Wade Crowfoot & Newsom on 30x30: “This Is Not an Intellectual Exercise”
VX News here features a conversation between California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot and Governor Gavin Newsom, with roughly 100 days left in his term, at the 30x30 Partnership 2026 Summit, held September 29 under Renzo Piano’s living roof at the California Academy of Sciences. Read the interview below and find the conversation here.
Wade Crowfoot: We have a lot to talk about, but I'll share that the governor just signed some really critical environmental legislation outside, about five minutes ago—including codifying the State Library Parks Pass program, Including codifying the state's Outdoors for All initiative to build equitable access.
Gavin Newsom: $1 billion dollars.
Wade Crowfoot: Including protecting coastal communities from these federal attacks to expand offshore oil drilling, and institutionalizing an important program to reduce human–wildlife conflict as we bring species back.
Wade Crowfoot: So it's a big day, and we have a lot to unpack on 30x30. But I want to ask you a personal question before we get into all this. At this point you have a national, even global, profile, and people know you for a lot of things. A lot of people might not know just how much you like to be outdoors. We've talked about your fly fishing in Montana in the summer; I sometimes help you slip into state parks and national parks with your kids; we get on the hiking trail. What does all of this mean to you beyond being an elected official?
Gavin Newsom: Memories. My father. Family. Divorced dad, 19-year-old mom, a couple of kids. They separated, and she raised us. The only connection I had with my father was the summers—a weeklong trip somewhere on the Rogue River, the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, eventually the Colorado River. We'd be up there fighting the good fight to save beluga whales near Hudson Bay in Canada, learning about the Tongass National Forest, meeting all his friends. I remember the coolest friend my dad ever had was a guy named Mark Dubois, who had literally chained himself to a rock to stop a dam from being built. I thought this guy was amazing. And he was a hugger as well.
As a kid, I remember my dad was on the Environmental Defense Fund board for 16 years. He was one of the early guys at the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund and Friends of the River. Those are my memories, and they're seared and indelible: his advocacy for the condors, his advocacy for mountain lions. He started the Mountain Lion Foundation in California and did an initiative to set aside habitat—which is literally part of this larger 30x30 initiative, because the state is still procuring habitat for mountain lions pursuant to that initiative they passed decades ago.
So for me, this is about family. It's about places. It's about people. It's about memories. This is not an intellectual exercise, and I imagine nine out of 10 of you can relate a little bit to what I said—to that relationship we have with what's above us, and how that connects us to 10,000 generations, how that connects us to our creator. This is a moral issue. What I'm so proud of in the approach you've taken, and in the leadership of CNRA and so many of you in this room, is that we have advanced policy through that prism, through that frame.
Wade Crowfoot: If you think back to 2020, I was thinking about our origin story on 30x30. It was that family fishing trip up at Independence Lake, north of Truckee. The fishing was bad that weekend—I remember that. But I remember sitting with you and Jen, the First Partner, and you said something along the lines of, "How do we go big on nature?" At the time, 30x30 had started incubating as a concept. So we threw out this possibility of 30x30, and you immediately seized on it, which made me very nervous. Because what it means, as you all know, is expanding conservation over 7 million acres of land and doubling the amount of conservation in coastal waters. But from the get-go you were like, "We're doing it," and three months later, through executive order, we did it. My question is: What the hell were you thinking?
Gavin Newsom: It's that we don't think about land; we don't think about biodiversity. We talk about climate. We talk about greenhouse gases. We talk about tailpipe emissions. We don't talk about nature the way we should. We were having that conversation—that biodiversity is lost in all this. We were having the debate around that wildlife corridor, going back to mountain lions down in Southern California. We'll be opening the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, that new bridge we built, in early December. Why aren't we talking about things that are tangible, that connect to the soul, to the heart—not just these intellectual exercises that confuse people completely? So that was a no-brainer.
You also said—and this is a true story—that we would be the first. And I'm like, "Yeah." That's always been my mindset: let's go. And Wade's like, "I think we can get the Biden administration interested in it," which you did, and Biden ultimately advanced it. But we were the first to set those audacious goals.
And you have Jack Dangermond here, who's one of our legends. He was also part of that conversation, because he had just made a huge gift to all of us and our kids and grandkids: the Dangermond Preserve, just north of Santa Barbara. That's next-level stuff. He could have sold that thing for—I don't know—but he didn't. He did it for all of us, and he did it for himself, because he wanted to leave a legacy. And that's a legacy. It's not the money in his bank; it's not the taxes he avoided. So that was it. I also knew that you could do it—that you'd make it happen.
