and
we have a newsletter that people seem to really like,
you know, like we try to make our newsletter entertaining
and we open rate on it, so I encourage people
to sign up for that or just like follow us
(43:32):
on X right, or you know, I'm always saying crazy
things on Twitter. So if you like crazy political and
social commentary interspersed with posts about trees, then you know
that's that's where you can keep up to date.
Speaker 1 (43:47):
Well, thank you so much for the time today. Really
fascinating in conversation.
Speaker 2 (43:52):
Cool well, thank you.
Speaker 1 (44:00):
Welcome back to sustainability in your ear. You've been listening
to my conversation with Yeshan Wong. He's founder and CEO
of terra Formation. It's a forestry software company that aims
to facilitate the reforestation of three billion acres with native
trees over the next two decades. And you can learn
more about the company as well as sign up for
(44:20):
their newsletter at terraformation dot com. Yeshan's comment that the
decisions we make today, though small, have large long term
impacts is really important to keep in mind as we
wrestle with climate change. Today. When we plant a tree
or we choose a more sustainable product, that makes a
small change in the present, but the values those decisions
(44:42):
represent roll down through time and they spread like ripples
from a rock thrown in the water, turning into waves
of change that our descendants will see in retrospect as
the history that shaped their world, and hopefully they will
be living in a restored environment. Terraformation's ethos to see
itself as an ancestor to many future generations of humans
(45:03):
who must have a vibrant and biodiverse ecosystem to live well,
provides an inspiring mission to keep people focused on the
work now. This week, Bill Gates announced a change in
his focus on climate. He will continue investing in climate
tech while focusing more of his philanthropy on human quality
of life in a warmer world. That landed with a
(45:25):
thud in the environmental community. But in the context of
our descendants, will an emphasis on human quality of life
be seen as a fault or virtue. As Yieshan said,
a forestry project lives or dies based on the engagement
and support of local communities, so designing reforestation projects to
enhance human communities well being is essential. The question that
(45:48):
we will answer through our actions today is if we
consistently anchor judgment in human experience the pursuit of happiness,
as we like to say, will people step up to
contribute to achieving the goal including robust biodiversity, forest and
grassland resilience, and the restoration of the environment that poets
and nature writers have brought the life in words? Will
(46:09):
they deliver on the promise that we have made to
the future. Will our actions meet the challenge? We can try.
We may fail frequently until we develop the system that
puts nature first in support of a good life for
its human members. But try we must, and trying involves
making a lot of mistakes. So every time we see
(46:30):
a failure, let's chalk it up to learning rather than
decide once again that the world is doomed. We'll continue
to talk with innovators to shine a light on the
steps that everyone can learn from. And I hope that
you'll take a few minutes to look at the more
than five hundred episodes of Sustainability in Your Ear that
we produce today. Writing a review on your favorite podcast
platform will help your neighbors find us, because, folks, you
(46:52):
are the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create
less waste. This is one of those moments to make
a decision to share. So tell your friends, family, and
coworkers that they can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio,
Audible and other purveyors of podcast goodness that they might prefer.
Thank you for your support. I'm Mitch Racliffe. This is
(47:12):
Sustainability in Your Ear and we will be back with
another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care
of yourself, take care of one another, and let's all
take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a
green day.
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you
are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability
in your ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating
the transition to a sustainable carbon neutral society, and I'm
your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
Most tech CEOs who leave Silicon Valley do so to
(00:31):
start another tech company, but our guest today, Yieshan Wong,
took a different path. After contributing to the growth of PayPal, Facebook,
and Reddit, where he was the CEO, he concluded that
the biggest problem facing humanity wouldn't be solved with algorithms
or network effects. It would be solved with trees. In
twenty twenty, Wong founded terror Formation with a mission to
(00:54):
restore three billion acres of native forest worldwide. That's more
land than the entire unit United States. Terraformation's goal is
rebuilt biodiverse ecosystems that take root at the speed and
scale that will actually make a difference to climate change.
The numbers tell a sobering story. Since the dawn of
(01:14):
the industrial era, the Earth has lost half of its
forest to degradation and destruction At current reforestation rates, it
would take about one thousand years to restore even a
third of what's been lost, but Long argues we have
only a decade to establish forests that can mature into
a meaningful carbon sink by mid century, when nations have
committed to reaching net zero and we are not on
(01:36):
track to meet those goals. Planting a trillion trees isn't
just about seeds in the ground. It's about solving bottlenecks
like funding gaps that leave ninety five percent of qualified
forestry teams without resources, seed shortages, lack of infrastructure, and
technology gaps in tracking and verification. Terraformation built a support
(01:57):
system that includes modular seed banks, solar powered nurseries, open
source forest management software which is called Terraware, and a
seed to carbon forest accelerator that's modeled on tech startup accelerators.
