Sustainability In Your Ear Transcript: Terraformation CEO Yishan Wong On Reforesting 3 Billion Acres

Mitch Ratcliffe 0:00
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 start another tech company. But our guest today, Yishan 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 2020 Wong founded Terraformation with a mission to restore 3 billion acres of native forest worldwide. That's more land than the entire United States. Terraformation's goal is to rebuild biodiverse ecosystems that take root at a speed and scale that will actually make a difference to climate change.

The numbers tell a sobering story. Since the dawn of the industrial era, the Earth has lost half of its forest to degradation and destruction. At current reforestation rates, it would take about 1,000 years to restore even a third of what's been lost. But Wong 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 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 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.

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. Its first carbon credit sale, based on a mangrove restoration project in Ghana, is bringing jobs and coastal protection to local communities at a carbon offset price just shy of $50 per ton.

In an industry built on intellectual property and competitive advantages, Terraformation wants to be copied. Wong has said he wants 1,000 copycats, arguing that climate change is too big for any single organization to solve. So this is an open source undertaking, and he believes the only path forward is mass innovation.

We'll talk with Yishan 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 can learn more about Terraformation at Terraformation.com.

Let's see what the possibilities that we can grow are right after this quick commercial break.

[Commercial Break]

Mitch Ratcliffe 3:44
Welcome to the show, Yishan, how are you today?

Yishan Wong 3:48
Great. Thank you for having me.

Mitch Ratcliffe 3:50
Well, 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 spent 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?

Yishan Wong 4:09
You know, yeah, I didn't come from what you would call a, 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 Reddit, and those are just some 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 a lot of my thinking, 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. I think the other thing is, like you're 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 very hot. Now, it's supposed to be warm in Hawaii, that's why you go there, right? But it was crazy, unseasonably hot, right? And my local friends were there. They said, like, you know, it's never been this hot. 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, and that was just this kind of moment. 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 thinks of it, which is like, there's a conventional answer, which is like, well, we need to reduce emissions. Okay, yeah, so we need to reduce emissions. So 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 another way to address this at scale that is commensurate, or at least will make the problem better, right?

Because sometimes when you have a very, very big problem, people often get intimidated, and they say, like, oh, we can't solve it, right? But like, if you can solve 20% of it, you can solve 50% 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 geoengineering methods, right, 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, because a lot of climate change solution discussions are kind of like, they're sort of like dinner party conversations, oh, this would be cool and make a giant space mirror.

But if you actually think about whether or not they're really going to work and what would work, it comes down to, turns out, the most effective geoengineering solution is large scale native reforestation. And that's how I got to it, right? It's like, what thing would actually work at scale, could be practically 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 implement a very, very large scale solution, you need to use as little technology as possible. That's like one of the key factors that I learned in Silicon Valley. Like Silicon Valley does very good technology marketing, right? Where we 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 the case, right?

Like if you use a new technology product has 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. And so when you look at all the solutions, then reforestation sort of comes to the fore as like the one is the least infeasible, is the way I like to say.

Mitch Ratcliffe 8:11
Well, so then you took that insight and you built Terraware. 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 300 different organizations around the world?

Yishan Wong 8:28
Yeah, 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 that just solves everything. What it really is is the embedding of little pieces of tools or productivity suites, right?

If you look at how, you know the original, really big thing that sort of moved the world forward, like Microsoft Office, remember that I'm sort of dating myself right now. Everyone uses Google, you know.

Mitch Ratcliffe 9:13
I was there. Don't worry about it.

Yishan Wong 9:17
Yeah, Google Suite now, but remember, like Excel wasn't the most powerful spreadsheet program, right? Like, it wasn't, but it won because it was just good enough that it was in an office suite that was bundled with the operating system that everyone had for their computers. And then you would get business productivity as a result of that. And once everyone started sharing files back and forth, it sort of became established as the de facto standard. And so we think of it as, like, if you just make something that's simple and user friendly and good enough, and you just get it widely deployed, then it becomes much more useful because everyone benefits from that baseline platform.

