I care deeply about California’s environment. One of the reasons I love this state is because of our extraordinary natural beauty: the coastline, forests, mountains, farmland, rivers, and open space. Californians rightly take pride in all of it, and we should absolutely want to protect it for future generations.
But a growing number of Californians are frustrated by a political elite that talks endlessly about climate change while making everyday life harder and failing at basic environmental stewardship right in front of our eyes. People are paying some of the highest gas and electricity prices in America. Housing costs are crushing working families. Young people increasingly wonder whether they’ll ever be able to afford a decent life here.
And after all the mandates, regulations, restrictions, and lectures from Sacramento politicians, what do Californians actually see? Forests that are dangerously unmanaged. Catastrophic wildfires every year. Reservoirs and watersheds neglected. Communities destroyed by fires that release enormous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.
A UCLA-led study found that California’s catastrophic 2020 wildfires released roughly twice as much greenhouse gas pollution as the state had reduced between 2003 and 2019. In other words, one terrible wildfire season wiped out nearly two decades of painful emissions reductions. Years of poor forest management and dangerous fuel buildup made many of these fires far more destructive than they should have been.
That’s the part that drives people crazy. Sacramento politicians will regulate your gas stove, measure your “vehicle miles traveled,” and tell you to buy a more expensive car, but somehow millions of acres of forest are still sitting there overloaded with fuel waiting to burn. I don’t think that’s what environmentalism is supposed to be.
I reject the idea that Californians have to choose between caring about the environment and caring about affordability or economic growth. We should pursue environmental policies that actually improve the environment without punishing working people in the process.
If your goal is to remove carbon from the atmosphere, why wouldn’t you start with the things that naturally remove carbon from the atmosphere? Trees, forests, wetlands, healthy soils, proper land management.
Instead, California’s political class has become obsessed with symbolic policies that micromanage the daily lives of people and businesses while neglecting the natural systems that actually sustain the environment. California now imports large amounts of oil from overseas on giant tankers burning dirty bunker fuel, rather than producing and refining more energy domestically under some of the strictest environmental standards in the world. Policies like that don’t reduce global emissions. In many cases, they increase them.
Of course California should do its part on emissions. But there’s a difference between serious environmental stewardship and performative politics. Sacramento has pushed ideologically-driven policies that have given us the highest cost of living in America, without meaningful environmental improvement.
Instead of relying almost entirely on mandates, restrictions, and higher costs for consumers, California should focus far more heavily on natural carbon sequestration and environmental restoration strategies that remove carbon while improving our environment. Experts in reforestation and natural climate restoration believe California could likely remove far more carbon through better forest management, wetland restoration, and natural sequestration strategies than through the costly, symbolic policies Sacramento currently prioritizes.
So as governor, I want to rebalance California’s environmental strategy around something much more practical: natural carbon sequestration, forest restoration, wildfire prevention, watershed recovery, and active land stewardship. That means investing far more aggressively in forest management, fuel reduction, prescribed burns, wetland restoration, firebreak construction, and replanting fire-resilient native trees in vulnerable areas.
At the center of this effort would be a new California Conservation Corps Alliance, a large-scale voluntary service program focused on conservation and restoration projects across the state. The goal would be to create opportunities for young Californians to work on forestry, wildfire mitigation, habitat restoration, watershed recovery, and land management projects. California should invite young people to help rebuild and restore the state itself.
To help lead this effort, I will appoint Tom Woodard, founder of the conservation nonprofit Plant With Purpose, as California’s first Director of Natural Climate Restoration.
Tom has spent years focused on practical environmental restoration work, especially around reforestation, land stewardship, and conservation. He understands that environmental stewardship should not mean more bureaucracy and higher costs. It has to mean healthier forests, cleaner landscapes, safer communities, and practical results people can see.
I want California to lead the world on environmental stewardship again. But real environmentalism should be grounded in results, not virtue-signaling. Californians don’t want ideological lectures. They want cleaner communities, healthier forests, lower wildfire risk, and a government that focuses on real-world results.
That’s the kind of environmental leadership California deserves again.
Steve Hilton is a businessman and 2026 gubernatorial candidate for California.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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