Since founding Terraformation, Wong has enabled the planting over for
four point seven million trees across three hundred and ninety
(02:19):
four species, established nineteen feedbanks in twenty one nurseries, and
created more than seven hundred and ninety eight jobs. Terrorformation
recently won the Keeling Curve Prize and the g twenty's
Restore Life award its first carbon credit sale based on
a mangrove restoration project in Ghana, is bringing jobs and
(02:39):
coastal protection to local communities at a carbon offset price
just shy of fifty dollars per ton. In an industry
built on intellectual property and competitive advantages, Terrorformation wants to
be copied. Wong has said he wants a thousand copycats,
arguing that climate change is too big for any single
organization to solve. So this is an open source undertaking
(03:02):
and he believes the only path forward is mass innovation.
We'll talk with Yeshan about why a former Reddit CEO
believes in low tech solutions that are the right approach
to climate change, how Silicon Valley's lessons about scaling systems
could apply to reforestation, and what it takes to build
an organization designed to be replicated rather than defended. You
(03:24):
can learn more about Terrorformation at terrorformation dot com. Let's
see what the possibilities that we can grow are. Right
after this quick commercial break, Welcome to the show, you, Shan,
(03:45):
How are you today?
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Great? Thank you for having me well.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Good to have you here, and thank you for taking
the time to talk with the audience. You know, I
wanted to start off by asking about the fact that,
you know, you spend a decade or more building some
of Silicon Valley's biggest companies. Was there a moment or
a revelation that made you think, gosh, I should do
reforestation instead. Uh?
Speaker 2 (04:09):
You know, yeah. I didn't come from what you would
call it, you know, traditional environmental background. So I came
up through engineering, and especially engineering that worked on very
large scale projects. I worked on a number of the
like PayPal, Facebook, and then and read It and those
(04:29):
are just some of the companies that operate like at
the limits of what we know of in terms of
what we can build at scale. And so that's actually
informed that informed a lot of my thinking, but but
in a way that I didn't totally understand at the time,
because you know, when you're a fish, you know you're
in the water, you're I think the things like you're
(04:50):
in water, you don't know what water is, right, So
I always thought of it as a very large scale problem.
And so in fact, it was one of the times
in between jobs when I was in Hawaii and it
was it was very hot. Now it's it's supposed to
be warm in Hawaii, that's why you go there, right,
But it was crazy, unseasonably hot, right, And and my
(05:14):
my local friends were there, they were they said, like,
you know, it's never been this hot. This is this
is not historical, like we've never seen this, right, Like
I live up in the mountains where it's always cool,
but it was super hot and like no one could sleep.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
And that was just this kind of moment where I
was like, you know what, this climate change thing has
got to stop. We have to solve this. And so
I thought of it not from the perspective of how
I think a lot of what you might call the
environmental establishment things of it, which is like there there's
a conventional answer, which is like, well, we need to
reduce emissions. Okay, yeah, so we need to reduce emissions.
(05:48):
So that's that's the conventional answer. But at the time,
even now, you know, we weren't doing a very good job.
So I thought of it as like, okay, well, so
what if the world fails to reduce emissions, is there
a no other way to address this at scale that
is commensurate or at least we'll like make the problem better. Right,
Because sometimes when you have a very very big problem.
(06:09):
People often get intimidated and they say like, oh, we
can't solve it, right, Like, if you can solve twenty
percent of it, you can solve fifty percent of it.
You still made it better, and you also make a
good start. That's an important part of it. And there
are these just different mindsets about tackling problems at scale.
And so that's how I started just doing a whole scale,
you know, full scale survey of all of the proposed
(06:33):
geoengineering methods that people had come up with for solving
climate change at scale. And it turns out if you
look at all of them and then you evaluate them
and you sort of think about, like, Okay, what criteria
really makes a solution that can be done for real,
Like if you're really going to do it as opposed
to it, because a lot of climate change solutions discussions
are kind of like those are like dinner party conversations,
(06:55):
Oh this would be cool and make a giant space mirror.
But if you actually think about whether or out there
they're really going to work at what would work? It
comes down to turns out the most effective geoengineering solution
is large scale native reforestation and and and that's so
that's that's how I got to it, right, It's like
what thing would actually work at scale, could be practically
(07:18):
done at the scale where it would have a planetary
level impact, right, And there's all these other considerations like
when you want to when you want to implement a
very very large scale solution, you need to use as
little technology as possible. That's like one of one of
the key factors that I learned in Silicon Valley. Like
(07:39):
Silicon Valley does very good technology marketing, right where make
you think that the marketing that the product is magical,
the technology is never going to fail, it's always going
to work and it's going to solve. But that's not
that's not the case, right, Like if you use a
new technology product as bugs and so if you want
to build something very very big, you have to use
technology that's like a few generations back, that's very very reliable.
(08:02):
And so when you look at all the solutions, then
reforce station sort of comes to the fore as like
the one that is the least infeasible is the way I.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Like to say, Well, so then you took that insight
and you built terrorware. Can you describe what that open
source forest management platform consists of I guess is the
best way to put it? And how is it being
used by more than three hundred different organizations around the world.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Yeah, it is. We are surprised at how many organizations
have taken us up. This is a significant fraction of
organizations that are working on reforestation. What we found is
that if you look at how technology has been adopted
throughout other industries, it's usually not some magical silver bullet
(08:50):
that just solves everything. What it really is is the
embedding of little pieces of tools or productivity suite. Right.