And so we made Terraware not because, like, this is the most genius piece of technology that will change the world, but we said, Hey, let's just help forestry teams achieve certain basic necessary activities like, for example, seed collection, right? So if you're going to grow native trees, you collect the seed locally, and then you germinate it in a nursery. That's like a very common standard practice, but most people were just doing it with pen and paper, with like, Microsoft Excel, or with Google Spreadsheets. And that's okay, but then what you really need is you need a platform that everyone in the world is using, so that, like when they measure the performance of their seeds and certain things work well, they all have like a common baseline for measuring this.

And then other teams around the world, when they have similar seeds, they say, Well, how did the Guatemalan team do it with this seed? And how do the Hawaiians do it? And so you can sort of share data points. And that's like a very important thing. And then, of course, you can just aggregate all that information. And the other thing that Terraware specifically does is it's able to sort of help seed collections better plan, like, for example, you need to know, like, if you want to plant 500 trees of species A, you've got to know, Well, what's the germination rate of species A? And where do we have to collect the seed from this area? And when in the year does it mature? It's like, there's all these little pieces of data like that.

And we just made it easy for them to have that data and track it. And that's, I mean, that's basically all it does. And so it's like a very simple, straightforward software that they all use, but it's kind of boring. It's not like a magical AI revolutionary blockchain thing. It's like, it's like technology as it should be. It's this very useful, basic plumbing.

So, like Microsoft Office, 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 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 outplanting. And those are all, if you actually lay down, 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 was really making good software for forest management, right? Because it wasn't cool.

And so we're like, Well, if we want to really help everyone do all of this better, first, we have to do it ourselves, so we have an in-house forestry team that does it, so that we're not just writing software as outsiders. That's one key part of it. And so we do it so that we know, oh, okay, we're needing a piece of software here to solve this very specific problem, and we'll need another thing here, right? So Terraware 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 asked to use it, it does many different things all along the pipeline of forest management.

Mitch Ratcliffe 10:46
An interesting point is that kind of suite nature of Terraware, 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 best practices?

Yishan Wong 11:02
You know, there's one thing that we found. 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. You can't get people to change what they do by yelling at them or lecturing them, or whatever. Time you really just do it by doing it, being successful and kind 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 primary strategy is actually to do it ourselves and to be really successful at it so that other people copy us. There's a thing in Tech where a lot of times, whenever there's a successful tech company, you get like, a copycat, right? You like a Chinese copycat, you get a German copycat, right? It's very, there's actually like an incubator in Germany that, like, produces tech, 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 1,000 copycats. We've sort of 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 like the largest company, like ever in history. It would be a management nightmare, but we figured out that somewhere between like 1,000 or 10,000 copycats, right? We just want 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. We'll show you how, right? So that's how we intend to act at scale.

Mitch Ratcliffe 12:43
You've raised $30 million. Was that $30 million impact capital that was intending to spread the word? Or were they looking for a profit? I'm curious how you pitch that.

Yishan Wong 12:54
We said, Hey, we have a solution where we're going to solve climate change. We also think that solving climate change is highly, it's a huge value creating act, right? You solve a big problem that people, lot of people, view as a problem. This creates value. And one of the things that you sort of like learn 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 off of that, right?

So many of our investors, in fact, almost all of them come from Silicon Valley, and 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, where there's like pure philanthropy, where you're just kind of like throwing money over the wall, right? You don't expect anything. And then there's IRR focused investing, right? Like the oil is in there in the ground, go get it and sell it and give me money. And there's the people in between, right, who want to make an investment, but are not IRR focused.

So what's interesting is all of 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 and we lost all your money, we'll be like, great. That's exactly what I wanted to happen, right? And so that difference 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 just came back, right? But we do actually believe that this is a huge value creating act, but it's also a very, very long term investment.

Mitch Ratcliffe 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, how do you ignore the politics that are swirling around climate issues, and particularly in 2025?

Yishan Wong 15:16
Well, it's two questions.

