A conversation with J.B. MacKinnon
Consumption has overtaken population growth as the most significant threat to the environment. So what would happen if one day we stopped shopping? That is the question writer J.B. MacKinnon sought to explore in his new book The Day the World Stops Shopping. A thought experiment, it journeys through cause and effect, delving not only into what would happen to society and ecology if we stopped consuming but also the reasons why we bought so much in the first place.
The book resonated with me. I have shared in this newsletter how, over the past few years, I have curved my consumption, something many people tested in the early stages of the pandemic. However, I took from this book that when we turn away from consumerism, if we don't fill this space with other things, community, for example, all we do is create a void.
I was particularly interested in the research MacKinnon presents around why we are so drawn to consumption. In the book, MacKinnon interviews physiologist Tim Kasser, who highlights the importance of intrinsic values and extrinsic values to our consumer behavior. MacKinnon explains,"'Being fashionable' is an example of an extrinsic value; you may take personal satisfaction from your good taste in clothing, but to feel fashionable ultimately requires approving glances, compliments, and heart-eyed emojis from people whose opinions matter to you." Whereas "Intrinsic values satisfy us directly, internally, without much need for outside acknowledgment." Kasser tells him,"'Having close and supportive friends' is an intrinsic value." Cultivating and nurturing intrinsic values is vital to succeeding in a world where there will be no consumption, which draws into question the fashion industry's role in this future when its success hinges on placing importance on extrinsic values.
J.B. Mackinnon told me he had "been interested in environmental issues since childhood. Initially, like most young people, I was concerned about this or that crisis. No deforestation, for example, which in British Columbia, where I live, is a particularly concerning one. It didn't take me too long to start thinking; all of these things seem to be threaded together by one particular pressure: how much we consume." His previous books include The Once and Future World, a bestseller about rewilding the natural world; The 100-Mile Diet (with Alisa Smith), widely recognized as a catalyst of the local foods movement; and I Live Here (with Mia Kirshner and artists Michael Simons and Paul Shoebridge), a 'paper documentary' about displaced people. This week I spoke with MacKinnon about The Day the World Stops Shopping and what he gleaned from it, not only professionally but personally too.
The images accompanying J.B. Mackinnon's interview are taken from a work by British artist Jessica Keightley called 'The Last Supper.' Keightley found the photos that make up the piece in a charity shop in Cornwall, England. Donated by a man whose father had recently passed away, Keightley said, "it felt like I had hit the jackpot — being able to see someone's relationship with the world through their lens." The images, documenting vacations and everyday life alike, are a haunting meditation on how we once lived; they invite us to consider how generational trends and changes in consumer habits have impacted the planet. Everything photographed was a moment of importance, a birth, death or marriage, or something extraordinary — however banal — that the photographer felt vital to capture. To me, there is a haunting sadness to the pictures, not only because of their aesthetic ubiquity — the family album's function to document the lives of those who went before us — but they also invite you to mourn the materialism we held so dear and privilege a more simple way of life, which puts value in reuse and abundance.
Image from ‘The Last Supper’ by Jessica Keightley
Shonagh: In The Day the World Stops Shopping, you begin by comparing contemporary Western living to how indigenous people in the Kalahari Desert live. Why did you start there?
J.B.: I started there because the people in the Kalahari I met with are such a clear indication that there's nothing hardwired about consumption. Many people I talk to think this is just the way humans are — there's some consumerism gene within us. People also often believe that indigenous people who live a simpler kind of life are just waiting for the money and opportunities to arrive, and when they do, they too will become consumers.
I wanted to start specifically with the character I describe, Gǂkao, because he's had a glimpse into what the rest of the world is up to; he's not unaware of it in any way. (Gǂkao served in the South African army and later held a government job in the town of Tsumkwe). Yet his dream, throughout his encounters with a more Western-type approach, was to return to his ancestral culture and live what for us is a radically simple life in terms of possessions.
Shonagh: In the introduction, you map out some staggering facts and figures about consumption and its impact. Could you tell me a bit about some of that research? When did you begin to think consumption is the big problem here?
