This is tangential: I was back home at my parents' place last Christmas: a small town in rural Canada. They have a bit of a library, and I was flipping through

This is tangential: I was back home at my parents' place last Christmas: a small town in rural Canada. They have a bit of a library, and I was flipping through some books before bed. I picked up a tome from one of the shelves: I remembered it from my childhood, but I'd never thought about it much. The title was "<community_name>". It suddenly struck me as strange. Why did this little town (pop. ~600) need a great big heavy 800-page volume to document it's history? How much was there to say? So I started flipping through it...and it was a bit surreal. The 1927 brass band? How the hell did they have 30 members? A hotrod club? How many churches _were_ there? Parades crowding the main street? A movie theatre--with lines out the door--and a drive-in theatre? Wait...what's this giant brick building? A high school? I've never seen this building in my life! ...And then I started thinking of the big old brick town hall, torn down when I was still a little kid. And the shopping mall place I halfway-remembered, like it was a dream, with the various clothing stores and the shoe store and the donut shop and the ice cream counter, that burned down shortly after... It's hard to square those memories with the ~100 houses scattered around the lone grocery store, gas station, and bargain shop that exist today. These seemed like pictures from a vibrant little town many times the size (and before Amazon and Walmart drove all the shops out of business). It didn't make sense that such a tiny little place could have this much history! Talked about it with my dad, and he pointed out what should have been obvious: 100 years ago, a square mile of land would have supported somewhere between 4 to 8 families--and families were bigger in those days. You might be talking dozens of people. Today, one family (with the typical 1.43 kids) can farm several square miles of land. The countryside used to be _dense_ with farming families orbiting this little town, coming in to buy food and clothing, catch a movie, hang out at the donut shop, cruise the strip...practice with the brass band. The same was true for all the other little clusters-of-houses-passing-for-towns in the area, and across the countryside. The lucky ones have shrunk to a fraction of their original size and lost almost all their businesses. The rest are just gone, a couple picturesque abandoned houses on the horizon. My point being: we (meaning the US & Canada) are at the tail end of this same process ourselves. We've just been at it a little longer, and our roots were less deep in the beginning.the donut shop and the ice cream counter, that burned down shortly after... It's hard to square those memories with the ~100 houses scattered around the lone grocery store, gas station, and bargain shop that exist today. These seemed like pictures from a vibrant little town many times the size (and before Amazon and Walmart drove all the shops out of business). It didn't make sense that such a tiny little place could have this much history! Talked about it with my dad, and he pointed out what should have been obvious: 100 years ago, a square mile of land would have supported somewhere between 4 to 8 families--and families were bigger in those days. You might be talking dozens of people. Today, one family (with the typical 1.43 kids) can farm several square miles of land. The countryside used to be _dense_ with farming families orbiting this little town, coming in to buy food and clothing, catch a movie, hang out at the donut shop, cruise the strip...practice with the brass band. The same was true for all the other little clusters-of-houses-passing-for-towns in the area, and across the countryside. The lucky ones have shrunk to a fraction of their original size and lost almost all their businesses. The rest are just gone, a couple picturesque abandoned houses on the horizon. My overall point being: we (meaning the US & Canada) are at the tail end of this same process ourselves. We've just been at it a little longer, and our roots were less deep in the beginning.