(00:01):
Well, I'm in over my head. No one told me trying to keep my footprint small was harder than I thought it could be. I'm in over my head. What do I really need? Trying to save the planet? Oh, someone please save me trying to save the planet. Oh, is someone please save me.

(00:25):
Welcome to over my head. I'm Michael Bartz. My guest today is JB McKinnon. JB is a bestselling author, documentary writer and award-winning journalist. Along with Alyssa Smith, he coauthored the hundred-mile diet, widely recognized as a catalyst for the local food movement. 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's also an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of British Columbia. Welcome to uni of my head. JB.

(00:55):
Thanks so much, Michael.

(00:57):
So in talking about the, just transition poverty and inequality came up, and this got me thinking about money and how we use it to address the climate crisis. As consumers, we make choices every day on how we spend our money. And clearly this impacts the planet, your latest book, the day the world stops shopping tackles consumerism in an imaginative way in the form of a thought experiment. I found it fascinating touching and educational, and I highly recommend it. For those who haven't read it, perhaps we can start with a brief synopsis of the book?

(01:23):
Sure. The book is a thought experiment, really, where I imagine a world in which consumption day to day, consumerism of goods and services dropped abruptly by about 25%. And I use that as a way to explore what would change, what would change if we were to make a shift towards a lower consuming society and really in terms of everything, but broadly speaking, how would our products change? How would the economy change? How would the ecology change? How would we ourselves change?

(01:59):
So how does lowering our consumption, slowing down our shopping? What are some of the ways that you talk about in your book that it helps with the environment and ecology?

(02:09):
That you are very, very closely linked. Everything we buy and use has an environmental footprint. So if we imagine clothing, for example, we've increased the number of clothes that we're buying by two times in the last 20 years, we're buying twice as many clothes as we were two decades ago. And to make clothing, we often of course, need to use cotton. Cotton's a very water-demanding crop, or we maybe are making the clothes at a polyester that requires fossil fuels. Then in the production of the clothing, beyond the basic building blocks, more water is used. More energy is used. There might be dyes and coatings put on clothing, which can end up detoxifying the air and the water and the places that they're made. And around the world, those products have to be shipped, of course, which requires fossil fuels, even something as simple as a t-shirt, you know, it has a long list of environmental impacts behind it.

(03:05):
And if we look more broadly, the climate of course is really strongly affected by consumption. A large part of the economy is driven by personal household consumption, and you can track carbon emissions almost in unison with the economy, if the economy's going up and it's a consumer-driven economy, then carbon emissions are going up. And if the economy's slowing down and emissions are typically tilting down as well. So we see that consumption really drives most of the environmental problems that we're facing around the world. And we can see that slowing it down has a really powerful impact on reducing those environmental impacts.

(03:44):
There's a lot there for sure. So let's start with the fashion side of things. So you address fast fashion in the book. So how does our consumption of clothing change in your thought experiment?

(03:55):
Well, when we look at how products in general might change, if we slow down our consumption, we would most likely see a reversal of the trend towards cheaper and more disposable clothing and back towards clothing that lasts longer and that we keep for a longer period of time. So I said earlier that we buy twice as many clothes as we did 20 years ago. Part of the reason that we buy twice as many clothes is because they last half as long, I'm sure everybody's experienced this. So yeah, if we wanted to lower, we wanted to have a, an economy that, that generated a little less consumption. Then we would swim back towards clothes that were made in a durable way and not just durable in terms of their materials, but also durable in terms of being able to survive through fashion cycles. So that might mean more of our clothes would be less dramatic in terms of their look, you know, classic cuts as fashion people would say so that we can keep them for a longer period of time and buy fewer clothes.

(04:57):
An interesting aspect of this is that it's one of the ways that we can see that lowering consumption isn't necessarily just, we buy less stuff and therefore we produce less stuff. And therefore the economy shrinks by whatever amount we reduce our production. It also changes the way we produce things. So buying less stuff in the case of clothing means clothes are being made in more labour-intensive ways because they're being made to last longer. And maybe more of the model, maybe more of the business model for selling clothes shifts towards things like repairing and altering clothes or reselling clothes secondhand. And interestingly enough, that's exactly what we see some companies doing now, companies like Patagonia, Eileen Fisher Levi's are starting to move towards this business model where they sell each customer, fewer new clothes and maybe more secondhand clothes or make part of their business model repairing and altering those clothes.

