I fear I’m in JB MacKinnon’s bad books. Halfway through our Zoom interview, I tilt my camera to adjust to the setting sun but from this new angle, an e-commerce box can be spotted over my shoulder. Its barcode glows in the fading light, a totem of 21st-century materialism presiding over our call.
MacKinnon is too polite to say anything, but he can’t be thrilled by my cardboard companion. After all, the Canadian bestselling author and journalist is on a mission to get us to buy a lot less stuff. The Day the World Stops Shopping, his new book, explores
Over-consumption is at the root of the planet’s environmental crisis. One solution, proposed by author JB MacKinnon, is that we should simply buy less. But would that really work?
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J.B. MACKINNON is the author or co-author of five books of non-fiction. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the New Yorker, National Geographic and the Atlantic, as well as the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthologies. He is an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of British Columbia, where he teaches feature writing.
MacKinnon’s latest book is
The Day the World Stops Shopping, a thought-experiment that imagines what would happen to our economies, our products, our planet, our selves if we committed to consuming far fewer of the Earth’s resources. Previous works are