I guess, like my career experience has been watching technology and sort of products advance during a time where, I mean, even back then, I would say, like in much of my lifetime, right now we consider it, like, very politically crazy, right? But in the 20 years leading up to this, it's been a little hectic. It's been like, pretty hectic, right? Like, if you were alive in the 80s and 90s, it wasn't this bad. And then after 9/11 it was getting crazier and crazier, and now it's like, really crazy, right?

But what I saw was that huge advances in technology really changed the landscape. Just what people are able to 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 this sort of, like, more core layer, right? Like that you can do, like, if I were to say something, if I were to 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, 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 someone, a guy, actually went and did this, right? He's very famous, very controversial now, for all sorts of reasons, right?

But, and then, you know, if there's lots of politics around space travel as well, but if you suddenly make the cost of space travel like 1/10 of what it was before, suddenly a lot more stuff can be done, right? And so changing certain physical realities can have a huge sort of leverage effect on politics. That's what I witnessed sort of like in this span of my career. So that was the first thing that occurred to me, right? Like, if we can implement at any appreciable scale a useful, you know, affordable carbon drawdown method, right? That is accessible to everybody, right? That changes the political conversation. So that's like first part of 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 to, 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 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, our solution is not about your politics being right or your politics being right. 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. But these forests are important, right? And I'm talking about basically everyone. Who hates trees, right? Exactly. Who can really hate trees?

Like, I've been surprised, because, like, yeah, in American 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 people who are like, skeptics or this and that, right? But like, what, they're trees. One of the things about trees is they don't talk, they 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.

Mitch Ratcliffe 19:40
There’s our Dr. Seuss reference from the day.

Yishan Wong 19:43
Yeah, 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.

Mitch Ratcliffe 19:49
So when you look at the math, what does success look like, and what's the timeframe for success?

Yishan Wong 19:57
Ooh, okay, so based on current emissions, there 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 roughly like the amount of new forest that would be covered by about 2 billion net new forest, 2 billion acres of net new forest. And on a rough order of magnitude, estimate that that's about 1 trillion trees. So you've probably heard of the 1 trillion trees program, and it's convenient that that, like nice little number, is on the right order of magnitude. It's about 2 billion acres at about, I think like 300 trees per acre, which is like within the range is actually very, very large, right? Like the 150 to like 3,000 or something.

But we can take 1 trillion trees as a rough order of magnitude goal, because one of the things is, if we can collectively reach 1 trillion, it's actually pretty easy to then get to 2 trillion because you've built the momentum, the supply chain, the logistics, the cultural appreciation for that. So I would say that 1 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 you can be planting your 1,000th tree at the same time that some other guy in some other country doesn't have to coordinate with you, is planting the 2,000,000,000th 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 serial, it's just 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.

Mitch Ratcliffe 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.

[Commercial Break]

Mitch Ratcliffe 22:15
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. We're talking with Terraformation CEO Yishan Wong, who previously was CEO at Reddit 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 replanted forest look that way. For instance, you are trying to 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.

Yishan Wong 23:00
The monoculture thinking comes from, mostly from, you know, commercial optimization, right? You sort of pick the tree that you know, like most closely matches your desired IRR. And you know, their growth characteristics. 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 that's sort of how people have thought about reforestation in terms of just like timber production, right?

And while actually that gets like a pretty bad rep in the environmental space, I think actually that's like fine for sustainable timber, because we need wood for things. And in fact, putting wood into furniture is a good way of sequestering that carbon. But if you want to restore forests for climate and in a resilient way, 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 watch it and monitor for like, maybe 10-15 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. 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, right? And then eventually, on top of that, you have like fauna, you know, birds and animals. And native species, native tree species can support an order of magnitude more species than non-native species, and usually when you optimize for fast growing monocultures, you're taking like a foreign invasive 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 co-evolved for millions of years with the other species that evolved in symbiotic relationships with them and feed 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, animal, insect, fungi, species in that ecosystem. Because it turns out that 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. No, 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 why it becomes a thing where it's not just like, oh, the tree grows and then it dies. You know, there's an objection like, oh, when the tree dies and like, re-releases the CO2. But that's not what you're going for. What you're doing is you're producing this self-renewing, perpetual forest where the tree grows, it supports other life. When it dies, the carbon goes back into the soil, into all the new trees, and you have an ever deepening old growth forest. So that's the whole trick.

