Deepali

“The most savage of consumerism's ironies is that those who consume the least offer suffer far more of consumption's harms than those who consume the most.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves

“It's like pollution, it feels like visual mental pollution," she said. "Let's say you go to The Gap online and you look for a pair of trousers. It's not just that The Gap will follow you around on your browser for the next week. It's that those pairs of trousers that you've thought you might want -- and then decided you didn't want -- are stalking you. You're literally being chased through the internet by products that you are trying not to buy. They're trying to wear you down and make you buy them.”
― J. B. Mackinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping

“Noting that material poverty in the US was matched by an even greater “poverty of satisfaction, purpose, and dignity,” Kennedy decried GDP as a poor measure of the state of the nation. “Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things,” he said. The GDP was buoyed, he noted, by cigarette advertising, ambulances, home security, jails, the destruction of redwood forests, urban sprawl, napalm, nuclear warheads and the armoured vehicles used by police against riots in American cities. “It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile,” Kennedy said.”
― 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

“We can't stop shopping, we must stop shopping. It isn't only that consumption is distorting the climate, felling the forests, cluttering out lives, filling our heads with a throwaway mindset, even stealing the stars from the night sky. The worst is that it leaves us with no idea of what else to do, no belief that things can be different. Whichever way we go, it leaves us doomed.”
― J.B. MacKinnon, The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves