Politics & Power Quote by Robert Redford

Redford frames environmentalism the way Washington prefers to hear any argument: as security, not sentiment. It is a deliberate act of translation, taking a cause long caricatured as tree-hugging and rerouting it through the muscular vocabulary of defense budgets, borders, and threat assessment. By calling the environment a national security issue, he’s not just raising the stakes; he’s changing the tribunal. If the battlefield is the policy imagination, “resources” becomes the quiet pivot word: forests, water, air, energy, public land. Not scenery. Infrastructure.

The subtext is a rebuke to the standard hierarchy of priorities. Redford suggests that “defense abroad” can become a kind of expensive theater if the home front is being hollowed out by drought, pollution, and extraction. His closing question, “Otherwise what is there to defend?” is a neat rhetorical trap: it forces hawks to answer on his turf. It’s also a critique of nationalism that treats land as symbol rather than system. Patriotism, in this framing, isn’t flag-waving; it’s stewardship with consequences.

Context matters: Redford came up as a movie star during the modern environmental movement’s rise and then used his platform (and later Sundance) to legitimize political storytelling. This line reads like an intervention aimed at moderates and conservatives: you don’t have to “believe in” environmentalism as lifestyle politics to accept it as risk management. Climate and ecological collapse don’t need an ideology to injure a nation; they just need time. Redford is asking the country to notice that the true invasion might be slow, domestic, and self-inflicted.