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Rewilding Earth Podcast
Episode 140: California’s Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot On Beavers, Rewilding Rivers, and Wildlife Crossings
00:38:50
Wade Crowfoot serves as California’s Natural Resources Secretary, leading efforts to conserve California’s environment and natural resources. He has served as Secretary since 2019 and advises Governor Newsom as a member of his cabinet.
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- [00:04]
A
We were a little late to the game in actually recognizing the importance of beavers, their natural and native habitat across our state, and actually then leaning in and developing policy to bring beavers back. But I have to say, we're trying to go from worst to first. In other words, really embracing not only helping beavers stay on landscapes, non lethal interventions, but also relocating them to where they were really before the fur rush of the 1800s, getting them back on the landscape to address some of the biggest challenges we have as a result of climate change.
- [00:57]
B
You're listening to the Rewilding Earth podcast. Wade Crowfoot serves as California's Natural Resources Secretary, leading efforts to conserve California's environment and natural resources. He served as Secretary since 2019 and advises Governor Newsom as a member of his cabinet. Secretary Crowfoot oversees an agency of over 25,000 employees spread across 26 departments, commissions and conservancies. His agency is charged with stewarding California's forest and natural lands, rivers and water supplies, and coast and ocean. It also protects natural places, wildlife and biodiversity and helps oversee the state's world leading clean energy transition. In this episode, I talk to Wade about California's beaver reintroduction and coexistence program, the Klamath River Dam removal, and the future of freeing more rivers in California, wildlife crossings, and much more. You may have to remind yourself throughout this interview that I'm talking to a state natural resources agency head. Wade has a far deeper understanding of rewilding and conservation topics than I expected when I met him. I see this interview as a preview of what's possible in other states when the right people are in charge of conservation and rewilding initiatives. Wade, welcome to the Rewilding Earth podcast.
- [02:24]
A
I am excited to be here.
- [02:27]
B
I am excited to talk to you. I met you at beavercon and I want to know first of all, was that your first BeaverCon or have you been to one before?
- [02:34]
A
It was my first one ever. And what'd you think lived up to its billing? Oh, it's incredible. And international group, hundreds of people that are driving beaver protection restoration across the world. Incredible.
- [02:48]
B
I was surprised to see lots of agency people from federal to state agencies. Usually conferences that we attend are really heavily in the activist and organization and all of that kind of makeup. And this was something quite different.
- [03:03]
A
Yeah, I think the beavers have achieved sort of an inflection point where decades of work by environmental activists, by tribal leaders has actually translated into government embrace of beavers. And we've really been educated and convinced of the necessity not only the Importance, but like the necessity of beavers on the landscape. So I'm hoping it snowballs from here and we see more and more governments actually leaning in on this agenda.
- [03:32]
B
Yeah, I was happy to see the Colorado governor was there. I think Colorado is trying to be as cool as you guys. Are you worried about that? Are they giving you any pressure?
- [03:40]
A
It's a virtuous competition. Governor Polis is doing incredible things in Colorado, as is Governor Inslee in the state of Washington. Governors across the country, among environmental governors, there can be a constructive competition, which is a good thing, I think.
- [03:58]
B
Yeah. I would go in and flex and just say, how many beavers do you guys even have?
- [04:02]
A
Well, I would say this. I'm never that hesitant to brag on California, but I'll say that other states have actually led on beavers in ways that California hasn't. We were a little late to the game and actually recognizing the importance of beavers, their natural and native habitat across our state, and actually then leaning in developing policy to bring beavers back. But I have to say, we're trying to go from worst to first. In other words, really embracing not only helping beavers stay on landscapes, nonlethal interventions, but also relocating them to where they were really before the fur rush of the 1800s, getting them back on the landscape to address some of the biggest challenges we have as a result of climate change.
- [04:49]
B
Yeah, I can't imagine the job just looking at one species, but this isn't just a normal species. It does so much for the land, for so many other species. It's got to be heartening to see more and more people gather around that campfire and to see things in action on the ground. Could you give some examples of things you've been really proud of?
