Leadership Quote by Ed Rendell

Rendell’s line is a politician’s attempt to smuggle environmentalism past the usual ideological checkpoints by translating trees into jobs. The phrasing “people don’t realize” sets up a gentle scold: the public (or his opponents) are missing something obvious, and he’s here to make it legible. Then he repeats himself - “that that natural beauty” - a small verbal stutter that reads like real-time persuasion, the sound of someone trying to bridge two constituencies at once: conservation-minded residents and business-first legislators.

The key move is the reframing of “natural beauty” and “recreational forests” as infrastructure. He isn’t arguing that forests deserve protection because they’re sacred; he’s arguing they’re productive. That’s not poetry, it’s strategy. In a state politics context - think budget fights, post-industrial reinvention, rural-to-urban divides - “economic development impact” functions as a permission slip. It lets a governor defend land preservation, park funding, or anti-sprawl policies without triggering the “nice-to-have” backlash that often dogs environmental spending.

Subtext: you can stop treating conservation as charity. Tourism dollars, outdoor recreation industries, second-home real estate, and the talent-attraction story (people and companies choosing livable places) become the real constituency. Rendell’s sentence is less about forests than about political coalition-building: he’s trying to make environmental assets count in the only language that reliably survives committee hearings - returns for “the state as well.”