We had the pleasure of speaking with Cameron Jones, co-founder of Flash Forest, an innovative company revolutionizing reforestation through drone technology. As Chief Operating Officer, Cameron leads efforts to combat the devastating impact of wildfires by automating tree planting, a mission-driven by his deep commitment to environmental sustainability. From a stable career in government to tackling one of the world’s biggest climate challenges, Cameron’s journey exemplifies purpose, resilience, and innovation in the face of adversity.

i&a: Cameron, we just really want to congratulate you on everything that you've done so far with Flash Forest. Give our audience a bit of a snapshot of Flash Forest.

Cameron: I am a co-founder of Flash Forest. In a nutshell, we’re automating the reforestation and environmental reclamation space. One of the big things that we do is drone reforestation. With drones, we are able to shoot seed pods at about 20 per second and we’re trying to increase it to 38 per second next year. We can fly drones kilometres away from where we are, which means we can plant in the most remote areas of Canada, that have just been neglected. We’ve been focused on burns. Canada has had some of the worst wildfires in the world. For context, on average, Canada loses about 1.5 million hectares to wildfire. 2021 was a brutal year. I think we lost about 4 million hectares of forest. In 2023 it was 16 million hectares.

i&a: That’s incredible.

Cameron: Yeah, it dwarfs any emissions from oil and gas. And the issue is these burns are happening in really remote areas and those fires are getting neglected. This could have been okay in the past. Wildfires are a natural process where you have serotinous cones—pine cones that actually open up after a burn. With climate change, these burns are extremely hot. There are different classes of burn heat, one through six. Once you get to a class five, class six burn, it’s incinerating the cones. Additionally, these burns are just happening on a scale that dwarfs anything that happened before. The result is, that you don't have ingress. You don’t have seeds that are coming in from neighbouring forests. You don’t have birds carrying them in and droppings with seeds in it. And the forests are now converting away from conifer stands to just brush grass, fireweed, and maybe some aspen. It’s fundamentally changing ecosystems. and I think most Canadians aren’t aware. So we started this business to really scale the reforestation efforts in Canada and we’re trying to take that international. We’re very proud of a seed pod we’ve developed. It holds water preferentially onto seedlings. When it’s not raining, if there’s drought, if there are heat domes, that seed has an advantage over bare seed. This has really helped us actually scale how trees can be planted by drone. Because if you just try to do it by seed, it’s not effective. You use too much seed. A lot of them get eaten, they land on the tops of trees, or they germinate right after it rains. If you have drought, they die. We’ve been able to increase water retention on that seed so that it can adapt to a changing climate, especially in those first few months. When we started this in 2019, we planted 3,000 pods. The next year we did 30,000 the year after that 300,000 and the year after that 3.3 million. And now we’ve done 30 million. But not every pod is a tree. We determine based on the site how many pods we need to plant per tree. It depends completely on the environmental factors. But we’re planting millions of trees a year now, and I think if we can keep annexing like we historically have done, we will surpass a billion, closer to 2030.

i&a: Just hearing you talk about those numbers is daunting how does that make you feel tackling such a big problem?

Cameron: Honestly, there’s nothing I would rather do. The challenge for us is we never know what the climate is going to be one year to a next to the next. We have all of these criteria that allow us to assess and determine whether a site is optimal before we plant. One of the criteria is what’s the average amount of rainfall it will get over a summer. But the historical benchmarks are now not even coming close to predicting the future. We would choose sites that get on average, 250 millimetres of rain between May and September and now will get less than five. It’s daunting because we don’t have the predictability, but that’s okay because there’s nothing else that’s given me as much purpose as this current role. And I would say the majority of staff would probably say their purpose is tied to the business. We’re doing something that we all believe in and we know that it needs to be done.

i&a: How does that purpose impact the decisions you make every day?

Cameron: Purpose can be messy because your emotions are involved. Your value is involved. Your identity is tied to it, which can also cloud your vision. But I would say it’s so valuable because this is how we’ve been able to do what we’ve done. Trust me, it’s not an easy business. We’ve worked the most insane hours you can imagine texting through the night all over the weekends without a break. And you just pick yourself up and do it because you believe in it. It’s a motivation.

i&a: You shifted from a stable government space into this world. What motivated you to take that leap?

