"The idea of citizenship in the United States seems to me to have been greatly oversimplified. It has become permissible to assume that all one needs to do to be a good citizen is to vote and obey and pay taxes, as if one can be a good citizen without being a citizen either of a community or of a place. As if citizenship is merely a matter of perfunctory dutifulness, a periodic deference to the organizations, beyond which it is every man for himself.

"Because several years ago I became by choice a resident of the place I am native to, which I know intimately and love strongly, I have begun to understand citizenship in more complex terms. As I've come to see it, it requires a devotion and dedication, and a certain inescapable bewilderment and suffering. It needs all the virtues, all of one's attention, all the knowledge that one can gain and bring to bear, all the powers of one's imagination and conscience and feeling. It is the complete action. Rightly understood, its influence and concern permeate the whole society, from the children's bedroom to the capitol.

"But it begins at home. Its meanings come clearest, it is felt most intensely in one's own house. The health, coherence, and meaningfulness of one's own household are the measure of the success of the government, and not the other way around.

"My devotion thins as it widens. I care more for my household than for the town of Port Royal, more for the town of Port Royal than for the County of Henry, more for the County of Henry than for the State of Kentucky, more for the State of Kentucky than for the United States of America. But I do not care more for the United States of America than for the world.

"I must attempt to care as much for the world as for my household. Those are the polls between which a competent morality would balance and mediate: the doorstep and the planet. The most meaningful dependence of my house is not on the U.S. government, but on the world, the earth. No matter how sophisticated and complex and powerful our institutions, we're still exactly as dependent on the earth as the earthworms. To cease to know this, and to fail to act upon the knowledge, is to begin to die the death of a broken machine. In default of man's personal cherishing and care, now that his machinery has become so awesomely powerful, the earth must become the victim of his institutions, the violent self-destructive machinery of man-in-the-abstract. And so, conversely, the most meaningful dependence of the earth is not on the U.S. government, but on my household — how I live, how I raise my children, how I care for the land entrusted to me."