(05:58):
And so if companies are doing that, is that going to lower their profits? Or is that going to keep them the same or will they go up, do you think?

(06:05):
Well, this is the mystery right now. I mean, I've talked in the book to people at Patagonia and Levi's, and I spoke to some other companies that don't appear in the book and their position is that right now we're in this period of green growth. And that means that a company like Patagonia might sell more and more and more because it's taking up the market share of companies that don't have the same kind of social and environmental values. So there's a real opportunity for companies to make this kind of shift. It seems at the same time, at some point, the number of clothes being made has to be reduced if we're going to be moving towards a lower consuming economy. So somewhere up the line, the rubber hits the road. Yeah. And then I think you're moving into more interesting territory in terms of what kinds of transformations might occur.

(06:57):
Even I think of that one company in your book that you mentioned, where they were trying to make a sustainable shirt made in America, and it ended up being like $200 and they wanted, they had to source things from around the world. Anyways, it couldn't even make the whole thing in America.

(07:10):
Yeah. It's it turns out it's really challenging to be a company that's trying to shift towards a more, well, I guess the model is often called fewer better things or by less, by better, it's really difficult to move in that direction really in large part because the system, the global system is designed to it's designed for the cheap and disposable model. So if you are like these shirt makers that you refer to, Michael, the folks at Tuckerman and company in the United States, they went out to try to create the most sustainable, most durable dress shirts in the world. And they wanted to make 'em close to home and they wanted to make 'em organic. Well, if you wanna make a durable dress shirt, then you wanna make that out of something called long-staple cotton. It has longer threads. And so when it's spun together into cotton threads, they're more durable threads than short-staple threads. And then they also wanted to use organic long-staple cotton. I mean, there are not that many people out there making durable organic products. And so there's only 1% of the global cotton market is organic. You can imagine how tiny the fraction of cotton being grown that's organic and long-staple would be. So there are these huge challenges for companies that are trying to do things differently.

(08:31):
And in talking about that societal-wide change and shift, you talking in the book about conspicuous consumption, what exactly is that?

(08:39):
Well, conspicuous consumption is sometimes nowadays called positional consumption because it's really any kind of consumption we do. That's public enough that it sends signals to other people about sends information to other people about, about us and who we are. And some position consumption is relatively harmless. I suppose, for example, you might, in the way you dress just convey the message that you're a fun-loving person or that you are a nonconformist or that you love the great outdoors, you know, these sorts of things. But a lot of position of consumption is sending signals about our income and our social status. And that's a big driver in a society of consumption. Is that keeping up with the Joneses type effect where we're looking around at the people around us, and if they seem to have more stuff than we do or better stuff than we do, then we feel that we may be losing a sense of social dignity in society. And that can really drive people to power up their consumption as much as they can. So that's really what conspicuous consumption comes down to. And it was identified way back in the late 18 hundreds. You know, it's, it's certainly gotten nothing but stronger since then.

(09:56):
And you talk about the opposite as well. Inconspicuous consumption, let's touch on that a little bit.

(10:01):
Inconspicuous consumption is consumption that happens out of the public eye and it could be well it's, it's actually really interesting. The version of inconspicuous consumption that I look at in the book most closely is air conditioning. And so we think of something like air conditioning as just kind of the background noise of daily life. Many people would consider air conditioning, a necessity, and it's not something we pay a lot of attention to. And yet of course, it's, it's out there consuming energy and the production of air conditioning units consumes a lot of materials and those sorts of things. So we don't really think of it as consumption in the same way that we think of shopping-type activities as consumption. But curiously enough, if you go back through the history of the air conditioner, it was originally something you had to shop for.