- [05:11]
A
Yeah, sure. First of all, I think it's a recognition that beavers are a way like a Swiss army knife for climate resilience. In California, we face big challenges from climate change. So think risk of catastrophic wildfire, worsening droughts and water security, loss of a lot of our endemic biodiversity. And what we know now is that beavers actually help us address all of these challenges, and they do the work for free. So I've said before, I'm for 100% employment of beavers. We know where beavers set up. They create buffers that slow down wildfires and sometimes stop wildfires. They spread the water, Slow the water. Spread the water and sink it, which actually allows for a slower recharge into our rivers throughout the year. Really helpful for water supply. And we know this is a keystone species that benefits fish and wildlife across the state. So now that we had this kind of aha moment a couple few years back, we invested, I'm proud we invested all told, about $4 million in standing up a beaver program, attracting some real experts across the country to come lead our efforts, revise our beaver management policies again to reduce lethal this knee jerk movement to kill beavers where they're nuisance and actually try to coexist with them. And then importantly to identify areas to bring beaver back. And I think maybe Jack, that's my, that's what I'm really excited, most excited about was actually being at two of these reintroductions when tribal leaders actually led this effort along with our Department of Fish and Wildlife and Chuck Bonham, leader there who's done great work to actually get beavers back onto these landscapes. The first one was about a year and a half ago up in the northern Sierra Nevada, the homelands of the mountain Maidu people. And it was a big huge meadow that used to be a green meadow most of the year, way long time ago, but without beaver had created these incised channels running through this meadow and really wasn't, wasn't living as the meadow had historically. So seven beaver were reintroduced. Five, I think five of the seven survived. And now a year and a half on they have the next generation of beavers that's recolonized up and down that river and that huge meadow system. So that's great. And when we were down a little bit more recently with the Tule river tribe, which is one of the tribes that has been for years, more than a decade calling for reintroduction of beaver. This tribe has petroglyphs on their reservation, date back hundreds of years with beaver on them to showing us that actually beaver are native to these lands. So we got up there and we did a reintroduction there as well. That's been a bit more of a learning experience because we had predation from bears and wolves on the first round of beavers we reintroduced. But now we have our third set of beaver reintroduced in partnership with that tribe on that reservation. And they've gained a foothold and are doing what they do. So it's exciting. Most exciting though is like actually being out there and opening up the crate and getting those beavers swimming in the water.
- [08:30]
B
Yeah, I can't believe that. I live in eastern Indiana and I'm in, in town and on an old section of a kind of retired golf course we have two beavers and right in town And I'm trying to get people excited about that. There's a lot of knee jerk reaction to it. And so that's been really crazy. That less than a mile from my house, I talked to other people that I met at beavercon and they're just like, wow, we got to travel like 50, 60 miles sometimes or way more than that to go see beavers. And you have them right there. There was a lot of talent in the room at beavercon. And I have to ask, were you checking out the field for some talent that might be persuaded to come to California and help you out?
- [09:12]
A
Absolutely. We had one of our newest recruits there and she was, she came from Washington State and I think she was attracted to the work that was happening in California. I gotta say though, the only reason I was in the room was over a decade of activism from an organization called the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center. Brock Doleman and Kate Lundquist, they're the epitome of wildlife activism across our country. And they play the long game with our state government. And they really educated, methodically educated each of the regulatory agencies in each of the areas of the complex big government that we are on the importance of restoring beaver. And then ultimately, when it got to me, I lead a big, large agency and Governor Newsom, we were excited about it. And then as we were doing the due diligence, they had checked all the other boxes, so we were able to move really quickly. So I'm in awe of that level of focused, patient activism that brings these changes about.
- [10:15]
B
There are so many unsung heroes out there. I don't know how if anybody's out there mentioning the names that you just did and giving them props for really what happened. They really. There are a lot of people out there that play that long game. And it's amazing their dedication and all of the heartache they have to go through until that point they were trying to reach actually arrives. And I, I think they're heroes.