J.B.: The thing that I found most staggering was the clear recognition, from scientists working in various fields, that consumption is now the primary driver of environmental crises globally. There are still parts of the world where population pressure is the bigger problem. But globally, consumption took over around the turn of the millennium. When I encountered that fact, I immediately thought, Why aren't we talking about this?
If around the year 2000 consumption became the biggest problem, it's also around 2000 that the public conversation about the sheer volume of consumption faded away. I certainly remember that conversation going on in the 1990s, but consumption hasn't been at the center of the discussion around sustainability in this millennium so far.
Shonagh: In these conversations about consumption, people often point the finger squarely at America, but you present finding that many other nations have caught up with America, and some have surpassed their levels. There are vast swaths of the world consuming far too much.
J.B.: Yeah, average per capita consumption in some countries has surpassed America, and others have equaled it. Consumerism keeps progressing, nearly everywhere. I remember being shocked by Global Footprint Network statistics about how many of the Earth’s resources Americans were consuming, and being glad that Canadians like myself were consuming less. Now Canadians consume as much per capita as Americans did back when I was first shocked by the scale of their consumption, and Americans have gotten even worse. There are no indications that this problem is slowing down or going away.
Shonagh: With that in mind, can you explain the thought experiment that is the framework for the book?
J.B.: The thought experiment arose from my recognition of what in the book I call the consumer dilemma: the planet seems to need us to stop consuming so much, yet the economy requires us to keep consuming. I wanted to find a way to think beyond that, and realized that I could make the shopping stop on the written page — I could make consumption abruptly drop. Then I could play out what would happen next across hours, days, weeks, millennia.
A rule I gave myself was that I would draw on real experiences to the greatest extent possible. I would focus on case studies, past and present, where individuals, cultures, or whole nations either had not participated in consumerism or where it had slowed dramatically at some time. I’d also seek out experts who study what happens when consumption slows. I didn't want to write a book that was speculative or theory-driven.
Shonagh: So what happened? You start on day one. Without giving too much away, what did you find would play out over time?
J.B.: I think the fun part of the book is that you do get to watch civilization collapse. It’s like a disaster movie. Stopping shopping does result in an immediate, powerful ripple throughout the global economy. It made clear to me how dependent we are on consumption at this point in history and how vulnerable that system is. The idea that the simple choice to consume a little less can effectively destroy the global economy — I think that should terrify us.
Then, as a result of slowing down our consuming, everything else changes as well. Many of the things we saw in the pandemic play out, but even more powerfully: shifts in our values and priorities, drops in carbon emissions, clearing the air, a resurgence of the natural world. And of course, businesses and corporations have to begin to adapt to this new world in which people consume less. That changes everything from how we make products to the way our economies run.
Image from ‘The Last Supper’ by Jessica Keightley
Shonagh: You mentioned some of the experts you spoke with. Could you tell me who some of these people were and what their research has found?
J.B.: Sure. I'll talk about experts in three areas: climate, psychology, and the production of goods.
Talking to experts in climate science, they pretty much all agree that yes, it would be tremendously helpful to reduce our consumption, because carbon emissions still track closely to the ups and downs of the consumer economy. Interestingly, a lot of the ones I spoke to said, We think that's a great idea, but we don't know if we think it's a realistic idea to introduce to the public debate. Then the pandemic began, and more people started to think it could be put back on the table for discussion, because we all saw how powerful a slowdown in the consumer economy could be when it came to cutting carbon emissions. That was fascinating.
Tim Kasser, who's possibly the leading researcher on the psychology of materialism, pointed out that if people are put in a situation or put themselves in a position where they turn away from materialist or consumer values, they have to figure out some other way to build meaning into their lives. But nobody knew how quickly that might happen. Then along came the pandemic and we saw people very rapidly change their orientation from the materialist and consumer world that they'd been cut off from to the kinds of pursuits Kasser predicted people would turn to. Everyone moved quickly to secure their social contacts and keep those human relationships alive as well as they could. You saw people starting down the path of intrinsically satisfying practices like gardening and baking. This shift happened abruptly. There is also circumstantial evidence—I don't know that anyone has studied this yet—that many people started to pay more attention to issues larger than themselves, such as climate or the reckoning on race, because they suddenly had the time and the mental space.
