A powerful class of itinerant professional vandals is now pillaging the country and laying it waste. Their vandalism is not called by that name because of its enormous profitability (to some) and the grandeur of its scale. If one wrecks a private home, that is vandalism, but if, to build a nuclear power plant, one destroys good farmland, disrupts local community, and jeopardizes lives, home and properties within an area of several thousand square miles, that is industrial progress. The members of this prestigious class of rampaging professionals are the purest sort of careerists—”upwardly mobile” transients who will permit no stay or place to interrupt their personal advance. They must have no local allegiances; they must not have a local point of view. In order to be able to desecrate, endanger, or destroy a place, after all, one must be able to leave it and to forget it. One must never think of any place as one’s home; one must never think of any place as anyone else’s home.
Wendell Berry
“Higher Education and Home Defense” in Home Economics
Quoted in “From solastalgia to philopatria: A call to watershed discipleship” by Ched Myers in Topology