- [10:38]
A
It's incredible. Another great example of that is the largest river restoration project in American history that just completed on the Klamath River. We were so glad to be one part of what removed four outdated dams along the Klamath and essentially brought back over 400 miles of salmon habitat. At one time, the Klamath was the third most productive salmon river on the west coast after the Columbia and the Sacramento. And it's been absolutely decimated. And it was tribes that live along that river in that watershed, the Yurok and the Karuk. Primarily that for 20 years led a campaign to take out those dams and restore the river. And for so long, agencies like mine told them it was not possible. But they stayed at it and stayed at it. And theirs is a remarkable story. And then ultimately three governors in California and their equivalents in Oregon. Because the river is shared between two states, the tribes partnered with our governor to convince Warren Buffett and his team of all people who own the company that own the dams, to actually remove the dams. And it's a remarkable story. And then believe it or not, literally days after that last dam gets taken out, there's the first indication of salmon return. And then within weeks, people can actually go up there and watch salmon spawning in these tributaries that salmon haven't been in in a century. And to me, it says two things. One, just the incredible importance of activism and activists that don't give up, that have a vision and that stay focused and stay perseverant, even against all odds. And then two is just how resilient nature is. If we give nature half a chance, it comes back. It's rivers in your town. In Indiana, it's salmon returning up the Klamath in a heartbeat of the dams being taken out. I just feel like we need to give nature half a chance. And I talk about help nature, help us, we need nature, right? And so if we're able to do these things, it's incredible. And to see how quickly things change.
- [12:44]
B
For the better, I sometimes put little thought bubbles above the heads of beavers when they're being released and think they must be thinking, it's about time just get out of our way, let us do our thing. Because they always have that earnest. Let me check this place out. They're already casing the joint the minute you open the crates. It's amazing.
- [13:02]
A
That's the amazing thing about natural instincts is that they can do that. And of course, the benefit of keystone species, you reintroduce beaver. And beavers help so many other animals and essentially the health of the ecosystem. As I said in California, there are other examples of that we're excited about in California, obviously the salmon are really big on that. Salmon are really important for our headwaters. And historically they were a source of really important fertilizer for the health of the landscapes and the trees. And it's tribes that have actually taught us just about the holistic benefits of salmon. So trying to get salmon and steelhead back where they'd been extirpated or lost in California, we're also really frankly excited to see wolves recolonize most of California. We've got a, we've got a wolf pack now in our southern Sierra, which is several hundred miles south of the northern border. And it's pretty incredible to watch wolves go from the Northern Rockies over into Oregon and down into California. It's not without its challenges. We're doing work with ranchers that are really concerned about the expansion of wolves. But what we're seeing is when you bring back these keystone species, remarkable things happen. This so called trophic cascade of nature, all these beneficial things happen and it's really important. It's important for the natural resources that we depend on, including water. So we're just trying to encourage more of it.
- [14:31]
B
I want to remind everyone listening that you're listening to a high level state secretary. You're not listening to somebody who's the head of a scrappy little organization like you typically do on this podcast and to point out that he knows what a trophic cascade is. And it's just worth mentioning because it's so rare. But it really is exciting to talk to somebody like you who is so excited about the things that we are because it's not typical at all.
- [14:59]
A
I'm learning every day and that's the best part of this job. I lead a huge agency, 26,000 people in this agency, and a lot of the job is responding to things, whether it's a wildfire or flooding emergencies or political issues, human resources. But I'm most excited to actually move the ball forward on we talk about it. It's a bit of a bumper sticker, but helping people in nature thrive together. At the end of the day, I'm convinced that the better we do actually restoring our natural areas and our natural systems, even where we live, the better off we're going to be in the future. We're seeing it in California. So this whole notion of environmental protection versus economic growth or people versus man versus nature, I just think it's a tired, outdated, false narrative. And what we're seeing is when we restore the health of these natural systems, good things happen. People are excited to see these animals back on the landscape. Our water systems are more secure, our wildfires are more controllable. It's frankly just exciting to see. Jack, I'll say too, the other thing that we're really seeing is this reckoning of, in our case, almost 200 years of history as a state where we have cut off ourselves from tribal knowledge and tribal leadership. We've dispossessed Native American tribes from lands we've outlawed certain Ecological practices, we're now working to get back on the landscape things like prescribed fire. And so the other thing beyond just that, restoring natural systems, getting these animals back in the landscape, thing that just gives me so much energy and hope are these, these partnerships with tribes. In the last five years, we've gone from none of our state parks, having co management agreements between the state park system and our tribes to co manage those lands, to 55% of our state park lands, almost 800,000 acres of lands now being under co management between tribes in our state park system. And that's really important because these tribes are driving their rewilding, they're driving actually bringing back animals and creating these holistic ecosystems. Like I said, this beaver, this movement to restore beaver in California is a tribally led movement. Just one of so many examples of where following tribal leadership, learning from tribes, it's not only the right thing to do, it's actually the smart thing to do to take care of our environment.