In the case of products, the experts are people who are in the business of trying to produce durable goods or trying to make products in such a way that we end up consuming less of them. Those people are fascinating because they struggle to produce future products in the present, where they are competing with a philosophy of more, more, more, and where trends continue to lean towards increasingly disposable rather than increasingly durable goods.
Maybe one of the most astonishing interactions I had was with Abdullah al Maher, the CEO of a knitwear manufacturing plant in Bangladesh. I went looking for an executive or business owner like him because I thought they would put up the strongest defense of Western consumption as beneficial to poorer countries. So I reached out to some of them, and I heard back from Abdullah al Maher almost instantly—it was like he’d been waiting for somebody to come to him with these questions. He's a lovely, cheerful individual who is also really angry about how we consume in the West and the consequences for his country and the people who work in his factories.
Shonagh: So he didn't protect his industry as you thought?
J.B.: No, quite the opposite. He argued that fast fashion has done serious social and environmental harm to Bangladesh and that slowing fashion down would be beneficial. Maybe most importantly, he said that the low prices Western consumers pay for most clothing are actually insulting—disrespectful to the people who make those clothes for low wages and under constant pressure to produce more.
Image from ‘The Last Supper’ by Jessica Keightley
Shonagh: You also spoke to communities who live a simpler life, such as those who live on Sado Island off the coast of Japan and people who have downshifted in the suburbs of Seattle. Could you tell me about how these people live and what you found?
J.B.: Quite a lot of people around the world are practicing simple living. What I found interesting is that wherever I looked for it, the pattern was pretty similar. I found that most people who live simply — whatever the cause — will still be working in the cash economy, but maybe less so than most of us. They will also be doing more self-provisioning; when I say that, I mean it in quite a broad sense. In some cases, like on Sado Island, where people have access to land, they might be growing some of their own food. In other places, like in Tokyo, they may have relationships with people who grow food, or they may organize within their community to share childcare or eldercare. All of them are doing more for themselves than archetypal consumers who work too many hours and hire people to take care of their children and elderly — people who are isolated, atomized, and paying a community of people to provide for them.
Maybe the most striking thing is that I found people who live simply really pleasant people to spend time with. They made time for me. They often arrived at my interviews having thought deeply about what they might be able to contribute to my thought experiment. One woman had even journaled out her thoughts before the interview. They just seemed that little bit more human, to be honest. I was far from feeling, These poor people who don't have very many things. Instead, I thought that their levels of contentment seemed enviable. I was impressed by the values that they practiced: most of those people were engaged with issues larger than themselves. They put a lot into their relationships with the people they cared about and their communities, and often with the natural world.
One of the most telling things about people who live simply is that often one of the biggest problems in their lives — and this also shows up in studies of people who practice voluntary simplicity — is that they feel isolated. They feel like outcasts because they live in a consumer society, and they're not consumers. It's really interesting to me that many people think that simplifiers give up so much, that it's so much sacrifice, that it must be miserable and dull. Yet, the biggest problem from the simplifiers’ perspective is that everybody else isn't doing what they do. They're quite satisfied with the way they live, but not so satisfied with the fact that doing so makes them outcasts from society as a whole.
Image from ‘The Last Supper’ by Jessica Keightley
Shonagh: This is something that resonates with me. I live in Brooklyn, in an area that is rife with hyper-consumption. I stopped buying any new clothes and started to change my consumption habits generally in 2018. It has been tough to live in New York, where everything is geared towards consumption, and I find it hard to find things to do where I am not consuming anything — food, goods, people! I have been looking for other things to do; I joined a community garden and have been volunteering.
J.B.: It resonates for me as well. What I didn't realize, until I was working on this book, particularly in my conversations with Tim Kassar, was that if you stop consuming, and you stop pursuing materialist values, the next stopping point isn’t a new set of deeply enriching, intrinsically satisfying values. The next stopping point is a void. You step into the void left behind by the absence of consumerism, and if you don't fill that void, you can end up in a profoundly dissatisfying place.
