Wealth & Money Quote by Bruce Babbitt

A politician’s favorite magic trick is to make a hard trade-off disappear, and Bruce Babbitt pulls it off with a clean three-step: conservation, jobs, growth. “Tens of millions of acres” is sized for awe, but the real persuasion is the next move: he preempts the standard attack line that environmental protection kills employment. The phrasing “not up, but down” is courtroom language, anticipating cross-examination and answering it before it’s asked. He’s not just defending a policy; he’s inoculating it.

Context matters: Babbitt, as Clinton’s Interior Secretary, was a central figure in the 1990s shift toward ecosystem management and big federal land decisions in the Pacific Northwest, where old-growth logging fights had turned into a cultural proxy war over rural identity, regulation, and “Washington” power. “For perpetuity” signals moral seriousness and irreversibility, a deliberate contrast to the boom-bust rhythms of extractive economies. It’s also a wager: the state can lock in ecological limits and still deliver prosperity.

The subtext is coalition politics. He’s speaking to moderates and business-minded skeptics as much as to environmentalists, offering a permission structure: you can support preservation without betraying workers. At the same time, the line glosses over distributional pain - a region can post better macro numbers while specific communities lose mills, wages, and a way of life. That omission isn’t accidental; it’s the point. The sentence is designed to turn a moral argument into a performance metric, and to make the metric look like destiny.