If you if you look at how you know, the
original really big thing that sort of moved the world forward,
Like Microsoft Office. You remember that, I'm kind of sort
of dating myself right now everyone uses Google? You know Google,
(09:14):
I was.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
There, don't worry about it.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Yeah. So like Microsoft Office, it's it's many tools, right,
and it's embedded within the entire workflow of information workers
in an office, right, spreadsheets, word processors, right, like slides, right,
Like there's a little database thing, right. And so what
(09:36):
we realized is that in terms of forest management, there
are many things that you need to do. You need
to track seed collection, you need to manage your nursery,
you need to monitor out planting, and those are all
like if you actually laid on, those are all different,
very different tasks. Right. So it's not just one product,
it's a suite of products. And you know, no one
(09:59):
was really making good software for forest management, right because
it wasn't it wasn't cool. And so we're like, well,
if we want to really help everyone do all of
this better, we have first we have to do it ourselves.
So we have an in house forest ROUTEAM that does
it so that we're not just writing software as outsiders.
(10:20):
That's one key part of it. And so we do
it so that we know, oh, okay, we're gonna need
a piece of software here to solve this very specific problem,
and we'll need another thing here, right. So terrorware is
not just like one little product. It's like many products
sort of gathered together in a suite, and we call
it this thing. We tell you we have this thing,
but if you're asked to use it, it does many
(10:41):
different things all along the pipeline of forest management. An
interesting point is that kind of sweet nature of terrorware,
but the other side of successful transitions in any industry
using technology is change management. How do you help these
organizations understand what they can do with it and develop
(11:01):
best practices. You know, there's one thing that we found here.
Here's another surprising thing that I kind of learned, which
is you don't really get people to change their behavior
by telling them what to do. Yeah, you get you
can't get people to change what they do by yelling
at them or lecturing them or whatever. Telling you really
just do it by doing it being successful and kind
(11:24):
of showing off. Right. You don't have to show off
really hard if you're successful, because usually people will notice
if you're successful, and then they'll copy you. Our our
primary strategy is actually to do it ourselves and to
be really successful at it so that other people copy us.
There there is a there's a thing in tech where
a lot of times, whenever there's a successful tech company,
(11:47):
you get like a a copycat, right, like a Chinese copycat,
a German copycat. Right. It's like very there's actually like
an incubator in Germany that like produces tech copy as right,
And people don't like that. They're like, oh no, there's
a copycat, and they get really upset about it. In
our case, we want a thousand copycats. We've sort of
(12:08):
figured out the scale of what it takes to build
a worldwide movement, and that cannot be done by any
one company. If we were to try to be one
company to do that, it would be, you know, the
largest company like ever in history. It would be a
management nightmare. But we figured out that somewhere between like
a thousand or ten thousand copycats. Right, we just want
(12:30):
a whole bunch of organizations doing what we do. We
will do it as well as we can and say, hey,
we're successful. You can do this too it and we'll
show you how.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Right.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
So that's how we how we intend to act at scale.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
You've raised thirty million dollars. Was that thirty million dollars
impact capital that was intending to spread the word or
were they looking for a profit. I'm curious how you
pitched that.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
We said, hey, we have a solution where we're going
to solve climate change. We also think that solving climate
change is a highly it's a huge value creating act. Right,
you solve a big problem that people a lot of
people view as a problem. This creates value and the
one of the things that you sort of like learn
(13:16):
in Silicon Valley, or sort of taken on faith reasonably
so is if you can solve a really big problem
and you're the one closest to it, you can usually
monetize some part of it and make money up with that.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
So many of our investors, in fact almost all of
them come from Silicon Valiant to understand that notion, right,
which is you do not need your business model worked
out on day one, but you have to have a
clear sense of what problem you're going to solve, and
that it's valuable. Our capital was entirely venture capital, but
from impact investors. So there's kind of continuum of investors
(13:52):
where there's like pure philanthropy where you're kind of like
throwing money over the wall, right, you don't expectating, And
then there's irr focused investing, right like the oil is
in there in the ground, go get it and sell
it and they give me money. And there's the people
in between, right who want to make an investment but
are not irre focused. So what's interesting is all of
(14:18):
our investors have said to us, hey, if you come
back and make a billion dollars but you don't have
any climate impact, I'm going to consider that a loss, like,
that's a failure in my investment. But if you come
back and say, hey, we solved climate change when we
lost all your money, We'll be like, great, that's exactly
what I wanted to happen, right, And so that difference
(14:40):
is like, hey, solve this problem. If you return my money,
I'm happy because they put their money somewhere and it
solved the problem and it just came back.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
Right.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
But we do actually believe that this is a huge
value creating act, but it's also a very very long
term investment.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
You've also said that climate change is a physical problem
about moving atoms and not a political one or just
a political one. How did that engineering background that you
described earlier shape that perspective? And I guess the other
question I have is, and how do you ignore the
politics that are swirling around climate issues, and particularly in
twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Well, it's two questions, I guess I answer, but I'll
take them in turn. Well, I guess, like my career
experience has been watching technology and sort of products advanced
during a time where I mean even back then, I
(15:37):
would say, like much of my lifetime it's been a
very politically you know, right, now we consider it like
very politically crazy. Right, But in the in the twenty
years leading up to this, it's been.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
A little hectic.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
Yeah, it's been like pretty hectic. Right, Like if you
were alive in the eighties and nineties, it wasn't this bad,
and then after nine to eleven it was it was
getting crazier and crazy, and now it's like really right,
But what I saw was that huge advances in technology
really changed the landscape. Just what people are able to
(16:13):
do with a certain amount of energy and effort is
changed radically. And so when you make technological advances in
the world of atoms, it shifts the terrain, and existing
political forces are affected by that. Right, So you have
(16:35):
this sort of like more core layer that, right, Like
that you can do like if I were to say something,
if I do something like, well, okay, this was actually done.