I have tried to practice what I — well, I try not to preach — what I write about to some extent. But through my work on this book, I realized that I never actively embraced the idea that I was practicing simplicity, and that there were specific things that I should do to make that feel good. I've spent a lot of time a bit lost in terms of who I am. I'm not a consumer, so who am I instead? It was only working on this book that I started to make more active efforts to fill the void. And it works.
People who practice simplicity pointed out that back in the 90s, lots of people were doing this across the Western world. The people who tried living simply but gave up on it tended to be the ones who saw it as a process of giving things up, often for environmental reasons. Those people didn't usually endure, because just sacrificing parts of your life isn’t very satisfying in the long run. The people who did endure as simplifiers are the ones who actively changed the orientation of their values and began to invest in those values proactively. Those people are the ones who are still doing it decades later and drawing at least as much satisfaction from their lives as the rest of us — in fact, there are a lot of indications that they are more satisfied than most of us are with our lives.
To your point about how you can walk through New York and not know what to do, that's precisely what I encountered in Barking and Dagenham. (The community project in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham called Every One Every Day). I think I went there with some assumptions about how lower-income people spend their time; I thought, these people will be consuming as well — they're just going to be consuming cheaper things. That didn't turn out to be the case. I heard so many people say to me that, until these participatory culture experiments started in Barking and Dagenham, they'd get off work, and they wouldn't do anything because there was nothing to do. If you don't have money to consume and you live in a consumer culture, there's not a lot available to you. I've gone out on the streets in cities like New York and thought, I don't want to go to a restaurant, I don't want to go shopping, I don't want to go to a cafe. In that case, if you can't find a park to sit in, then there's not much else to do with your time.
Shonagh: In the book, you look at consumption as shopping, but there's a chapter where you broaden that to look at inconspicuous consumption: what we eat, what we drive, how much energy we use. What did you learn about how we consume those things?
J.B.: I use the term “shopping” as shorthand for the consumer lifestyle as a whole, because it's easy to understand consumption through the lens of things you go out and buy. But there are all kinds of ways we consume that are built into the way we live: how hot or cold we keep our homes and buildings, what we eat, how we get around. A lot of sustainability advocates point almost exclusively to those things, right? They say transportation is the problem — you can't call that consumerism. What we eat is the problem — that's not consumerism, either. If you live in a hot place, you need to cool your house to be comfortable — that's not consumerism. But if you trace back through the history of these things that now seem built into how we live, many of them originated as consumer products, and often they had to be pushed on us.
Air conditioning is one example that I looked at. The resistance to air-con throughout history was astonishing. People didn't care about air conditioning; they certainly didn't desperately want it. They had all kinds of practices, from architecture to the types of drinks and food they ate, that helped them get through hot or cold weather. People enjoyed the variability of weather and climate. So air-con had to start as a luxury product marketed to the rich. Then it had to be turned into a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses type issue. Gradually, it took hold, just in the United States at first and then in other countries. In some countries, there's still quite a bit of resistance to it.
I don't have air-con or very effective heat in my home, so I started practicing a return to natural variability. To me, it's much more satisfying. There are meaningful, simple pleasures to be had in waking up when it's a little chilly, and then the day warms up, and that feels good. On a summer day, you get too hot, and then it starts to cool again in the evening. It gives you this whole cycle of things to appreciate, and even little challenges to overcome. I don't want to overstate it because it's very subtle, but it adds to the pleasure of life. The alternative — and I love this term — is “thermal boredom.” You're in these buildings, and the temperature never changes. It's boring, and it's not good for you — for your health. I go into that in some depth in the book. The alternative is so much better.
To loop back to the critical point, these things that we think of as built-in — like air-con, cars, and meat-heavy diets — often started as consumer products pushed on us through consumer culture. It's crucial to remember their roots.
