Speaking for the trees 🌳
Terraformation CEO Yishan Wong explains why planting trees is a tractable solution to reducing CO2 emissions.
Climate tech is filled with a wide array of innovative technologies aimed to aid the health of our planet. In-depth engineering projects, supply chain reworkings and the invention of new forms of energy have all made waves. But with all of this emerging tech, it’s easy to forget about nature’s invention for CO2 reduction: trees.
When confronted by the reality of the climate crisis, ex-Reddit CEO Yishan Wong sought out solutions. What he found is that by restoring what Mother Nature provided us millennia ago, we can achieve our climate goals. That’s why he created Terraformation in 2020, a company dedicated to restoring the world’s forests to revive ecosystems and build thriving communities. The company has planted 850,000 trees across multiple ecosystems, but not without some opposition on the effectiveness of the effort. Yishan sat down with The Cooler to discuss trees, his disagreements with Bill Gates, the scale of his solution and why it’s achievable.
Tell us about your initial idea for Terraformation? How did you get things off the ground?
At the time, I was living in a community that experienced an extreme heat wave. Everyone in the community was saying things like “This has never happened!” and “This is really, really strange, the climate has been changing.” And I said, “Okay, this has got to stop, I’m going to stop this.” So that was my moment.
Over the next week I began evaluating all of the planetary-scale carbon capture proposals that have ever been made. One of the things that I think isn't often talked about is that you want something that's practical and immediately scalable. What I found is that scalability requires low-tech reliability. If you want to do a lot of something, you really need your components to be extremely reliable and well understood. So you have to be able to isolate it to scale, which means you need to be completely certain about your technology—or as certain as you can be. So this combined with probably seven or eight other factors, led me to this conclusion that even though I am a technologist, and I think very much like an engineer, the most effective planetary scale geoengineering plan is actually a global campaign of native biodiverse forest restoration. We have enough land and we can produce enough water. Logistically, it can be done given the amount of human effort and money that we have. So off we go.
Around that time, the Crowther Lab in Zurich released a paper where they had done similar calculations from a completely different angle. It concluded that if you reforested all of the land that could easily be reforested, you would be able to remove up to a third of all of the CO2 that's been released. Certain parts of their paper were examining the same areas with the same light conditions and their numbers actually matched mine. So I was like, “Oh, wow. Some real scientists actually think this is also true.” So I released an essay about this on Medium and then a friend of mine said: “I'll give you $100,000 to go and work on this.”
And now you are scaling globally. Your story is interesting because this is a simple solution that people can wrap their heads around. As you’ve gotten into the work, how has the way you’ve communicated your story changed?
It turns out that it’s really important to stick to the basics. You find out that everybody on the planet is interested in talking about the climate because they have a stake in it. So at some point, you need to have a message for every single human being, and there's a really wide range of comprehension.
For example, a lot of people talk about climate change, but not everyone understands what carbon actually is. But people understand forests, they understand trees, they have this emotional connection to them. Nobody hates trees. We find that very few people understand or are interested in the details, even very detail-oriented people. Scientists, engineers and financiers are all interested in different aspects of the problem, and I find that almost nobody is interested in all of them. So if you talk about details that don't match the interest of your particular audience, you lose them.
Luckily, everyone has a common emotional connection to something like the romance of the forest. So we talk about that, and we let people guide us to where they are interested, and we go deeper there.
I would say that talking about this solution is very much a know-your-audience thing. At any time you need to know your audience and what they tend to think about and what they don't. Because it is very true that if you incorrectly assume who your audience is, and then you talk from a certain angle, you can get it wrong and totally turn them off. So there's a lot of thinking about their biases and what they pay attention to. Climate is very complex, and the audience of people who care about it is big and very diverse.
Luckily, everyone has a common emotional connection to something like the romance of the forest. So we talk about that, and we let people guide us to where they are interested, and we go deeper there.
You’ve talked a lot about the skepticism of trees as a solution that comes from some of those detail-oriented people. How do you explain Terraformation’s story to them?
It's kind of funny because if you think about explaining it to your “smart friend,” every smart person has certain things that they just take for granted. Many of my “smart friends” will say, “Aren’t trees a short term solution? When the tree dies, it releases all that CO2, right?” Very often what they miss is that we're restoring forests, not trees. So when a tree grows, it seeds many other trees and plants and animals. Then 100 years later, when it dies, it decomposes very slowly, over the span of more than a decade.
