On restoring social roles as well as economic roles 

Excerpt from James Howard Kunstler’s 3/19/07 speech to the Commonwealth Club of California.

An audio stream of the full speech is available:
http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/50049/

“It is important to recognize the damage that the national discount chain stores have done in systematically destroying local commercial economies. The destruction, the abandonment and desolation in the fabric of our towns is just appalling.

“[Increasing energy scarcity means that] the era of chain store supremacy will not continue far into the future, and as it wobbles and falls we will be faced with a tremendous task of rebuilding the fine-grained, multi-layered local networks of economic interdependency that the chain stores destroyed.

“As that rebuilding occurs we will restore social roles as well as economic roles that have long been absent in our home places. In destroying local retail infrastructures, the chain stores wiped out a whole mercantile middle class. These were the people who ran local businesses, who sat on the library and hospital boards, who sponsored the little league baseball teams, who employed their neighbors and had to behave decently toward them, as well as treating their neighbors decently in matters of trade. They were people who uniformly had to take care of at least two buildings in town - the place where they did business and the place where they lived. These were people who [among others] were the caretakers of our communities, and the extermination of this class of citizens has been devastating.”

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