Shonagh: This relates to what fashion is selling as it so often sells a lifestyle. It doesn't just say buy this dress or shoes; fashion media says you should live here, eat here, buy this air-con unit to be fashionable. In the book, you do look at fashion. There is a chapter called 'Fast fashion cannot rule but it may not have to die.' How so?
J.B.: I talked to Cyndi Rhoades, a British woman who's working on a circular process for fabrics and textiles (Worn Again Technologies). You can take a T-shirt and throw it in one end of the process, and they can dissolve it, whether it's cotton or polyester. It comes out the other end with either the basic building blocks of a plant-based shirt like Tencel or a polyester pellet that can be respun into a polyester shirt. Fascinating technology, really promising. I asked, can this supply us all with shirts and clothing? The answer seems to be yes. She said we have all the necessary materials, either in the clothes we’re wearing right now or the ones sitting around in closets and landfills unused.
But if we need more and more and more clothing, you have to feed more stuff into the circle. So it's the same old problem. A circular economy is still a problem if it has to grow relentlessly, because then it’s not just going to be recycling existing resources, it's going to become a suck for new resources. It made me think that if you have a circular process, it could provide us with some of what fast fashion does today, which is novelty and change, and it could do so in a sustainable way. Sharing models could also allow us a flow of clothes into and out of our lives, where we could still enjoy some of what we get from fashion — particularly the novelty aspect, the sense of newness. But none of those things let us off the hook regarding the overall need to reduce the overall amount of clothing we consume.
Shonagh: You speak about retaining the fun and novelty aspects of fashion. I am interested in identity. Fashion has been linked as integral to the way that we perform our identity. Do you think this is true?
J.B.: This has come up in so many of my conversations with mainstream journalists. They say fashion as we know it today is essential to our identities. It absolutely is not. If we roll back to say the 1950s and 1960s, people were consuming radically fewer articles of clothing than they are now. Did they struggle to convey their identities? Some of the most iconic personal identities that we still celebrate today were created during that period. They formulated those identities with a fraction of the resources that we do today. Did our identities become 60% more powerful as we consumed 60% more articles of clothing per person over the past 20 years?
Image from ‘The Last Supper’ by Jessica Keightley
Shonagh: No, it is the great commodification of identity.
J.B.: Our possessions are just one of the ways we express our identities. In the Kalahari Desert, among people with very simple material lives, I didn't find anybody having any trouble expressing their identities. If I met somebody, I wouldn't find them indistinguishable from everyone else around them. It's comical that we think we can't express our identities without fashion as we know it today. You read those old Victorian novels where people had three dresses, and fashion was changing the color of the ribbon in their hair every summer — we can be individuals, and express ourselves as individuals, with the tiniest fraction of the consumption that we're doing today.
Shonagh: I feel that you might have a lot more time to develop yourself and define your identity if you weren't shopping all the time. That's something I found; I've learned a lot about myself when I wasn't distracted by buying new clothes. I wanted to ask you about your faculty post; you teach feature writing at the University of British Columbia. I am interested in how the media is handling coverage of the climate crisis. Is this something you focus on with your students?
J.B.: Honestly, I don't talk to students about it all that much — although you're making me think I should. I do think the media is in a very strange place right now. The New York Times is a great example because there’s this tension between all of the lifestyle journalism they do, and the climate journalism they do, because the consumer lifestyle is such a driver of climate change. There's also the undying devotion of the Times to growth — the relentless growth of a consumer-driven economy. I think the way the media makes sense of these contradictions is through the total faith that green technology and clean energy will get us through this dilemma. They feel like they can say, buy all these cool things, let us keep you up to date on all the trends AND the climate crisis is the existential crisis of our times. They feel that there's no dissonance because there's a magic wand that can make all of the environmental consequences of the lifestyle go away. I mean, that is a pervasive faith, not only in media but in government and business. And the culture as a whole.
Shonagh: It is interesting to attempt to engage these publications in critical and serious thought around fashion consumption. I have been trying, and so far, no luck. They see fashion as fun and frivolous and something that shouldn’t be questioned or taken away from people.