Mitch Ratcliffe 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 wilderness-urban interface, it's a combination of Ponderosa pine, Doug Fir and oak, and they have to all be here, otherwise the wildlife is not going to survive. You mentioned them a moment ago, but what is the role of forestry companies in the reforestation equation?

Yishan Wong 27:09
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 a little bit of a fear that people have about forestry products and, you know, timber companies like there that, well, they're just like, they're going to cut down all the trees or whatever, right? I actually think the forestry product industry, like timber is actually, like, 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 plant in order to reforest the world. It's something like less than 1%, right? Like, I think people maybe imagine, like, whoa, you know, like, it'd be like 90% of, you know, like, planted forests and you cut them all down. It's like, that's not actually what would happen, right? If you were to, in fact, reforest 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, just the amount of wood and paper, you know, all those things that we need, that's like less than 1% of those forests.

But there's a huge benefit there, because those companies have a huge amount of institutional expertise in how to grow trees and manage the land, right? We really need that expertise, right? 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 company drilling, would be really useful to use for thermal, like, for geothermal drilling, repurposing it. Yeah, absolutely. Like repurposing, like, 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, how do you monitor it, right? And I would like to see more of that expertise sort of move into the environmental restoration movement. And I think there's a lot of good synergies there.

Mitch Ratcliffe 29:30
Some of the conflict we were talking about before has to abate in order for that to really happen. But I do agree that we're, it's--

Yishan Wong 29:38
Everyone's planet, right? So everyone has a stake in this.

Mitch Ratcliffe 29:42
So let's change the subject a little bit, and talk about how you've invested in creating economic opportunity as well. In the ReDAW project, which is a mangrove restoration project in the Anlo wetlands of Ghana, you created more than 350 jobs, many of them held by women, and you're bringing sustainable aquaculture and beekeeping and other services to communities that contribute to the biodiversity of their environment. How important is it that climate solutions also address economic equity?

Yishan Wong 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 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 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. And that doesn't work, because you can't actually enforce laws from far away, right? Like, if someone lives next to a forest and they need to cut down the forest for their livelihood, they will cross the fence or bribe the guard and they will cut down the forest, right?

Mitch Ratcliffe 31:24
History is replete with examples of that.

Yishan Wong 31:27
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 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 was 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 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 ecosystems, but they are missing some technical knowledge, some infrastructure assistance, right? Like some financing or whatever, right? So there are many communities who want to do it, and engagement 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 provide economic benefit. We do it because it would provide economic benefit, because that is what's good for the project, right? What's good for humans is what's good for the project. And these are all stakeholders, right? So if you do something for the planet, it has to benefit all the stakeholders in some way. And so that's how it works with projects as well.

Mitch Ratcliffe 33:14
I was really intrigued by the price of your initial carbon credit sales at around $50 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?

Yishan Wong 33:36
Yes, but the pricing is a little, there's a lot of different pricing pressures. So $50 a ton is high compared to previous forestry projects, where the willingness of the market to pay was just much, much, much lower, right, like $4 early, $8, 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 is a significant fraction that goes to the communities. And we say to funders, this is because the community must benefit from this to have buy-in.

And the increasing awareness of this, 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 they found out it was, in fact, community involvement, right? And so we said, look, you want this project to succeed? This is what makes it succeed. You have to pay for this as part of the price. That's why it's $50 a ton. It's considered a very high price--

Mitch Ratcliffe 34:50
--granted. On the other hand, drawdown and sequestration programs are pricing somewhere between $300 and $600--

Yishan Wong 35:00
Yeah, they are, and those are high and small and low volume is sort of 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, like, you know, commensurately more. And part of the difficulty is engineered carbon capture gives much finer accounting, right? Like the counting of molecules in trees is much more difficult and fuzzy than counting of molecules moving through an air stream that you can directly quantify.

