Living Locally, not Globally

Does the downturn herald a shift to the way people lived at the turn of the last century, in the wake of the panics of 1893 and 1907? In The Future Is the Past?, Jonathan Salem Baskin poses three points in favor of the idea:

1. The world is effectively unknowable – At the beginning of the 20th Century, the vastness of the world was beyond the reach of most people.  Sure, they got info about it, but the content was infrequent, often indirect, and many times anecdotal.  It would be fair to say that most folks ended each day knowing and believing what they’d started their days knowing and believing.  In 2009, it’s not all that much different.  We have infinite access to the world as rendered via the Internet, but the content we gain comes with a loss of confidence and veracity.  We see and hear more, but know less (generally speaking)
2. Communities are of paramount importance – This statement has been true for thousands of years, not just a hundred.  We base our beliefs and lifestyle/purchase decisions on the counsel and judgments of those whom we know, trust, and value.  Folks in the early 1900s were “members” of wide-ranging groups (organized religions, for instance), but the reality of that involvement was defined by very specific and focused involvement in a particular institution.  Civility required that men doff their hats in the presence of women, but that wasn’t the same thing as acknowledging active membership in the same club (i.e. it was no different than “friending” someone on Facebook today)
3. All business is local – Most commerce in the early 1900s was local…products and services were offered within (and limited to) reasonably nearby geographies.  Production and consumption were integrated into mutually-supporting networks, even as the manufacture of certain complex or expensive products was being centralized (like light bulbs and cars).  Most of the institutions on which society depended — banks, insurance, social services — were local, as was most of the food production and entertainment (people played music more than they listened to it, for instance)

Obviously, point number one is a bit of hyperbole (we may not individually know a lot more, but we benefit from collective knowledge), point two is debatable (studies suggest we are more disconnected and less in touch with our communities today than in the past) and point three sounds flat out wrong in a globalized economy.
Baskin acknowledges that point three looks wrong, but thinks that we are about to make a big reverse towards a local focus. Here’s his argument:

We have numerous crises these days — financial, environmental, social — and the problems all seem to stem from the enormity of the enterprises and their impacts on our lives.  Yet the solutions all seem to be local, or at least the crises reveal our interests to be so.

He posits far more community involvement, local purchasing, even for energy, neighborhood-oriented banks and mutual insurance, and the rise of micro-lending as a source of investing.

I find it hard to see how agricultural production will shift enough to create food for all those living in cities; much of the best farmland is now suburb, and it’s unlikely that foreclosure patterns will return enough land to the plow. The flow of capital away from the tiny percentage of people who still have it also seems unlikely. But the small-is-beautiful ideal of local production isn’t necessarily far-fetched. Mini-mills in steel are an example, and I’ve run across extremely efficient small plants producing things as diverse as yogurt andoil.
I’ll give him this: it’s contrarian. Is it feasible?