J.B.: Yes, and I'm encountering that attitude with this book to some extent. This book has received less coverage so far than my previous books, which is interesting. I’ve never met a person who doesn't have strong opinions about consumption — at the very least, people always have judgmental attitudes about other people's consumption. But, we've heard from editors that they don't think this is the moment to talk about this issue because people haven't been consuming during the pandemic, and they want to get back to it. They don't want me to be a party pooper. Or they feel that having a public conversation about the impacts of consumption on ourselves and the environment is inappropriate or insensitive right now because so many people have felt the effects of the decline of the consumer economy: joblessness and business loss. There is more resistance to the idea of talking about consumption than I anticipated.
That played out as I was writing the book as well. I contacted people in large corporations that are symbolic of consumption. Either I was turned away or had real cloak-and-dagger conversations with people in a couple of cases — "this never happened" type conversations. The topic of consumption is not only overlooked; people are afraid of approaching it. This threads back to one thing that I do explore with my journalism students: I encourage them to think about where their story fits within grand narratives. You're never just reporting on a story; you're also reporting within the context of a grand narrative of one kind or another. So if fashion writing exists within a grand narrative of fun and levity, you might be able to spend 2% of your time thinking about its environmental consequences — but it's a bit rude.
Shonagh: Fashion writing is wedded to selling things that are somewhat inaccessible or hard to obtain. A fantasy. And that's what keeps you coming back for more.
J.B: One of the things that came up in my research was a prediction from the 1990s. A sociologist was doing some of the earliest research on practitioners of voluntary simplicity in the United States. He looked at what this materialist lifestyle can give us, and he found it could provide us with various important things. It can even give us a sense of efficacy, for example, because people can become very good at being fashionable. However, he found that what consumerism can't give us is a sense of authenticity. But he concluded that advertisers and corporations just hadn’t gotten good at selling us the idea of authenticity yet! He predicted that they would.
A decade later, Ad Age and other publications were asking, Is authenticity the most abused word in advertising today? His prediction came true. The companies latched on to the one area that they hadn't yet mined — our souls. They started selling us authenticity and became very, very good at it. I think this is a large part of why people now say, Well, you can't take away fashion, because it will turn me into an automaton, and I will no longer be able to express my authentic identity. In the short history I've outlined, you can see how inauthentic that movement towards authenticity has been.
Image from ‘The Last Supper’ by Jessica Keightley
Shonagh: Thank you so much for talking to me today. Although your book is a utopian proposition, do you have an idea of what utopia would look like to you? Do you hope that consumption will stop?
J.B.: Yeah, it is what I'd like to see happen. Very much.
The book points to a set of principles that would underlie a deconsumer society. From those principles, we can reverse engineer how to get there. The book's not highly prescriptive. Towards the end, I talk a little about specific things that might shift us towards producing more durable products or reducing inequality and things like that. But there's a lot of different ideas around how to achieve those things. I didn't want to attach myself to any particular set of those ideas. I'm not sure we're at that place yet, where we can say, This is the one certain path to a lower consuming society. I was much more interested in identifying these principles, and then we can see what sorts of ideas might fit with those.
I think it's totally achievable. We can start making changes in the next two minutes, but I would expect that a move towards a deconsumer society would be gradual. It would involve change in every sphere of contemporary existence. That's good news for people who want to participate in that project because they can do it from wherever they are. We can do this in the same way that people started to raise awareness about sustainability, a low carbon approach, or the greening of the production of goods and services. We can now begin to raise the reduction of consumption within business, government, schools, friend groups, or families. People can participate in this at any level that they want to. There are ideas out there for the kinds of changes that are needed; we just need to start enacting them.
In my opinion, it's much more straightforward to imagine that we can take concrete steps to reduce consumption than it is to believe that we can use new technologies and clean energy to green away all of the consumption we're doing today and all of the consumption that Western culture is inspiring in everyone else on earth, and then to keeping growing the whole world’s consumption in perpetuity. When people tell me we can green all of that away, that is the true fantasy. What I'm proposing compared to that is pretty practical work.
