Leadership Quote by Bruce Babbitt

“Live in harmony” is doing diplomatic heavy lifting here: it sounds like an ethical creed, but it’s also a policy brief dressed as moral common sense. Bruce Babbitt, a centrist-leaning environmentalist who ran the Interior Department in the 1990s, is threading a needle that American politicians constantly face: argue for environmental constraint without sounding anti-growth. The phrase “obligation” signals duty, not preference. He’s not inviting voters to recycle; he’s asserting a standard that governments (and industries) are accountable to.

The pivot is “with our capital.” That’s the tell. Babbitt folds nature into the language of assets and stewardship, reframing ecosystems as something like principal in a trust fund. It’s a way of disarming the familiar backlash that environmental protection is sentimental or elitist. If creation is capital, then degradation isn’t just ugly, it’s mismanagement. The word “administer” amplifies that technocratic subtext: this is about governance, rules, permitting, and trade-offs, not wilderness postcards.

Then he adds “God’s creation,” which isn’t mere piety; it’s coalition-building. Babbitt is borrowing religious vocabulary to make conservation legible to audiences who don’t respond to EPA acronyms. He’s implying that extraction without restraint isn’t just economically short-sighted, it’s morally suspect. The repetition and slight self-correction (“with creation, with our capital... with God’s creation”) reads like a live attempt to connect constituencies in real time: environmentalists, business-minded pragmatists, and faith-based voters. The carefulness he calls for is less gentle reverence than a warning: we can use the land, but we don’t get to treat it as disposable.