Grant Canary

Rebuilding after a wildfire isn’t cheap. The recent Los Angeles wildfires, for example, incurred up to $164 billion in property and capital losses. But restoring the forest isn’t, either, with a few thousand acres running a couple million dollars, Grant Canary, co-founder and CEO of Mast Reforestation, told TechCrunch. “If you’re a land owner and it’s going to take 60 to 80 years for those trees to grow, any money manager is going to be like, put your money literally in anything else.” The biggest cost in reforestation is dealing with the dead, burned trees. Frequently, they’re cut down, piled up, and burned on site. Canary said Mast has devised a way to pay for reforestation today, without landowners needing to wait decades to either harvest timber or claim carbon credits. Instead of burning what’s left, Mast will collect and bury the trees to prevent decay — and sell the carbon credits that result.