…Global warming... happens to coincide with our imminent descent down the slippery slope of... [hydrocarbon] depletion, so that all the potential dis… - James Howard Kunstler

In the early twenty-first century farming had all but died out here. We got our food from the supermarket, and not everybody cared where the supermarket got it as long as it was there on the shelves. A few elderly dairymen hung on. Many let their fields and pastures go to scrub. Some sold out to what used to be called developers, and they'd put in five or ten poorly built houses. Now, […] there were far fewer people, and many houses outside [the] town were being taken down for their materials. Farming was back. That was the only way we got food.

In any case, it is human nature to consider a place “home” if you were born there, […] have family there, or have spent some portion of your life there, and people are naturally reluctant to leave home. I daresay that many Americans now living in the Southwest will not be disposed to understand what is really happening—that the carrying capacity of their home region has been suddenly and drastically reduced—and they will hunker down hoping for a return to better times.
The vested owners of all those sun-drenched tract houses may stick around for a while and fight over the region, perhaps thinking that they are reenacting the great historical dramas of the nineteenth century—such is the long-term effect of canned entertainment on the collective imagination. The violence and loss of resources will surely send some American citizens fleeing. After a while, it will be obvious to even the staunch defenders that places like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, and Albuquerque will never again support the populations that were possible during the height of the cheap-oil blowoff in the late twentieth century. They will then pack up and move elsewhere, sacrificing their houses and ties to a disintegrating community. These new refugees may move into careers that they never could have conceived of twenty years earlier, when they were young college graduates: farmer, farm laborer. Wherever they go, they are going to discover a nation preoccupied with food production above all other activities.

The free-market part of the equation referred to the putative benefit of unrestrained economic competition between individuals, and because corporations enjoyed the legal status of persons, they were assumed to be on an equal footing with other persons in a given locality. Thus, Wal-Mart was considered the theoretical equal of Bob the appliance store owner, and if Bob happened to lose in the retail competition because he couldn't order 50,000 coffeemakers at a crack from a factory 12,000 miles away in , and receive a deep discount for being such an important customer, well, it wasn't as though he hadn't been given the chance.