Cameron: I was in government for five years. I had a very stable job and, a great career path, at a very senior level for my age, but I was so dissatisfied because I didn’t have a purpose tied to it. I knew that I wanted to do something tangible for the environment. And I think I had spent a lot of time convincing myself that what I was doing in that role would have an impact. Manifest destiny, my brother came to me with this idea and said, “Hey, what do you think about doing this?” and I said, let’s go for it. If I had to talk to myself five years ago, it’s going to be ten times harder than you think. But take the leap. It’s worth the risk.

i&a: You found an interesting intersection between technology and sustainability, in an industry that is predominantly done with manual tree planting, Understanding where you are and how far you've come, what role has resilience played?

Cameron: The whole business has been run on resilience. 100%. There’s a quote I always use by Tim Nottke. “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.” If you work hard enough, you'll be able to overcome things. I’m also a great believer in luck. I find the harder I work, the more of it I have. So I think that’s just the case for our business. If you just keep picking up, no matter what failures you have, or what challenges are thrown at you, if you keep putting your head down and working through it, you come out on the other side. Just got to keep putting in the work.

i&a: What advice would you give to somebody to find that grit?

Cameron: For me, it’s a mentality shift. I think what tends to happen is you will work very, very hard and then you’re going to hit what you think is your limit, you start telling yourself a narrative. You’re telling yourself to keep pushing while you’re also saying dial it back, maybe this is too much. Maybe these indicators are showing that you don’t want to keep going down this path. You’re negotiating with yourself. This quote was transformative for me. “If you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them.”—Jim Kwik. So whenever you are approaching a challenge and you’re saying you haven’t been successful with this in the past or you don’t know if you’re going to be the best at this, you’ve got to ignore your limitations. You have to be bold and rewire your brain. Stop fighting for your limitations. Because if you fight for them you keep them.

i&a: Is this something you and your brother both carry? Does your team have that?

Cameron: I wouldn’t say it's just limited to my brother and me. I think there’s a camaraderie amongst the team because we have all really been through the trenches and we’ve all come out and we’re going to keep going. I think the one thing between all of us is just this unwillingness to give up. No matter how many cards are stacked against you.

i&a: We believe that you’re going to be one of i&a’s trailblazers that we can look back on and truly measure impact. What does legacy mean to you?

Cameron: I have legacy aspirations personally and professionally. What’s important for me is that I have good relationships with my wife, family and my friends. When things are good and when things are bad. A legacy would be that, despite the ebbs and flows, despite me being at my worst, I can still show up and be a good husband, a good family member and a good friend. Professionally, it’s that I've had, more than anything else, a tangible positive footprint on the environment. That I’m making an impact on climate change. And if we can inspire other people to do similar things, that’s great.

i&a: We’re going to combine two questions. What makes you uncomfortable—what’s your vulnerability? And what's on your nightstand or in your headphones? What inspires you?

Cameron: I’m a pretty avid reader or listener of audiobooks. I just read this book recently, “It’s Never Enough: from Barista to Billionaire” by Andrew Wilkinson. He started with humble beginnings, in his early 20s worked at a coffee, built a design agency and by 35 he was a billionaire and friends with Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. One of the things that he talked about was “anti-goals.” He said instead of setting goals, his first step was to say, what am I doing now that I don’t want to be doing in a year— my anti-goals. And he basically mapped out what he was going to do to make sure he avoided those anti-goals. Make sure he avoids them in the future. And then from that he had his own goals right? And so, I did that. I mapped out personal, professional and financial anti-goals. And then I unpacked it and then I broke it down into goals. It’s been so helpful because I’ve now visualized the path that’s going to just get me into a better space.

i&a: What would you tell someone when asked what motivates you, what gets you through, what would that be?

Cameron: I would say create a list of your anti-goals. You already know what your business goals are. Come up with your anti-goals, the things that are keeping you from hitting your goals. The things that are keeping you dissatisfied. Map those out and create a path. Write it down. Break it down into metrics. That’ll give you the resiliency you need to create a path—a manifest destiny.

i&a: We’ll close on this question. What is your non-compromise position?

Cameron: Be a lover of truth, no matter how painful it is. It’s great to receive it and it’s great to give it.

i&a: That’s a powerful place to end our conversation. Thank you, Cameron.

Written by
impact&agency