- [17:30]
B
I don't ever start a conversation about species in terms of the services they provide us. I think that first and foremost they deserve to be, and they just deserve to be. But there's a heck of an interesting story developing as you reintroduce beaver and you start talking about prescribed burns. They're a lot safer when there's beavers in the area. And it's almost got to be like a tightrope kind of feeling. I don't even imagine that you're very much able at the moment to have any prescribed burns just because it's so dangerous and there's no backstop, there's no safety net. And beavers provide that safety net. I wonder if have you made any headway using that argument?
- [18:13]
A
Absolutely, we have. And it's tribal experts that are telling us that prescribed fire and beaver go hand in hand because you're right. When you wet up an area and you make it more moist as a result of beaver dams and that spreading of water, it is very helpful for getting prescribed fire done in the area because it's that natural buffer that's going to slow in sometimes cases, stop the fire. And what tribal leaders tell us is it's not one of these things in isolation. It's a lot of practices together. So we are making big progress actually on prescribed fire. And our tribes talk about cultural fire as a little different than prescribed fire. You're not just managing to reduce densities in our forests again to bring fire back onto the landscape, which is a natural part of our ecology, but to avoid these Situations where these huge hot fires burn through a million acres in one fell swoop and essentially destroy the habitat in the area. But tribes also are doing these cultural fires that are set on the landscape to also cultivate certain plants and this type of thing. It's amazing when you get right down to it, it's really caught on. And I think it's also you mentioned the changing of the leadership at the federal level. I think things like prescribed fire actually is catching on in blue counties and red counties a lot like our wildlife connectivity is too. We are working on a bunch of different wildlife crossings over highways in California. And that's a really good example of actually we're following the lead of a lot of states in the intermountain west. States like Wyoming. You don't consider Wyoming really a bastion of environmentalism, but they actually have done quite a lot on wildlife crossings to protect their large ungulates, their big game species. And I think part of the rationale there is they want to protect hunting of those animals, but also the overall population health. In California. We're about to finish what we think is the world's largest wildlife crossing nature bridge over a 10 lane freeway outside of Los Angeles to protect our mountain lions down there and connect two big areas of habitat and give them the genetic diversity that they need by being able to interbreed in two big areas. And there we've really followed the lead of some of these other states. So I just want to agree with you, Jack, that certainly there'll be things that, you know, disagreements we have with the Trump administration on environmental protection. I'm not naive to that. But there are also probably some areas where we can continue to make progress because it really becomes a bipartisan or nonpartisan issue, this idea of wildlife connectivity.
- [20:56]
B
The Crossings issue, I had Ben Goldfarb on while he was working on the Crossings book. After Eager and other people, I had people from the Wildlands network who are working on Crossings and they all say the same thing. It's such a bipartisan issue. It's an easy do. If you can't get anything else done, you should be able to. In any state, like you said Wyoming, you should be able to get that done. And I think that's really cool. I think we need to have some kind of campfire that we all get around. And if it's going to just be crossings, not that they're not a big deal, but whatever that is, we need it so that we can see that we can work together and maybe some other things can happen too.
- [21:37]
A
Absolutely. And you know that the crossings in the argument for wildlife crossings is such a strong one, because not only are we protecting the environment and the animals and the fish that need connectivity, but we're also protecting people. When you have a bridge across a highway, it means that the deer or the mountain lion or the bear is not going to wander out in the traffic and create a major dangerous accident. So the traffic safety issue is paramount. I had a chance to meet Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in California up in Tahoe within the last year, and I raised wildlife crossings with him because I said, hey, I'm really appreciative that the federal Department of Transportation is leaning into this. And he said something like he had learned about the issue, more about the issue as Transportation secretary, and what he realized is just how broadly popular an issue it was. And he expressed some surprise about that. But ultimately he. I think he. He's with us, that it is one of these bridging issues, to use in that metaphor, between people with other political differences. And to your point, around the metaphor of the campfire. Yeah. Let's find things that we can get done together. I think if you look at, if you think about it, in the American west, most of us love being outdoors. We may recreate differently. Some people hike and some people camp, some people hunt, some people fish. But we all want a healthy outdoors. And that relies on actually the ecosystems, our life systems. So to me, it's like you can make the case for environmental restoration in so many different ways. Ultimately, that appeal to people across the political spectrum. I'm convinced of that.