And it turns out that, like, when the finance people have their say, they want an exact number, right? You end up paying a premium, or you end up taking a premium in, like, what you can charge when you're reporting is not able to be as precise. And so that's some of that cost difference. The other cost difference is that engineered carbon capture is just like, very small, low volume. You know, there's 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 paying $300 a ton, right? This is the same carbon, and so we've moved it up from, like, $12 to $50, right, with our reasoning. And I agree it should move up.

Mitch Ratcliffe 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 enough that many people could be compensated simply for caring for nature?

Yishan Wong 36:49
I can. And what would be surprising to some people is that those very companies that are currently driving the data center boom 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 nature-based carbon removal. They are, in fact, already doing it. Part of 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 you know that often comes down to sort of specifics, but I think in broad strokes, matching those two things up is something that's already happening and likely to continue.

Mitch Ratcliffe 37:47
Yishan, 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 Terraformation 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 and what's keeping you up at night when you think about those future descendants?

Yishan Wong 38:11
Oh, well, what's keeping me up at night, literally, is just drinking too much caffeine past 5 PM. But, okay, so I'm a technology person, and so I read a lot of science fiction. And if you look at the science fiction stories of the future, right, where mankind has spread to other planets, other, you know, other star systems, 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, 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'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, the people who are living in the frontier colonies where, right, like, you gotta 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 going to go back to Earth and visit, right? And it's like, wonderful place that mankind came from. There's like blue skies, and there's like oceans of water, and it's all green, this beautiful place, right? And you look back on Earth with the sense of awe, like the original birthplace, and we're on the stars, on other planets. And, you know, some of the planets 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, all right, and it's clear which one 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 billions of years of future human history. And you know, we've only had, sort of, depending on how you measure it, right, a few thousand years of human history, since, like civilization or agriculture began. And if you measure, look at those two numbers, you realize today, in our hyper-technical 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, you naturally think you can make a big difference right now with the decisions that you make. 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 all, everyone living today is one of the great ancestors of the millions of years of human history, and what we do now is really going to matter.

Mitch Ratcliffe 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?

Yishan Wong 41:25
Well, we've made a lot of mistakes in terms of trying to make it better, not just in terms of the environment and the ground.

I think what's like, really, really important is to, like, 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 a mistake looks like. And so you've got to do this with this full consciousness of, like, evaluating what you've done. And a lot of people when they do something, even when they do something big, if it goes wrong, they don't want to face up to the mistake. They kind of, they don't want to think of it as a mistake or deny it's a mistake.

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, you and everyone else who makes that decision will never make that mistake again. So you can then make that decision 10 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 scaling. And so if we recognize and learn from this mistake, we'll be able to do it 10 times. We'll be able to, you know, make that key decision 10 times, and we'll make it correct every time after that, if we properly acknowledge and learn from the mistake and what caused it.

So there's a sort of mindset around, like, how to consciously make mistakes in order to, right, 1%, 10% of time it's an error. 90% of time it's correct, right? And that's like a pretty good success.

Mitch Ratcliffe 43:06
So how can folks keep track of what Terraformation is doing?

Yishan Wong 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 where we're the most active, and we have a newsletter that people seem to really like, you know, like we try to make our newsletter entertaining. We'll get open right on it. So I encourage people to sign up for that, or, just like, follow us 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 where you can keep up to date.

Mitch Ratcliffe 43:46
Thank you so much for the time today. Really fascinating conversation.

Yishan Wong 43:51
Cool. Well, thank you.

[Commercial Break]

Mitch Ratcliffe 44:00
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You've been listening to my conversation with Yishan Wong. He's founder and CEO of Terraformation. It's a forestry software company that aims to facilitate the reforestation of 3 billion acres with native trees over the next two decades. And you can learn more about the company as well as sign up for their newsletter at Terraformation.com.

Yishan'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 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 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 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 a virtue? As Yishan said, a forestry project lives or dies based on the engagement and support of local communities. So designing reforestation projects to enhance human communities' wellbeing is essential.

The question that 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 goals, including robust biodiversity, forest and grassland resilience and the restoration of the environment that poets and nature writers have brought to life in words? Will 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 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 500 episodes of Sustainability In Your Ear that we produced to date. Writing a review on your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us. Because folks, you 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 Ratcliffe. This is 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.