If electric cars could be affordably made and they were cool,
like you know, they weren't like clunky or whatever hyper expensive,
(16:56):
suddenly the markets would change, like a lot more electric
cars would be sold, and you know, there would be
a lot less gas being used. Right, And then then someone,
a guy actually went did this, right, he's very famous,
very controversial now for all certain reasons.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
Right.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
But and then you know, if you there's lots of
politics around the space travel as well. But if you
suddenly make the cost of space travel like one tenth
of what it was before, suddenly a lot more stuff
can be done, right, And so changing certain physical realities
can have a huge, you know, sort of leverage effect
(17:30):
on politics. Was what I witnessed sort of like in
this span of my career. So so that was the
first thing that that sort of occurred to me, Right, Like,
if we can implement at any appreciable scale a useful
you know, affordable carbon draw down method, right that is
accessible to everybody, right, that changes the political conversation. So
(17:54):
that that's like the first private questions. The second part
is it is very very political. So it's like how
do you avoid that. You sort of have this choice
as like how you're going to participate in politics, right,
Like the winds are blowing one direction, there's another wind
blowing in another direction, and you can choose whether or
(18:15):
not you're going to go along with that. And I
would say that during this very chaotic time, that means
there's more room to say something new, and we say, look,
we are not, Like, our solution is not about your
(18:35):
politics being right or your politics being right. Like, we
believe this is important, right, this is a problem for
the planet. There's lots and lots of people who believe
in this who are neither Republicans or Democrats because they're
not in the United States, and they think you're both crazy, right,
but that these four ESTs are important, right, and I'm
talking about basically everyone is not right exactly. Who can
(19:00):
really hate trees? I've I've been surprised because, like, yeah,
in America politics, there's like hate for everything. Everything kind
of gets polarized, right, But like it's been hard to
find anyone who really hates trees. You know, you kind
of have some some people were like skeptics or this
and that, right, but like what they're trees. One of
the things about trees is that they don't talk, they
(19:20):
don't argue with you. They just grow and they help
the climate. Right, they're just quiet allies. So they're very
non objectionable. I try to speak for the trees, and
you can always say something different. When you know there's
a lot of politics swirling around, it's a sort of
it's up in the air. Reference of the day.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
My wife always says I should lean into that reference,
and I like feel a little funny, but I'm starting
to come around to it.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
So when you look at the math, what does success
look like? And what's the time frame for success?
Speaker 2 (19:57):
Ooh okay, So based on current emissions, there is is
actually there's an actual amount of forest and biomass that
would roughly offset those emissions. And I did like a
rough back of the envelope calculation and it's it's roughly
(20:19):
like the amount of new forests that would be covered
by about two billion net new forests. There are two
billion acres of net new forest and on a rough
order of magnitude estimate that that's about one trillion trees.
So you've probably heard of the one trillion trees program,
and it's convenient that that nice little number is on
the right order of magnitude. It's about two billion acres
(20:41):
at about I think like three hundred trees per acre,
which is like within the range is actually very very large, right,
like the one fifty to three thousand or something. But
we can take one trillion trees as a rough order
of magnitude goal. Because one of the things is if
we can collectively read one trillion. It's actually pretty easy
(21:02):
to then get to two trillion, because you've built the momentum,
the supply chain, the logistics, the cultural appreciation for that.
So I would say that one trillion trees within the
next decade is what success would look like. And I
think that's very possible for one very interesting reason, which
is that reforestation is highly parallelizable. It's wonderfully parallelizable because
(21:30):
you can be planting your one thousandth tree at the
same time that some other guy in some other country
doesn't have to coordinate with you, is planting the two
billionth tree. And so it really is a mass scale
problem and the work of one person doesn't really depend
on everyone else. It doesn't proceed in Cereal. It's just
(21:53):
a thing right where you spread the idea and you
spread the basic knowledge needed, and then once everyone is
doing it, it proceeds very quickly.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
We've reached a clearing in this forest. I want to
stop for a moment and take a quick commercial break.