- [23:20]
B
Yeah. Behind you is a little sign. I think there's a 30 and there's a buy. Yep. There's another 30. 30 by 30 California. So this is another thing that I can't talk to too many people in too many states who are versed in this. And back up for just a second. The fact that you could walk up to Pete Buttigieg and. And talk to him about crossings and tell him something about them is also probably something he wasn't expecting when he got to Idaho or something. And that's really cool. That really means a lot. It's getting top. But the 30 by 30 thing is another thing that came and went. It was really a big deal when Biden announced it. It was a really big deal for us because that's our language, reaching all the way to the top. And we didn't know what he meant, what he thought he meant by 30. And we still don't know exactly how that's going to pan out. Somebody's going to want to be the first one to wave the victory flag. And we're going to go. That's. I can guarantee we're going to say that's not all the protection that's needed or, or whatever. But what does it mean to you in California and the governor when you guys talk about 30 by 30?
- [24:23]
A
Yeah, great question. This is another movement that was started by people outside of government, this idea of protecting 30% of the planet by 2030. And this is a global movement. There are countries around the world that are committed to this. I remember seeing E.O. wilson, the incredible legendary conservationist who came to UC Berkeley when I first got this job, and he talked about Half Earth. He's got a book called half Earth. 50% of protection of the planet, 30 by 30. When we found out about it, our governor, Gavin Newsom, got really excited about it and we talked. Actually, we were fishing up at Independence Lake up in the Sierra with him and his family when we broached this idea with them, and he loved it. And so it was only a few months later that we issued an executive order actually setting a target to conserve 30%, protect 30% of our lands and coastal waters by 2030. That was fall of 2020, and it was a few months later that President Biden actually embraced 30 by 30 in America the Beautiful nationally. And then it was less than a year and a half later that through the United Nations. Believe it or not, every nation in the world came on this treaty for biodiversity, where 30 by 30 is part of what they sign on the dotted line for. And I'm with you. We have to make sure it's a real thing. And so in California, our goal has been to be a model of what 30 by 30 can be. So we spent 18 months actually going around the state and identifying what our initiative should be. And I'll tell you what it is. We are. We've set a really high bar for what it means to be protected lands and coastal waters. Those are lands and waters durably protected, principally for ecological or environmental benefit. For the wonks out there, this is Protected Areas 1 and 2 on a database that our U.S. geological Survey keeps. So think wilderness areas, national and state parks, lands with conservation easements on there. And when we do the math, we were at but high 23%, almost 24% of protected land. So when we set this out in 2020, we basically are holding ourselves accountable for expanding protections onto almost 5 million, 6 million acres of land. It's a big Moonshot of a goal. But we think it's really important because so often nature protection doesn't have a really distilled numeric goal that's easy to galvanize around because nature's complex, right? So in California, we set this goal, we created a roadmap to get this done. It's called pathways to 30 by 30. There are 10 specific pathways, everything from enhanced conservation on federal lands. Half of our lands are federal in California. To get more conservation easements done on private lands, to spend state dollars on acquiring lands for conservation. And believe it or not, over the last couple of years, we've protected more than 1.5 million additional acres. So we are on track to get to 30 by 30. It's not a glide path. It's one of the reasons why we're still advocating for new national monuments in the waning days of the Biden administration, because we need to continue to keep our pedal to the metal on this. And we believe that 30 by 30 can be a success in California. And then we're spending time going around the world actually sharing what it means to get this done. We were just at a UN summit in Colombia with all of those countries that signed up for 30 by 30 sharing what we're doing in California, and, of course, learning, because there's plenty to learn from other people. But I tell you this, what I have behind me, which is a 30 by 30 California, I leave this big sign behind me whenever I'm doing virtual meetings. I was just on a call with the federal government, the White House, earlier today, and they saw the 30 by 30 sign behind me. We're just glad to be part of the movement.
