Leadership Quote by Tom McMillan

McMillan’s line lands like a moral audit of the modern project: the Enlightenment brag of “mastery” curdling into a crime scene. “Conquering nature” borrows the language of empire and war, the kind of metaphor industrial societies used to make extraction feel heroic, even inevitable. Two centuries is not a neutral timestamp; it pins the start of the spree to the Industrial Revolution, the moment coal, steam, and later oil turned landscapes into inputs and atmosphere into a dump.

The twist is the escalation. Conquest implies strategy, limits, even a perverse respect for an opponent’s strength. “Beating it to death” is personal, ugly, and excessive. It’s not progress anymore; it’s abuse. McMillan compresses the arc from confident modernity to panicked late-stage capitalism, when the gains are marginal but the damage compounds: fisheries collapsed, forests thinned, soils exhausted, climate destabilized. The phrasing also smuggles in culpability. “We’ve been” makes the listener an accomplice, not an observer, and that collective pronoun is classic political rhetoric: a way to universalize responsibility while also inviting a shared pivot.

As a politician, McMillan isn’t just lamenting; he’s reframing the stakes to justify intervention. If nature is being “beaten,” then regulation stops sounding like bureaucratic fussiness and starts sounding like domestic-violence prevention on a planetary scale. The subtext is impatience with half-measures: conservation as polite housekeeping won’t cut it if the underlying relationship is still domination. The line works because it refuses the comforting story that technology will quietly fix what technology intensified. It’s a demand to stop calling exploitation “development” and start naming it as harm.