Cyndi

“downshifting classic Your Money or Your Life,”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves – An Inspiring Investigation into Climate Change and Sustainable Economics

“It was a quiet revolution. Most downshifters dressed quite a bit like everyone else and lived in ordinary neighborhoods rather than communes or cabins in the woods. Seattle emerged as the nexus of voluntary simplicity as the growing tech industry-Microsoft's headquarters were there-made the city synonymous with the overworked, conspicuously consuming yuppie, while many other residents were still mixed in a lingering recession. The result was perhaps the most deliberate experiment in stopping shopping in modern times: a whole city in which the rejection of consumerism entered the mainstream.
For nearly a decade, few aspects of daily life in Seattle were left unchanged by its shadow culture....For a few rare years, the consumer lifestyle was uncooled. 'We were sure in the '90s that we were the up-and-coming lifestyle choice,' Vicki Robin, coauthor of the downshifting classic 'Your Money or Your Life' told me....Then the global economy came roaring back to life, Seattle became better known for billionaires than plain living, and downshifting faded.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves

“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.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves

“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