About Us

We Create Accelerated Solutions

We are an international team of scientists, naturalists, and business people committed to the regeneration of the natural world. We are an open-source non-profit based in Santa Rosa, California, and we harness the emerging technologies of aerial robotics, big data, and seed enhancements to dramatically scale up restoration of priority forestlands, watersheds, and habitats.

alaric balibrera eric radcliffe lake silalahi
Treasurer Eric Radcliffe and founder Alaric Balibrera survey potential restoration sites in northern Sumatra
treasurer eric radcliffe planting tree
Researching reforestation in the Leuser Ecosystem, Sumatra

Our Mission: Restore Priority Ecosystems

Our leadership team represents diverse cultures and worldviews but together we share a passion for a thriving planet. We believe the survival of countless species including our own depends upon our ability to mitigate climate change and transition into a sustainable relationship with the Earth. We are committed to solutions as far-reaching as the challenges we face.

We have agency. We can shape the future.

Our leadership team represents diverse cultures and worldviews but together we share a passion for a thriving planet. We believe the survival of countless species including our own depends upon our ability to mitigate climate change and transition into a sustainable relationship with the Earth. We are committed to solutions as far-reaching as the challenges we face.

alaric balibrera eric radcliffe rudi putra discussion
Planning tiger habitat with National Geographic Fellow Rudi Putra
panoramic tropical forest hills
alaric balibrera bukit lawang

Linking Global Efforts

As the world’s only not-for-profit droneseeding company we are uniquely positioned to make critical field and laboratory contributions to open-source SET and droneseeding knowledge banks. In these efforts we collaborate with leading researchers, renowned research institutions, conservation organizations, and local communities. Virtually all future large-scale restoration will depend on these open sources for their information and resourcing. Our methods, materials, and results, all free, will empower individuals and local organizations anywhere in the world to carry out large-scale restoration in degraded ecosystems near them – whether in Congo, Colombia, or California.

The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.

Meet our founder, Alaric

The reason I’m here is the same reason many of you may also be here: a desire to help the planet, save endangered species, and save ourselves.

To meet the challenges we face our responses need to be big enough to restore habitats, watersheds, and ecosystems faster than they’re being destroyed. Given that the scope of destruction is a staggering 40 million trees a day, closing that gap will require an equally epic effort. Collaborating with passionate and committed people has always been inspiring.

I feel the Earth is alive. I feel grateful, as do so many people around the world, to know that she’s my mother. She’s home. Her generosity is humbling because she’s given me literally everything I have – my body, the air, food, clothes, shelter, all the people I know, everything I have is made of her. The reason I do this work is simply because I want to help her.

Seven years ago megafires burned much of my hometown to the ground. They also lit a spark inside me into a constant flame. I stopped focusing on the firehoses of bad news and drilled instead for ways to take action. Action on a larger scale, action that could actually make a difference.

Action on a landscape scale.

What I didn’t know at the time was I was looking for something that didn’t exist.

But it was about to be born.

2016 was the year the fires came to my hometown and a new word was coined: megafires. Over the next few years large sections of my city were reduced to ash. Records were shattered as extreme weather raged all over the globe and here we began to comprehend the dangers of a warming planet in real time.

A few short years later, megastorms are the new normal. This is just the beginning. Planetary change and extreme weather phenomena are accelerating. Now we begin to understand that civilization as it is currently organized will not survive.

With so many species including humans on the brink of extinction and the epic scope of destruction still accelerating, the question boils down to: how can we hope to restore the very systems that support us?

In 2016 droneseeding didn’t exist. Now it does and I’ve been helping to bring it into existence for these seven years. For scaling up reforestation there is no better solution. It’s cheap. It’s reliable. It’s precise. It can be automated. It can be radically scaled up. It can plant in places humans can’t. Most important of all, a single team can plant millions of seeds in a single week.

In spite of the urgency there are still only a handful of droneseeding companies in the world and Rainforest Rising is the only open-source. We are also not for profit, which means we give all our knowledge to benefit others in their efforts to regenerate degraded ecosystems. If you have a restoration idea we will try to help you bring your vision to reality, too.

We’re here to work together because we believe that together is the only way we can reforest the world. There is precious little time and as I mentioned earlier we are far, far behind.

Together is the only way to reach the pace and scale we need.

Do you have skills in forestry? biology? business? computers? people? simply a passion and desire to help the planet?

Alaric Balibrera

Founder

Alaric envisioned droneseeding before it existed, was inspired by the scope of its potential and has spent most of the last decade developing and establishing this new restoration model.

dark drone isolated
Thank you for all you do. Together is the only way.

Join us in our commitment to solutions as big as the challenges we face.