- [28:13]
B
It's amazing. It's really amazing to hear all of this, but I can't help but be greedy. If we have this 6 million acres, you're looking at pieces on the map that are somewhat, some of them disjointed, unconnected. Did you ever get into conversations about, did somebody come up as a biologist and say, mountainlands used to like to go between, and the genetic diversity was traded back and forth between these two places that are now cut off. Were connectivity issues like that discussed?
- [28:40]
A
Yeah, they absolutely were. And we have. We helped to form, like an adjunct to our state effort called the California Biodiversity Network. And it's essentially a network of scientists and institutions, everything from our University of California system to our California Academy of Sciences and the LA Natural History Museum. So essentially all of these to go out and to answer questions exactly like the one that you're asking. So One of the big questions we've asked are, look, not all acres are created equal, so 30 by 30 is a means to the end. We're not trying to simply get 6 million acres as cheap and as fast as possible. We want it to actually have biodiversity benefit. So one of the questions they're helping us answer is what are the ecosystems that are in greatest peril and where should we focus this? We're supporting this movement. So there are land trusts and resource conservation districts across the state that are doing conservation. We're trying to be the win in their sales. But then at the same time, what do we need to prioritize within state government of the areas that are most under threat? Then we have to figure out where are the climate refugia, where are the habitats that are really necessary as temperatures increase, for example, and plant and animal species have to migrate. So Joshua trees are a great example of that that are imperiled by climate change and development in Southern California. Thinking about that, then, where are the points of connectivity? We're really excited to be part of essentially a public private partnership to prioritize the most important areas of habitat connectivity. And remarkably, we have our transportation agency as part of the executive committee of that initiative. So we really want to institutionalize the hard bake. When you're improving a highway system or you're putting in a new highway system, you have to bake in connectivity. Too often, historically, in our country, connectivity, if it's not, if it's thought about at all, it's an afterthought, right?
- [30:36]
B
Which is much more expensive, isn't it, than if it's baked into the plane?
- [30:40]
A
Way more expensive. And there's ways to, there's ways to construct and rehabilitate transportation that just makes sense for connectivity that aren't that expensive, you build a culvert in a certain way that's not going to degrade over time to enable fish passage underneath your, your highway. Right. If you've got $20 million project for transportation, you put a portion of that to an overcrossing where it makes sense. So it's not rocket science. And again, I think we're making progress on it. But I'll be the first one to say that we're on borrowed time. That's, that's the challenge is that climate change is on the march. It's changing our conditions significantly in a place like California, where our species are threatened in a greater way than ever. I'm proud of our progress, but really focused on moving further and faster to get this stuff done.
- [31:31]
B
When I think about that, what gives me hope is what you said at the top of this, which was if we just get out of the way and let nature go. You were remarking on how just incredibly impressive and fast it can work. So it's really, it's not like nature is holding us up. It's just us just not getting out of the way and just. And moving forward faster. I can imagine, because you're still in an agency, it's still government, and you can say and know all kinds of things that should and could be done. But you still have to just face the glacier sometimes and just wonder, is it going to be enough? Is it going to be fast enough? What keeps you getting out of bed every day? In light of that, I'll say that.
- [32:14]
A
We are trying to drive a paradigm shift. We talk a lot about nature based solutions. The fact is, most of our challenges have solutions that are nature based, that have multiple benefits. And the challenge, as you point out, is these are huge agencies that have been driving gray infrastructure and sort of traditional approaches for decades. For example, on flood infrastructure, the traditional thing that we do in our state is we build higher and higher levees around our rivers, essentially walls that keep in our rivers. But the reality is that for thousands of years our rivers spread out in these big wet months onto their floodplain and that reduced flooding downstream and recharged our groundwater basins and provided habitat for salmon and other fish. In talking to our flood protection agencies, we're saying floodplains are a really important nature based solution. So you create these weirs or notches in the levees and then where it's safe, you allow the river to overtop the levee and spread out into the floodplain. And what's pretty amazing is it works. And you can find agricultural producers, a lot of our rice growers up in the Sacramento Valley, for example, that it really works in a synergistic way. But the challenge is working with some of our agencies, including the Army Corps of Engineers, that for over a century has literally manuals around the things that they need to do from a civil engineering perspective. And so even with the Army Corps, which I give a lot of credit to for working to try to. They've got an effort called Engineering with Nature. There's the concept that they're trying to drive, but it is moving this battleship and changing the culture of these organizations. I think we're, I'm convinced that this is the future, that if we're going to actually continue to thrive as people being selfish, we have to let more of nature do its thing. As long as I'm in this job and really doing whatever I'm doing, I'm going to be driving that forward. That notion that we can work with nature and that keeping nature healthy is an investment in protecting ourselves.
