What if we simply stopped shopping?

Would civilization collapse?

Would the planet’s ecology be reborn?

What would happen to the way we think, make products, use time, express our individuality? Would life be better, or worse?

The Day the World Stops Shopping is a provocative, deeply researched thought experiment exploring what life beyond consumerism might look like—and how we can get there. 

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J.B. MacKinnon is the author or coauthor of five books of nonfiction. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in such publications as 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 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; I Live Here (with Mia Kirshner and artists Michael Simons and Paul Shoebridge), a ‘paper documentary’ about displaced people; and Dead Man in Paradise, the story of a priest assassinated in the Dominican Republic, which won Canada’s highest prize for literary nonfiction.

MacKinnon also works in documentaries, most notably as writer for Bear 71, an internationally acclaimed digital interactive that explores the intersection of the wired and wild worlds through the true story of a mother grizzly bear.

He lives in Vancouver, Canada.