To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.

Kingsolver contrasts a worldview of humility—humans as temporary “houseguests” in a creation that belongs to God—with the forward-driving confidence of American capitalism and development. The passage condemns a cultural habit of treating land as an inert resource and time as a perpetual present, severed from memory, consequence, and ecological limits. By calling Americans “amnesiacs,” she suggests not mere ignorance but a willful forgetting: of environmental damage, of prior stewardship, and of the land’s own history. The final sentence personifies the landscape, implying that exploitation leaves traces even if people prefer to erase them, and that moral accountability extends beyond human society to the more-than-human world.