Leadership Quote by Stewart Udall

“Mining is like a search-and-destroy mission” is Stewart Udall at his most prosecutorial: a politician choosing the language of war to strip an industry of its usual romance. Mining is often sold as frontier grit and economic necessity. Udall flips that script. “Search-and-destroy” doesn’t describe production; it describes a raid. The phrase makes the objective unmistakable: locate what you want, eliminate what’s in the way, leave the site changed beyond recognition. It’s a moral reframing, not a technical one.

The subtext is about asymmetry. In military doctrine, search-and-destroy treats terrain and communities as collateral to the target. Udall implies mining operates with the same logic: the “mission” is extraction, while watersheds, wildlife, and nearby towns absorb the aftermath. The simile also smuggles in urgency. If mining is a mission, then permitting and regulation aren’t bureaucratic annoyances; they’re rules of engagement.

Context sharpens the blade. Udall served as Secretary of the Interior during the 1960s, when the modern environmental state was being sketched into existence and America’s appetite for energy and minerals was accelerating. This was the era of big federal projects, rising ecological consciousness, and early fights over strip mining and public lands. Udall’s rhetoric anticipates the later environmental movement’s central argument: some forms of “development” are less like building and more like liquidation.

Politically, the line is calibrated to puncture complacency. It asks listeners to see mining not as neutral commerce but as an operation with casualties, and to decide whether the spoils justify the damage.