Transcript:

Five years ago, a wildfire tore through Rebecca Gentry’s Montana ranch, leaving tens of thousands of dead, scorched trees in its wake.

In situations like this, landowners sometimes clean up pastureland by cutting the dead standing trees, piling them up, and burning them, so they don’t fall and hurt people or animals.

But that releases the climate-warming CO2 the trees absorbed as they grew.

Canary: “And that’s what we want to help landowners avoid.”

Grant Canary is CEO of the company Mast Reforestation, which worked with Gentry on a different solution.

They dug a pit about 20 feet deep, buried millions of pounds of dead trees, and capped the vault with fabric, gravel, and soil.

Then they replanted the ground above with native grasses for grazing cattle.

Research shows that burying wood underground can slow its decomposition.

Canary: “In the right conditions, the carbon is locked into the soil for hundreds, if not thousands of years, taking advantage of all the hard work that the trees did over decades to remove that carbon from the atmosphere.”

At the Montana ranch, the vault will be closely monitored to ensure that it’s locking away global-warming emissions long-term.

Reporting credit: Sarah Kennedy / ChavoBart Digital Media