We're going to be right back. Stay tuned, folks, welcome
back to sustainability in your ear. We're talking with Terra
Formation CEO Yeshan Wang, who previously was CEO at Reddit
(22:23):
about reforesting the planet as fast as possible. Yishan. One
of the things that's interesting about a lot of plantings
is they're sort of monocultures, and so you end up
with a canopy that's absolutely flat as you look at
it from far away. Most of the Pacific Northwest's replanted
forests look that way. For instance, you are trying to
(22:44):
plant a mixture of trees that are appropriate for whatever
setting they're in. Talk about how you came to the
conclusion that we need to think diversely, not just think
about planting a lot of the same kind of trees.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
The monoculture thinking comes from mostly from you know, commercial optimization, right.
You sort of pick the tree that uh, you know,
like most closely matches your whatever your desired I R
R and you know they're they're sort of growth characteristics,
(23:20):
and then you say, okay, well then we should plant
only this tree, right, And if you're doing a timber
plantation and you are trying to produce wood of consistent quality,
that makes sense, right, And and that's that's sort of
how the people have thought about uh reforestation in terms
of just like timber production, right. And and while while
(23:41):
actually that that gets like a pretty bad rap in
the environmental space, I think actually it's that's like fine
for a sustainable timber, because you know, we need wood
for things, and in fact, putting wood into furniture is
a good waves questering that carbon. But if you want
to restore forests for climate and in a resilient way
(24:03):
where you don't have to take care of it forever,
Like you want to be able to plant a forest
and maybe you work on it and take and watch
it and monitor for like maybe ten fifteen years, and
then you can like ignore it and restore it as
an old growth forest. You want a biodiverse mixture of
native species, and the reason for that is very interesting.
(24:26):
It turns out that trees are the anchor species for
a forest ecosystem. All of the other species that are
there generally sort of live off of the byproducts of
those trees, right, Like insects, fungi, bacteria, shrubs, grasses, they
all live off the byproducts of the tree.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
Right.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
And then eventually, on top of that you have like fauna,
you know, birds and animals such and native species. Native
tree species can support an order of magnitude more species
than and non native species. And usually when you optimize
for fast growing monocultures, you're taking like a foreign invasive
(25:08):
species that's very often like eucalyptus or something like that,
but those don't support as many other species around them.
And the reason for that is because the native species
have coevolved for millions of years with the other species
that are evolved in symbiotic relationships with them and feed
(25:29):
off of those byproducts. And so what you actually want
is you want to plant the tree species that are native.
You want to plant a mix of them so as
to support the largest possible number of other plant, animals, insects,
fungi species in that ecosystem, because it turns out that
(25:52):
the real carbon sequestration is all of the life there,
because you have to remember, all life is carbon. That
is the real carbon stock in an old growth forest.
It's not just the trees. A lot of people think, oh,
you're growing trees. Know what you're doing is you're growing
trees as the anchor species so that all of the
other life in that forest ecosystem comes back. And that's
(26:14):
why it becomes a thing where it's not just like, oh,
the tree grows and then it dies. You know, there's
a subjections like, oh, when the tree dies or like
re releases the co two, But that's not where you're
going for. What you're doing is you're producing this real
self renewing, perpetual forest where the tree grows, it supports
other life. When it dies, the carbon goes back into
(26:34):
the soil into all the new trees, and you have
an ever deepening old growth forest. So that's that's the
whole trick.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
I really appreciate that because I've watched these kind of
single story canopies emerging with dismay, and you know where
I happen to live at the world inner urban interface.
It's it's a combination of ponderos of pine, dug fur,
and oaks, and they have to all be here otherwise
the wildlife is not going to survive. You mentioned in
(27:05):
a moment ago, but what is the role of forestry
companies in the reforestation equation?
Speaker 2 (27:11):
I think actually they have like a huge role to play,
and many of them are actually getting on board with
this reforestation. I think there's there's a little bit of
a fear that people have about forestry products, and you know,
timber companies like well, they're just like they're gonna cut
down all the trees or whatever. Right. I actually think
the the forestry product industry like timber is actually like
(27:35):
super super important because we need demand for forestry products
and satisfying the world demand for like wood products is
only a tiny percentage of what the total amount of
forest would be that you would need to that you
would need to plant in order to reforce the world.
(27:56):
It's something like less than one percent, right, Like I
think people maybe imagine like whoa, you know, like it'd
be like ninety percent of you know, like the planalliys
for us, and you cut them all the bounds, Like
that's not actually what would happen, right, if you were
to in fact reforce the world at scale needed to
make a dent in climate change, even if you then
involved forestry products as an industry as part of that.
