Art & Creativity Quote by Stewart Udall

Udall’s line turns a boardroom metaphor into a quiet indictment: if you insist on counting, be prepared for nature to audit you back. Calling ecologists the “ultimate accountants” isn’t a cute comparison; it’s a power move. Bookkeepers tally quarterly profits, but ecologists keep the ledger of carrying capacity, soil loss, water tables, biodiversity, and carbon - the balances that don’t show up in earnings reports until they collapse the whole enterprise.

The intent is political as much as poetic. Udall, a major conservation voice in mid-century America, is arguing against the era’s default assumption that growth metrics equal success. In the 1960s and 70s, the U.S. was building dams, highways, suburbs - and also awakening to polluted rivers and smog-choked cities. Environmental regulation was emerging precisely because the market’s internal math wasn’t capturing the costs it was offloading onto the public and the future.

The subtext lands hardest on time scale. “Over the long haul” is Udall’s way of saying the planet doesn’t care about your fiscal year. Nature’s accounts accrue interest, penalties, and compounding feedback loops. You can defer maintenance in an ecosystem the way you can in infrastructure, but the debt is paid in floods, dead zones, fire seasons, crop failures - liabilities that arrive as “surprises” only to those who refused to record them.

It’s also a rebuke to technocratic complacency: the final reckoning won’t be decided by spreadsheets alone, but by physical limits. In Udall’s framing, ecology isn’t a lifestyle preference; it’s the bottom line.