The Restoration Trust

The Restoration Trust is being formed to coordinate post-wildfire and ecological restoration on US public and tribal lands, working with credentialed partners. The work is grounded in survival monitoring: success is not measured by trees planted but by acres surviving at year three, five, and ten, audited by external forest science.

The restoration category has been damaged by donor-funded campaigns that emphasized planting over survival. The Restoration Trust is being designed to avoid those failure modes through credentialed partners, transparent methodology, and survival-based reporting. We do not promise carbon neutrality, offsetting, or net zero outcomes. We promise rigorous restoration work, honestly measured.

The Restoration Trust is intended to be structured as a public-benefit trust with conservation easement holding capacity, pending counsel confirmation. The trust form is intended to convert mission to property: where the trust holds conservation easements on restoration sites, the mission is enforceable against the land itself, not just against the institution.

Operating partnerships are intended with credentialed organizations including the National Forest Foundation, American Forests, the Arbor Day Foundation, USFS field offices, and tribal land management authorities. The Restoration Trust does not plant trees directly; it coordinates funding, site selection, methodology, and survival auditing across partner operations.

The primary beneficiaries are US public lands (USFS and BLM jurisdictions affected by wildfire backlog) and tribal lands (under partnership agreements respecting tribal sovereignty and land management protocols). The Restoration Trust operates in service of the land itself and the communities, human and ecological, that depend on it.

Watershed communities downstream of restoration sites are secondary beneficiaries. Restored forests provide flood mitigation, water quality protection, fire risk reduction, and biodiversity recovery that flow downhill from the restoration site. The benefit is real but indirect.

Trust governance is intended to follow a multi-stakeholder pattern with adversarial composition. Trustees are intended to include representation from federal land management, tribal nations, credentialed restoration partners, scientific advisory bodies, and at-large public-interest seats.

Methodology is intended to be published and version-controlled through the platform Standard primitive. Survival audits are intended to be conducted by external forest science advisors and published. Corporate sponsor attribution is intended to be tightly scoped: sponsors may not claim outcomes the methodology has not yet measured.