(28:20):
Just the amount of wood and paper, you know, all
those things that we need that's like less than one
percent of those for us. But there's a huge benefit
there because those companies have a huge amount of institutional
expertise in how to grow and grow trees and manage
the land. Right, we really need that expertise, right, YEA.
(28:42):
I have a similar I guess you might call it
like environmentally politically incorrect view about oil companies, which is
I think like the drilling from oil company the technology
from oil companies drilling would be really useful to use
for thermal like for geothermal.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
Drillingurpose repurposhing it.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
Yeah, absolutely, Yeah, Like pirthly like that, there's a lot
of technology from one to the other, and we shouldn't
like just have this kind of vibes based like, oh
that's bad, so we shouldn't do this, right. I think,
like timber companies have a huge amount of institutional expertise
when it comes to like how do you grow a
healthy forest? Right? How do you manage it?
Speaker 1 (29:16):
How do you monitor it?
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Right? And I would like to see more of that
expertise sort of move into the environmental restoration movement. And
I don't think that there's there's a lot of good
synergies there.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Some of the some of the conflict we were talking
about before, It has to debate in order for that
to really happen. But I do agree that we're going.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
To say it's everyone's planet, right, Yeah, so every everyone
has a state in.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
This so let's change the subject a little bit and
that and talk about how you've invested in creating economic
opportunity as well. So and in the Reda Project, which
is a mangrove restoration project in the an low wetlands
of Ghana, you created more than three hundred and fifty jobs,
many of them held by women. And you're bringing sustainable
aquaculture and beekeeping and other services to communities that contribute
(30:05):
to the biodiversity of their environment. How important is that
climate solutions also address economic equity.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
I think that this is a funny view for someone
who works in nature to have. Maybe I think people,
human beings are the prime driver of what happens on
this planet, for better or worse. We are now the
most powerful and influential species on this planet, and what
we do is going to matter. And so what we
(30:35):
found is the success of a reforestation project is most
heavily affected by whether or not the community that lives
there buys into the project and supports the project and
wants the reforestation to happen. That's really really key. In
the past few decades, there have been a few projects
(30:55):
that weren't where basically some like big oil company went
and bought a bunch of land somewhere and then fenced
it off and said to the people who lived around there,
you can't come in anymore. We're planting trees. So that's
not going And that doesn't work because you can't actually
enforce laws from far away, right, Like if someone lives
(31:15):
next to a forest and they need to cut down
the forest where their livelihood, they will cross the fence
or bribe the guard and they won't cut down the forest.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
And the history is replete with examples of that.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
Yeah, exactly, the forest actually belongs to whoever is living
closest to it. That is the real truth of ownership.
The land version of whatever like possession is nine tenths ownership, right.
And so what you really need to do is reforestation
projects need to be designed as projects that benefit the
(31:50):
communities around them. And it turns out this is not hard.
You just have to sort of have this like reorientation
of your view because there are many communities who remember that,
you know, in the time of their grandfather, there's a
great forest here, and you know they're like really good
fishing in this area, or you know it was just
like a richer place. But now the land has sort
(32:12):
of become you know, like dried or whatever. The forests
have died off. And so there are many communities who
want to reforest, they want to restore those those ecosystems,
but they are they're missing some technical knowledge, some infrastructure assistance,
right like some some financing or whatever. Right, So there
are many communities who want to do it, and engagement
(32:33):
with those communities that value the forest, that want the forest,
and if the forests were restored, would play an active
role in maintaining and growing the forest. That is the
primary driver of project success. So we don't do it
in order to you provide economic benefit. We do it
(32:56):
because it would provide economic benefit, because that is what's
good for the project, right, what's what's good for humans
is what's good for the project. And that that's how
that's how everyone like these are all stakeholders, right, So
if you do something for the planet, has to benefit all.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
The stakeholders in some way.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
And so that's that's how it works with projects as well.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
I was really intrigued by the price of your initial
carbon credit sales at around fifty dollars a ton. That's
a lot lower than a lot of other forms of
carbon credit that are emerging right now, could you raise
the price a little and share some of that income
with those communities in order to drive even more work
that involves caring for the forest.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
Yes, but the pricing is a little there, there's a
lot of different pricing pressures. So fifty dollars a ton
is high compared to previous forestry projects, where the where
the sort of the willingness of the market to pay
was just much much much lower, right, like board dollars eight,
(34:02):
really really low, and it made it very very hard
to in fact, like provide any or much of that
funding to any of the local communities. In fact, we
push the price up precisely to do that, right, We
insist that in the price there's a significant fraction that
goes to the communities, and we say to funders, this
(34:24):
is because the community must benefit from this to have
buy in. And the increasing awareness of this, it was
it was actually a key research result that was like,
you know, there was like what is the primary driver
behind reforestation project success? And I found out it was,
in fact the community involvement, right, So he said, look
at look you want this project to succeed, this is
what makes it succeed. You have to pay for this
(34:45):
as part of the price. That's why it's fifty dollars
a time. It's considered a very high price.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
For forest granted. On the other hand, draw down into frustration,
programs are pricing somewhere between three hundred and six.
