Earth Force Technologies positions itself at the intersection of sustainability and innovation. What global problem is your company specifically trying to solve, and how does your approach differ from existing solutions?
I’ve worked in the climate sphere for the past 25 years. I spent the first 15 years in renewable energy—back when wind and solar were niche—helping those sectors grow both as a project developer in the private sector and in clean energy policy, which involved lobbying, drafting legislation, and securing public support for ballot measures.
Next, I spent five years in electric transportation once clean energy began to gain real economic traction and attract talent and capital. In 2020, I was thinking about what to do next. I stepped back and looked at the big map, if you will, of climate emissions. Energy and transportation seem on track for strong progress over the next 20 years—we can already see the path forward. The other big piece, which is about a third of the climate puzzle, is about taking care of the land. This field is moving backwards. Frankly, it’s a discouraging story that people rarely discuss: nature’s carbon cycle is moving backwards much faster than renewable and clean energy is moving forward. For example, one bad wildfire season in California has emitted more incremental emissions than the emissions offset by the last 20 years of clean energy and clean transportation combined in the state (by a factor of two, actually).
That reality hit home when my aunt and uncle’s house in Southern Oregon burned down in 2020. It struck me that the wildfire rampage was both a crisis and an opportunity. It underscored that not all tons of carbon are equal—a ton of carbon dioxide from a wildfire destroying someone’s home is far more devastating than a ton from a car. So, from an entrepreneur’s point of view, my perception was that there might be effective entry points for taking better care of land where fire risk intersects valuable real estate, strong local motivation, and the ability to pay for protection—places like Tahoe, Napa, or other high-stakes communities. As we refine the model there, we can expand it to more regions. That was the genesis of the idea.
Our mission at Earth Force is to help society partner with nature. Historically, people have relied on low-information, high-scale interventions—like clear-cutting entire hillsides or plowing fields to plant a single crop. Meanwhile, there are high-information, low-scale interventions, including artisanal park restoration and small-scale regenerative farming. What is missing is high-information strategies at scale and that will be true not just in forests but in grasslands, river settings, near-coastal landscapes, and so on. That is the skill we must develop as part of climate adaptation, and wildfire is a high-value place to start. That is why we are called Earth Force, rather than say Forest Force.
Today, forest restoration in the western U.S. relies on foresters or forestry technicians, who walk around the woods and literally spray paint or flag individual trees to mark them. In California, the workforce for forestry could prepare about 10,000 acres of forest per year for fuel reduction. The state’s goal is 1,500,000 acres. So, our current capabilities are off by two orders of magnitude.
Regarding our tech, we’ve built what you might call a “Google Maps for forests”—a vision system mounted on machinery that reads the forest in real-time. It identifies every tree’s species, size, and type and compares it to a prescription for the desired forest structure. Instead of manual marking, operators see on a tablet which trees to remove and when to move on. The system then generates an automatic report comparing the before-and-after forest map to verify that the correct work was done. The aim is to cut out certain trees to reduce fire potential and leave a healthier forest.
This delivers precise, large-scale fuel-reduction thinning at a much lower cost and far greater speed—faster, better, cheaper, and, critically, at greater scale. Since incorporating in 2022, we’ve been fortunate to have raised several rounds of financing and deployed dozens of sites despite today’s market turbulence. We hope to continue scaling up. Our name—Earth Force—signals that we’ll start with fire, which is so urgent and visible, then extend into other ecosystems to enable high-information stewardship of all lands.
When you were building a new approach to land use, were there any other models around the world that inspired you, or that you thought could be coalesced into something even better?
When a local approach fails, [one] must identify alternatives that might succeed. We draw on several international examples. For example, in Europe, two centuries of clear-cutting caused managers to develop information-driven methods to restore forests, though often still at a relatively low-information scale: operations there generally resemble tree farms.
In Canada, authorities discovered that making the economics of forestry more feasible requires larger‐scale, longer-term contracts. By contrast, the U.S. model often bundles work into one-off, 500-acre project bids that may go unclaimed—part of the broader forestry crisis in the western U.S.