Some of that goes into the soil, and the rest of it does re-release into the air but it's taken up by all of these nutrients. This is why old growth forests are the deepest carbon sink. But a lot of people just think of it in isolation as a tree. The ecosystem thinking is something they don’t really think about.
I would be curious to hear how you thought about that in relation to your Fast Company piece in rebuttal to Bill Gates. What has the reaction been to that op-ed?
The reaction was actually overwhelmingly positive. Technically Bill was responding to an off-the-cuff, absolutist statement. Because of what happened all the reports after that were like, “Bill Gates thinks trees are complete nonsense.” Which is a pretty harmful thing to have floating around, because it not only makes him look bad, but it's like misrepresenting what he said. So you sort of have to respond to that and say “Well, he said this, but really the truth is this.” That was the main impetus. Bill Gates has probably done more for the climate than any other human. So it's not like he's the villain, but someone has to speak for the trees.
Bill Gates has probably done more for the climate than any other human. So it's not like he's the villain, but someone has to speak for the trees.
Your home base is Hawaii. How would you say that the specific environment there has helped you scale Terraformation across the world?
Doing things in Hawaii is inherently hard. After a while, you become aware that you're 2,500 miles away from any other land—it’s one of the most remote places on Earth where there is a significant population. The way we think of it is: if we could do it here, we could do it anywhere else.
These islands have 10 out of the world's 14 climate zones. Hawaii has more endangered species than almost anywhere else in the world because there's a lot of endangered habitats that have been destroyed. There was a time when the islands were being colonized, and people were bringing every plant here. Hawaii is a state where the Indigenous peoples legitimate government was overthrown in a coup, and then annexed by the U.S. That's important, because it lends a sort of political and cultural dimension that is present in a lot of places in the world, where climate projects are happening and people are more vulnerable to the changing climate. That context affects everything that you do.
So we're not only working in this environment where costs are high, but where you have to be very aware of endangered species and biomes. You have to be very keen on your practices. I think that's a good practice for the rest of the world. Then you can say to the rest of the world, “Hey, we did this here. We're not saying we know all of your challenges, but we did have to overcome many, and what that means is that you can do it, too.”
Hawaii is a state where the Indigenous peoples legitimate government was overthrown in a coup, and then annexed by the U.S. That's important, because it lends a sort of political and cultural dimension that is present in a lot of places in the world, where climate projects are happening and people are more vulnerable to the changing climate. That context affects everything that you do.
That mentality has really carried over to your work with other community leaders across the world. How do you approach communicating your solution with local leaders?
I've learned one really big lesson, which is you don't communicate to local leaders, you work very hard to listen to them. It’s very easy for people to think they know what a group needs. But people know things about what they need that outsiders don't really know. So there's an extreme emphasis on listening, and when you think you understand, you actually need to look deeper. People will tell you what you want to hear or what they aspire to. So you have to really dig deep. Humans are not always what you expect. So it's really more about listening, and not assuming that you know anything.
You are attempting to take on one of the biggest challenges the world has ever faced with Terraformation. How do you explain the scope of your solution?
I like to use two math illustrations. One of the approximate goals for global reforestation is a trillion trees. So let's say you were going to count to a million and it takes you one second to count each number 24/7 with no breaks. It will take you about 12 days to do that. It would take you 31 years to count to a billion. It would take 31,000 years to count to a trillion. So that shows you how big a trillion is compared to a million.
I've learned one really big lesson, which is you don't communicate to local leaders, you work very hard to listen to them.
Here's the second illustration. Let's say we want to plant all those trees in a decade somehow. If you divide 1 trillion trees into 8 billion people—which is roughly the population of humans on the earth—that's 125 trees per person. If you want to do that over 10 years, that's 12.5 trees per person, which really means if every person planted only one tree per month for 10 years, we would have a trillion trees. So this is actually a tractable number. A trillion trees is actually practical—and immediately scalable.
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Mr Wong, Super grateful that super-smart, influential people like you are working on reforestation. I'd like to mention that deforestation has put into danger habitats for large number of living organisms. So reforestation of the planet can be seen as an imperative by first principle. The climate benefit is an important bonus.