Speaker 2 (34:59):
So they are, and those are high and small and
slow volume is sort of the the reason for that,
I think, like engineered carbon capture has still been extremely
extremely expensive in our pricing. We try to point to
that and say like, hey, you're paying this much for that, right,
(35:21):
like you should pay you know, conmensarily more. And part
of the difficulty is engineered carbon capture gives much finer accounting, right.
The counting of molecules and trees is much more difficult
and fuzzy than the counting of molecules moving through an
airstream that you can directly quantify. And it turns out
that like when the finance people have their say they
(35:44):
want an exact number, right, you end up paying a premium.
You end up taking a premium in like what you
can charge when your reporting is not able to be
as precise. And so that's some of that cost difference.
The other cost difference is that for very engineered carbon
countries is like very small, low volume. You know, there's
(36:04):
only a small segment of the market that's willing to
pay that much. But we definitely point to that price
and say, like, look, you're meaning they're inted dout a ton, right,
this is the same carbon, and so we've moved it
up from like twelve to fifty right with our reasoning,
and I agree it should move up.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
You're making me think of something that I had not
anticipated talking about, but that is the impact of AI
data centers on carbon emissions. But there's a commensurate concern,
which is we're all going to lose our jobs and
AI takes over. Can you imagine an economy in which
those companies that are generating so much carbon are paying
(36:42):
enough that many people could be compensated simply for caring
for nature.
Speaker 2 (36:49):
I can. And what would be surprising some people is
that those very companies that are currently driving the data
center boom are are some of the best buyers. They
are currently some of the ones who are most active
in and most interested in paying for carbon removal, especially
(37:12):
nature based carbon removal. They are in fact already doing it.
Part of it is doing it is because they have
the profits to cover it. Part of it is that
they are very forward looking. They're forward looking both when
it comes to tech. They're forward looking when it comes
to climate and long term planning. Whether or not that
ends up balancing out exactly is a different question, because
(37:34):
you know that often that often comes down to sort
of specifics. But I think in broad strokes, matching those
two things up is something that's that's already happening and
likely to continue.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
You Sean, this is a fascinating conversation. I wanted to
close with a last question, and that is to ask
you about one of the core values that Terror Formation
has published, which is we are ancestors. I think that's
a profound way to think about the company's role in
the world as you look forward to leaving a forest
legacy for future generations. I'm wondering what gives you hope
(38:07):
and what's keeping you up at night when you think
about those future descendants.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
Oh well, well, what's giving me up at night literally
is just drinking too much caffeine in past five pm.
But yeah, okay, So so I'm a I'm a technology person,
and so I read a lot of science fiction. And
if you if you look at the science fiction stories
(38:32):
of the future right where mankind has spread to other planets,
other you know, other star systems, there's there's often there's
like two different visions of that, often of what happened
to Earth. In some of them, Earth is like this toxic,
post apocalyptic wasteland. You know, maybe it was nuclear war,
(38:55):
maybe it was pollution, whatever. Earth is largely uninhabitable and
you know, like humans just managed to get off of
it and now we're on other planets so we're kind
of okay, but oh man, we really messed up Earth,
right like that. That's one of the visions. Another one
is Earth is a beautiful Eden. It's like the blue
green Jewel, the cradle of mankind. And the you know,
(39:17):
the people who are living in the frontier colonies where
you're right like you're gonna recycle all your water and whatever,
you know, they tell their kids like, oh, Earth is
this great place. You know, one day we're gonna go
back to Earth and visit, right, and it's just like
wonderful place that mankind came from. There's like blue skies
and there's like oceans of water and it's all green.
Is beautiful place, right, and you look back on Earth
(39:38):
with the sense of awe, like the original birthplace. And
we're on the stars, on other planets, and you know,
some of the plants aren't super habitable, but Earth is great.
So there's those two visions of future humanity. And I
think we can choose which one we have, right, and
and I want to and so it's clear which one
(39:59):
is better. Right. You want the Earth that you look
back on with pride and joy. And if you think
about how much more human history there is in the future,
you realize that there's millions of years of future human history.
And you know, we've only had sort of, depending on
(40:19):
how you measure it, right, a few thousand years of
human history since like civilization or agriculture, we can and
if you measure look at those two numbers, you realize today,
in our hypertechnical age, we are still living in the
dawn of time. This is the dawn of civilization, the
dawn of human history. And so if you think about that,
(40:41):
you naturally think you can make a big difference right
now with the decisions that you make. The decisions you
make are very consequential. And so when we say we
are ancestors. I really mean that if you were to
look at the entire lifetime of human history from outside
of it, everyone living today is one of the great
(41:01):
ancestors of the millions of years of human history, and
what we do now is really going to matter.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
It also is important that we recognize we're going to
make a lot of mistakes, and somebody from Silicon Valley
knows that better the faster you make those mistakes, the
faster you learn. Are we making enough mistakes and learning
fast enough.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
Well, we've made a lot of mistakes.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
In terms of trying to make it better, not just
in terms of running the environment into the ground.