From a mass-balance perspective, forests cannot grow forever: there is something limiting them. In fact, forests grow until that biomass is removed by fire or fiber, which is either through burning or cutting. Historically, fire served as the primary control. In fact, California’s forests are fire-adopted. Indigenous peoples in California used intentional burns to manage ecosystems. Yet, when California joined the Union, its very first law outlawed prescribed burning—shifting the mindset from fire to fiber. For two centuries, this led to unsustainable fiber production with fire suppression. In the late 1980s, policymakers realized that this system did not work: they were cutting everything they have. Policymakers reversed course once again, effectively proscribing both fire and fiber.
After forty years without either mechanism, forests accumulated fuel to unprecedented levels. Dry years or summer droughts followed by ignition events produced uncontrollable, mega wildfires. The task now is to get back into balance, meaning in most places to cut strategically, removing certain trees while retaining others, until we get to a point where beneficial fire can be used constructively.
Fuel reduction is more important than ever, with the recent catastrophes of the 2025 Palisades wildfires. Could you share any anecdotes from this period that either changed Earth Force’s way of thinking, or proved Earth Force’s methods to be correct?
When we examine places [in California] that have proactively carried out fuel-reduction work year after year, [they] were able to protect their communities—even in the face of high-wind or large-scale wildfire. When a fire encounters an extended fuel break, the flames descend to the forest floor rather than filling the canopy; on the ground, fire moves much more slowly, burns far less intensely, and remains visible enough for firefighters to engage, unlike a high-wind crown fire that engulfs the treetops and creates extremely hazardous firefighting conditions.
This experience really reinforced the success of our methodologies. These real-world experiments—where treated and untreated areas both eventually burn under similar conditions—reveal the disparate outcomes of prioritizing forestry, compared to neglecting it. For example, the Caldor Fire near Tahoe, which was one of the first regions to invest in fuel-break networks and mechanical thinning, was stalled and simply did not enter the community’s perimeter. In other towns that had ignored the need for fuel reduction, homes and entire neighborhoods were consumed by the flames.
Could you share the aspects of technology and data analytics of Earth Force Technologies that help bring your mission together?
For anyone interested in nature-based solutions or climate adaptation, I would say that finding a problem is not difficult. There is an abundance of problems to be solved. The challenging aspect is finding an entry market where [clients] will pay enough, and where the opportunity is large enough to attract capital and scale up.
As we think about our own growth path, [our team] is deploying solutions today that would have been considered R&D five years ago, yet we expect them to be routine within the next five. That is the aspiration of entrepreneurship: trying to get the timing right where you are early enough to be a creator in the market, but not so early that your solutions are not technologically feasible.
To explain the specifics of our technology, consider a box on top of the machine. We build a little hardware, and then build a lot of software that uses the data generated by the hardware. The hardware collects detailed forest data, and our software transforms it into guidance for operators, administrative tools, inputs for future plans, and community-scale fire-risk assessments—all of which flows from a vertical software. We repurpose low-cost LiDAR for forestry. We’re using Nvidia chipsets, which were originally developed for gaming, now to find our way through a forest. We use cloud and satellite to move data. None of these technologies were originally developed for forestry, but we’ve been able to leverage them. Just five years ago, such a system would have been more expensive and impractical. In another five years, it can be fully normalized. Our team is going through the process of this transformation.
What would you say are the challenges or experiences unique to entrepreneurs in the intersection of business and real-world impact? What advice would you give to such entrepreneurs?
My team and I feel super fortunate to be working pretty near the top of Maslow’s hierarchy: each member of our team gets to do work they are uniquely suited for, thanks to a lifetime of experience leading to this point.
Personally, I have worked in natural resource development, wind and solar project development, policy, and technology. We can dream of a more linear career, but sometimes bouncing between roles or earning some unexpected graduate degree is necessary to build a unique combination of skills.
Earlier today, I joined a call reviewing a map when someone asked why a particular zone appeared red, indicating that [the operator] must avoid it. When asked why it was marked as such, I replied that this zone marks the presence of a wolf den, so operators cannot go within 300 feet of the den with their machines. It is gratifying to know that [our technology] also safeguards living ecosystems. That was my original motivation when selecting land use as my next focus after energy and transportation.
My advice is to follow the thing that you love to do, and try to set your life up so that even if it takes time, eventually you’re doing something that you feel really fulfilled by.
Dawe spoke with Sheth on April 16, 2025. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
The views expressed in this piece are the interviewee’s own and are not reflective of the views of the HIR.