- [34:28]
B
Are you the guy that all the other agency heads roll their eyes when you come in the room? Oh, here he comes. Here he comes. He's probably got some cockama idea.
- [34:38]
A
No, probably. But I'm pretty pragmatic, too. There's only so much you can accomplish with every step. And I always want to make sure. For example, on our transportation infrastructure, I work with our transportation secretary, and he has a different mandate. He has to make sure that people can move around California. So I'm a big believer in not just standing on the soapbox and advocating for one point of view, but really finding this common ground. Because if we're going to make something work, it's got to work for the transportation agency. It's got to work for our flood protection agency or those that are developing clean energy. So it's not like the panacea, but we do have to find, I'm convinced that we can help do all the things that we want to do. Build out our clean energy infrastructure, put in our water, more water infrastructure where needed, rehabilitate our transportation system. In other words, maintain our human engineering, but do it in a way that's more integrated with nature. And if we do it and we do it at scale, nature comes back. And as we talked about, nature doesn't need much to be able to do its thing. And when it comes back, it creates a much healthier, more stable environment for us to live in.
- [35:44]
B
Yeah. Wade, I'm not ashamed to say that I'm going to probably be using this interview to guilt other natural resource secretaries of other states. Wade did it. I'm probably going to have some more on and just. And try to keep this going. If you have that energy around competition with other states, with crossings and stuff, I'm all in. I will help you guys be competitive with each other. Like, you gave Wyoming praise. This is almost like basketball. You gave Wyoming praise, but then you went and built the biggest crossing. So I see what's going on here. I know you guys have conferences or something where you all brag about what you've been doing. So I want to be in on that any way that I can because I like stirring the pot.
- [36:27]
A
I love it. I love it. Like I said, virtuous competition, just taking it full circle to Beavercon we have to move far, we have to move fast. We can't reinvent the wheel in every jurisdiction, so we need to learn from each other. So it's people like in my position learning from our equivalents in other states, but it's actually through networks like beavercon that best practices become standard practices. Right. Because someone can go there and say, oh, how did you do this with your county commissioner? Or, oh, California's got a new Beaver policy. Let's take a look at what we could adapt in our state. So I'm thankful for the work that you guys do because you're creating this connective tissue and you're connecting us that want to move in the right direction. And I think there's strength in numbers, and we can learn from each other and ultimately do more of the stuff that we need to do more quickly.
- [37:15]
B
Yeah. Let's keep this up. You're invited to come back to the Rewilding Earth podcast anytime you want. So anytime you get a new wolf pack or something, cool happens with kelp, which most other states can't even talk about. Kelp and coastal stuff, so we didn't even really get into that yet. Oh, you were going to tease something. Do you want to still tease it?
- [37:36]
A
Oh, the fact that, you know, with Klamath, the restoration of the Klamath river has been really galvanizing, and it's helped people understand what's possible. I just want to let your listeners know that we're not stopping there. We're looking at other rivers like the Eel river and moving outdated barriers on that river and others, and again, restoring hundreds of miles of habitat and the health of our watershed. So I think the tease is can't stop, won't stop. We're not stopping here. We're going to keep it going. And I will take you up on your invitation to talk about our progress here in future years.
- [38:10]
B
Nice, Wade. Thank you so much. It's really been a great talk.
- [38:14]
A
Yeah. I appreciate all you're doing, Jack.
- [38:17]
B
Likewise. Thanks for listening to the Rewilding Earth podcast. We do what we do because of you. This podcast is supported by listeners like you who long to live in a wilder world. Please consider donating@rewilding.org and subscribe to our weekly news and article digest while you're there to go the extra mile, you can follow and share Rewilding Earth on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Bonus points for sharing this podcast with your friends. To listen to past episodes, go to rewilding.org pod that's rewilding.org pod.