2
" I gave a magic wand to Amanda Rinderle of Tuckerman & Co., maker of probably the world's most sustainable dress shirts. If she could use it, I asked, to change one thing in order to help create an economy of better but less, what would that one thing be?...she would make prices tell the whole truth.
Right now, prices reflect demand for goods and services and the costs of producing them: materials, energy, manufacturing, shipping. Mostly excluded are the consequences of production and consumption, from pollution to soil erosion to carbon emissions to habitat loss and onward to the human health effects of all these, the incredible destruction wrought by wildfires, floods and storms in the age of climate chaos, the burden of two billion tonnes of garbage each year, and the incalculable moral injury of driving million-year-old species into extinction. "
― J.B. MacKinnon , The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves
4
" Consumer research consistently shows that exposure to what can easily add up to thousands of advertisements a day, most of them telling us that money, possessions, and the right image are a path to happiness, success, and self-worth, does in fact tend to make us feel worse about ourselves. In cities, especially (where most people now live), the crowds of other consumers and glut of advertising constantly cause us to doubt our social status. In the words of British economist Tim Jackson, we are persuaded to spend money we don't have on things we don't need to create impressions that won't last on people we don't care about. "
― J.B. MacKinnon , The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves
12
" At the same time, she saw on the streets and subways of New York a depth of poverty unlike anything she'd ever witnessed in Europe, and realized that unemployment or even a poorly paid job in the US could lead to abject homelessness, hunger, and desperation. Compounding Partanen's anxiety was the fact that, while poverty was often visible, wealth frequently was not; she eventually realized that many of the people whom she thought of as her peers were not living on their earnings, but on inheritances or family support. Worst of all, it really did seem difficult to earn enough to own a home, send her kids to college, or have reliable health-care insurance. Paradoxically, as her insecurities added up, she found herself wanting to spend more money, rather than less. 'It was striking to me that I, who had grown up in a Nordic country and had not felt that before, got caught up in it quite quickly after moving to America. I felt like I should be consuming more,' Partanen said, 'You want to buy more things that will make you feel like you're making it, and like you are safe. "
― J.B. MacKinnon , The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves
13
" Fortunately, ideas already exist for how to achieve every aspect of deconsumer society that appears in this book. Lifespan labeling can encourage product durability: new tax regimes and regulations can favour repair over disposability, job-sharing programs and shorter work days or work weeks can keep people employed in a slower, smaller economy. Redistribution of wealth can reverse income inequality, or prevent it from worsening in a lower-consuming world.
I set out on my thought experiment as an observer, I wanted to see for myself where a world that stops shopping would lead, rather than be guided by others' theories. In the end, both approaches arrive at the same place. Movements for degrowth and a well-being economy-one measured not by GDP but by its ability to improve the quality of life of citizens-have been steadily refining a set of ideas and ways of life that could free us from the need for relentless, and relentlessly damaging, economic expansion. The alternative to consumer capitalism is not a constellation of possibilities, but increasingly a convergence. "
― J.B. MacKinnon , The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves
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" Does Kurokawa feel that deep-time thinking in business is better than short-term thinking? He is an even-minded person, and I admit that I expected him to reply that both are important. Instead he said, "Of course."
He offered one more history lesson: in 1915, Tokyo decided to commemorate their recently deceased emperor with a Shinto shrine and sacred forest. At the time, the area they selected was marshy farmland on the outskirts of the city.
The forester planned out the project in stages, beginning with a hundred thousand young trees that would be planted around the few existing pines. Over a hundred years, a broad-leaf woods of oak, chinquapin and camphor trees would rise to become an untended forest. No one involved in the planning would live to see the final outcome.
Today the mature forest covers a slow-rising hill alongside Harajuku subway station. It's a green respite, where a sense of calm prevails and there's clean air for your lungs-and it is surrounded to the horizon on every side by the megalopolis of Toyko. Kurokawa became speechless with awe at the brilliance of the deep-time vision.
'If you don't think that way,' he said at last, 'what kind of passion do you have for human life? "
― J.B. MacKinnon , The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves
