Leadership Quote by Bruce Babbitt

Babbitt is doing a neat bit of political judo: he grants his opponents their favorite verb - use - then straps it to the adjective they least want to own, sustainably. The line is engineered to make extraction sound not just harmful but childish, a binge that leaves the grown-ups to clean up the mess. By framing the conflict as short-term use versus long-term heritage, he yanks environmental policy out of the tree-hugger corner and plants it in the register of stewardship, patriotism, and basic fiscal sense.

The subtext is a rebuke to a very American temptation: treating public land as a clearance aisle. "Heritage" is the operative word. It turns landscapes, ecosystems, and cultural sites into an inheritance with moral weight, not merely a warehouse of commodities. That rhetorical move also sidesteps technocratic debate about parts per million or market efficiencies. Instead, it dares policymakers to defend a strategy that burns down the house to heat it for a night.

Context matters. Babbitt, as Interior Secretary in the 1990s, was closely associated with fights over public lands, grazing, mining, and the reach of federal protection. His sentence echoes the era's battle lines: Western resource economies and property-rights politics versus a federal government newly confident about conservation, national monuments, and ecosystem management. The genius of the phrasing is its trap: if you oppose him, you risk sounding like the guy who mortgages the future for a quarterly report.