Everybody knows the saying about making lemonade when life gives you lemons. Here in Sonoma County, when local wildfire mitigation efforts give you felled trees, you might as well make firewood.
This is the concept behind the Good Fire Project, a nascent nonprofit created by Healdsburg resident Scott Keneally.
The effort repurposes trees removed by fire crews into boxes of packaged firewood, turning risk into resource. As Keneally tells it, every box of Good Fire supports community safety and forest health. He says the wood is also a symbol of local resilience, a sustainable by-product of fire mitigation in the region.
“I like to say we’re fighting fire with firewood, one box at a time,” he says.
Keneally hatched the idea for Good Fire in 2020 on the front lines of wildfire mitigation. After enduring the Tubbs Fire in 2017 and evacuating his family during the Kincade Fire in 2019, he enrolled in Santa Rosa Junior College’s Volunteer Fire Academy and joined the Northern Sonoma County Fire Protection District as a volunteer wildland firefighter.
That winter, he participated with the group’s fuels crew, cutting firebreaks, clearing brush, felling trees, working burn piles, and taking part in prescribed burns.
Through this work, Keneally became aware of how much fuel was out there — and how much of it was wasted. One of the most disturbing lessons: Once trees are felled, many are chipped or left in the woods, while local stores import packaged firewood, often from far away.
“None of it made sense to me,” he says. “I knew there had to be a better way.”
For Keneally, that better way included cultivating a cadre of conservation groups, arborists, and landowners from which he could source materials. Once he identified these partners, he established agreements to purchase wood by the cord. In most cases, the wood is already chopped into manageable chunks. Sometimes Keneally grabs a log splitter or ax and cuts it down further by hand, boxing it in industry-standard bunches of 0.75 cubic feet.
Each box features purpose-driven messaging and a QR code linking to immersive stories, resources, and steps people can take to support wildfire resilience.
The first boxes of Good Fire hit shelves July 31. Big John’s Market in Healdsburg was the first customer, selling the wood for $14.49 per box. Oliver’s Market in Windsor was expected to follow suit.
Like many startups, the endeavor tracks to develop slowly: Keneally’s goal is to sell 500 boxes by the end of the year. Eventually, as the project grows, Keneally hopes to expand the scope beyond Sonoma County and develop a philanthropic arm to support fire mitigation year-round.
These goals excite John Mills, co-founder and CEO of the Watch Duty wildfire app. Mills says an effort like Good Fire could make fire mitigation more sustainable and could save businesses tens of thousands of dollars on importing firewood every year.
“I don’t see why you couldn’t plug this into every fire district across the country,” says Mills, who lives off-the-grid on the western side of Healdsburg. “When it comes to wildfire mitigation, you have to think globally and act locally.”