Now, the good news is we're making progress. You talked about 7 million acres. I think my math's correct: we've set aside about 3.5 million, which isn't bad—that's the size of, I think, Rhode Island and Delaware combined. We've made tremendous progress on land. Coastal waters are stubborn, though we've made progress there as well, and we can talk about it in a moment. Last year was record-breaking. So we're not only building momentum and setting stretch goals; we're going to reach those goals by 2030.
Wade Crowfoot: Yes, we are—thanks to everybody in this room. And here it is.
Gavin Newsom: Oh, they gave it a number.
Wade Crowfoot: Part of what we wanted to share here—and the governor just did—is that thanks to all of you, we are over halfway to our 30x30 goal on our lands. An additional million acres of conserved lands have been added to our California Nature database over the past year. So give yourselves a hand for that.
Gavin Newsom: Well done. Good stuff.
Wade Crowfoot: And there are big things coming on the coast, which we can unpack a little bit.
Gavin Newsom: Just to put this in perspective: you're being recognized. A lot of places have signed on, but few are implementing. This is the great implementation. We say it all the time—we were saying it at the United Nations last week: we're done with the what and the why. It's all about the how. It's the great implementation across the spectrum of issues, and that's what 30x30 now represents: the application, the implementation of our ideals. And there was a wonderful recognition—congratulations to all of you. An international organization, the IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, gave the first award of its kind to a jurisdiction in the United States. It was because of the work that all of you did—not just setting the goals, but achieving those short-term goals and building that momentum for the ultimate goal.
Wade Crowfoot: It's incredible. And we have Tracy Farrell here from the IUCN. That nature network was the first awarded that gold-standard Green List. We were just in New York—it feels like last month, but it was last week. A lot of us are focused on California; we have our heads down doing the work. What does California setting an audacious goal, and making the progress to meet it, mean to the rest of the world?
Gavin Newsom: The power of emulation. Success leaves clues. We were down at COP in Belém, and the United States was literally a footnote down there. I thought it was more, but it turned out—the New York Times did the analysis—close to 1,000 representatives from the Chinese government were there, flooding the zone. They already have 70 percent of EV production globally, and their supply chains. It's not just electric power; it's economic power. It's statecraft. All the cars being driven down there were BYDs. These guys are not screwing around.
Gavin Newsom: And we're doubling down on stupid. We've got a president whose head is in the sand, soaked by oil and big oil interests, and it's depressing beyond words. What's not depressing is what's happening at the subnational level. We went there with that mindset, with that consciousness—with the extraordinary organizations that have formed out here on the West Coast: the Pacific Coast Collaborative; the U.S. Climate Alliance, which I'm proud California co-chairs; America Is All In. Bloomberg has been doing extraordinary work there, building a bipartisan coalition of subnational leaders all across the globe, not just across the United States, to step up and step into the void that is Donald Trump.
I don't want to spend too much time on Trump, but he's trying to recreate the 19th century, and he's doing it on a myriad of issues—not just climate, but women's rights, voting rights, civil rights, LGBTQ rights. Putting America in reverse. I remember my dad talking about James Watt, Reagan's interior secretary; that was a four-letter word. I kind of miss him. What the hell is going on? Chris Wright, all these guys. This is serious. It's code red.
The science is overwhelming. We had Al Gore in here maybe 21 years ago, the year before An Inconvenient Truth came out. We did UN Climate Day—remember that, Wade? I was mayor, and we made it a week. That's when Gore was out here starting to preview his movie. You should watch it 20 years later: with the exception of the snowcaps on Kilimanjaro, 99 percent of it came true. And the movie predicts what's coming next. The last 10 years are the hottest on record. We're going to see these super El Niños because of climate-charged impacts. We had to do a declaration of emergency—I did a proactive one, in anticipation of what's coming.
Climate risk is financial risk. You all know this. When you're trying to get that insurance renewal, or your insurance bills are going through the roof—if you're in the construction business, it's hard to even get a project approved, on the basis of getting the insurance. And then there are the impacts to the economy, broadly defined.
So California was front and center in Belém, in the absence of federal leadership, and we were front and center last week at the United Nations. Just as a Californian, it was a deep point of pride to see you out there, to see our CalEPA, to see all the teams and all of these networks—many of you were there. Thank you for not giving in to the fear and anxiety. Thank you for not selling out to the coal industry and the gas industry and the oil industry. Thank you for standing up, and thank you for being an example not just to others across the country, but to the globe. I'm not lying: the world is literally looking to all of you at this incredibly important moment. So there's deep pride that we're here, and deep gratitude, humility, and grace that we have this opportunity. I see many remarkable members of the Legislature here, and I'm confident in their leadership. I pray that baton—that leadership—extends to whoever comes next in your role, and certainly to whoever comes next as governor.