Speaker 2 (41:36):
I think what's like really really important is to make
mistakes consciously and to do it with this mindset of like, Okay,
I'm going to do this thing, and i don't know
if this is right, but I've got a good idea
of what correct looks like and what mistake and looks like.
And so you've got to do this with this full
consciousness of like evaluating what you've done. And a lot
(41:59):
of people when they do when they do something, even
when they do something big, if it goes wrong, they
don't want to face up to the mistake. This is
kind of they don't want to think of it as
a mistake. I want to deny its mistake firms. But
the mindset you really want is you want to clearly
identify did this thing go well or was this a mistake?
Because if you identify that something is a mistake and
you learn from it really well, then from then on
(42:21):
you and everyone else who makes that decision will never
make that mistake again. So you can then make that
decision ten times correctly if you recognize the mistake the
first time you made it. And we sort of have
this view in the company which is like, hey, we're
going to make some mistakes and this is going to
be hard. But remember we're like scaling, and so if
we recognize and learn from this mistake, we'll be able
(42:43):
to do it ten times. We'll be able to make
that key decision ten times, and we'll make it correct
every time after that if we properly acknowledge and learn
from mistake and what caused it. So there's a sort
of mindset around like how to consciously make mistakes in
order to write one percent, ten percent of time it's
an error, ninety percent of time it's correct. Right, and
(43:04):
that's like a pretty good success.
Speaker 1 (43:06):
So how can folks keep track of what Terraformation is doing.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
Oh, well, we have social media. You should follow us
on social media LinkedIn and Twitter or x as it's called.
These days are sort of wareworth the most active, and
we have a newsletter that people seem to really like,
you know, like we try to make our newsletter entertaining
and we open rate on it, so I encourage people
to sign up for that or just like follow us
(43:32):
on X right, or you know, I'm always saying crazy
things on Twitter. So if you like crazy political and
social commentary interspersed with posts about trees, then you know
that's that's where you can keep up to date.
Speaker 1 (43:47):
Well, thank you so much for the time today. Really
fascinating in conversation.
Speaker 2 (43:52):
Cool well, thank you.
Speaker 1 (44:00):
Welcome back to sustainability in your ear. You've been listening
to my conversation with Yeshan Wong. He's founder and CEO
of terra Formation. It's a forestry software company that aims
to facilitate the reforestation of three billion acres with native
trees over the next two decades. And you can learn
more about the company as well as sign up for
(44:20):
their newsletter at terraformation dot com. Yeshan's comment that the
decisions we make today, though small, have large long term
impacts is really important to keep in mind as we
wrestle with climate change. Today. When we plant a tree
or we choose a more sustainable product, that makes a
small change in the present, but the values those decisions
(44:42):
represent roll down through time and they spread like ripples
from a rock thrown in the water, turning into waves
of change that our descendants will see in retrospect as
the history that shaped their world, and hopefully they will
be living in a restored environment. Terraformation's ethos to see
itself as an ancestor to many future generations of humans
(45:03):
who must have a vibrant and biodiverse ecosystem to live well,
provides an inspiring mission to keep people focused on the
work now. This week, Bill Gates announced a change in
his focus on climate. He will continue investing in climate
tech while focusing more of his philanthropy on human quality
of life in a warmer world. That landed with a
(45:25):
thud in the environmental community. But in the context of
our descendants, will an emphasis on human quality of life
be seen as a fault or virtue. As Yieshan said,
a forestry project lives or dies based on the engagement
and support of local communities, so designing reforestation projects to
enhance human communities well being is essential. The question that
(45:48):
we will answer through our actions today is if we
consistently anchor judgment in human experience the pursuit of happiness,
as we like to say, will people step up to
contribute to achieving the goal including robust biodiversity, forest and
grassland resilience, and the restoration of the environment that poets
and nature writers have brought the life in words? Will
(46:09):
they deliver on the promise that we have made to
the future. Will our actions meet the challenge? We can try.
We may fail frequently until we develop the system that
puts nature first in support of a good life for
its human members. But try we must, and trying involves
making a lot of mistakes. So every time we see
(46:30):
a failure, let's chalk it up to learning rather than
decide once again that the world is doomed. We'll continue
to talk with innovators to shine a light on the
steps that everyone can learn from. And I hope that
you'll take a few minutes to look at the more
than five hundred episodes of Sustainability in Your Ear that
we produce today. Writing a review on your favorite podcast
platform will help your neighbors find us, because, folks, you
(46:52):
are the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create
less waste. This is one of those moments to make
a decision to share. So tell your friends, family, and
coworkers that they can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio,
Audible and other purveyors of podcast goodness that they might prefer.
Thank you for your support. I'm Mitch Racliffe. This is
(47:12):
Sustainability in Your Ear and we will be back with
another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care
of yourself, take care of one another, and let's all
take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a
green day.
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