(10:49):
It was something that had to be marketed to us and a product had to be sold to society. And it was very difficult. Lots of people resisted air conditioning and thought that it was an absolutely useless luxury. Something that would distort the kind of natural transitions of heating, getting warmer and cooler through the day. It took a long effort by the air conditioning industry to convince us, to buy into air conditioning and make it something as in conspicuous as it is today. But they're also used to just be a lot more inconspicuous consumption, you know, your home water heater. Wasn't something that everybody saw in the past or your curtains in your bedroom, a long list of things like that. Even as recently as the nineties, these were things that nobody really saw or cared about in your home. But thanks to social media, you can very easily see people showing off their , their new hot water heater or their bedroom curtains, or all kinds of forms of consumption that used to be quite private. And again, this is another powerful driver of how much we buy and consume.

(11:56):
I find that example of the air conditioning so interesting that they had to push it on us and, and sell it to us. And it was something that we didn't want. And I feel like most people just feel like that's the default. You have to have air conditioning in your car, in your house and such. So it's interesting how quickly things change and how quickly we adapt to a new environment.

(12:14):
Yeah. One of the early pioneers of air conditioning way back when, you know, he imagined in a, I believe it was a radio interview. He imagined this world where we'd step out of our air-conditioning homes into our air-conditioned cars and go to our air-conditioned workplace and then drop by the air conditioning shot. And at the time it was total science fiction. And even he himself probably thought it would never come to pass. And of course that's how many people experienced daily life today.

(12:42):
And speaking about adapting, you referenced the COVID 19 pandemic quite a bit throughout the book. What lessons have we learned from this event that we could relate to lowering our consumption?

(12:54):
Well, I mean, I had the interesting experience while working on this book of having the thought experiment I was working on become real. I mean, I was writing and researching about a world that stops shopping. And then all of a sudden COVID 19 struck the global consumer economy was effectively locked down with the slowdown in consumption. We did, of course see a really dramatic shock to the consumer economy. That was a very real part of the conversation around this. But we also saw, as people will remember blue skies opening up bluer than any of us could remember over many of the world's cities. And in particular, some of those cities where many of the world's consumer goods are now made in places like India and Pakistan and Western China, we saw the slowdown in mass tourism result in wildlife returning to spaces that the wildlife hadn't been able to use for a couple of decades.

(13:50):
Now, I remember a beach in Mexico in particular and saw photos that alligators had moved back to bask on the beach and even surf in the waves, you know, in the absence of the large numbers of tourists that would usually have been there. So really just globally, you saw the hand of human pressure lessen a little bit, and then, you know, the environment was benefiting in pretty much every possible way, including of course the deepest and sharpest drop in carbon emissions ever recorded. So all of those kinds of transformations were occurring. We also saw in, especially in those earliest months, changes in ourselves. So we were baking loaves of bread and gardening and watching birds through the window. And even though we could only do so on our phones or through screens, there were people reaching out to friends and family that hadn't reached out to for a very long time.

(14:45):
And in many cases you had people trying to take care of their physical health in a way that they hadn't had time to do when they're in the workplace. And all of those sorts of things are precisely the kinds of things that people who study the psychology of materialism and consumerism say are the things that we would turn towards. If we turned our backs on materialistic values and turn towards a different set of values. And those are also exactly the kinds of things that people who make the deliberate choice to consume less tend to fill their time with. So the combination of what happened during COVID 19, with the kinds of research I had done about other case studies really started to make a lower-consuming world, come to life before my eyes.

(15:33):
So you talked about voluntary simplicity as well. Let's, let's touch on that a bit.

(15:38):
Yeah. Voluntary simplicity is the deliberate choice to reduce your personal consumption. And I spoke to people who have practiced this way of life for at least a couple of decades, two or three decades. And one of the things you see there is that people do change their relationship with time. So most of them will start to realize that because they live more simply, they don't need to earn as much money. That means they don't necessarily have to work as much. So they make choices like choosing to do work, that they find more satisfying, even if it means that it pays less, or they may simply reduce the number of hours they're working. And then they invest that time in things that they find meaningful. So those will typically be, I mean, the number one way that they use their time seems to be investing a lot of time in building strong relationships with people they care about, or they may master new skills. They may engage with issues that are larger than themselves by participating in the environmental movement or some kind of social justice movement, things like that. And again, you can see that these are exactly the kinds of practices that people started to turn toward in the early weeks and months of the COVID 19 pandemic. So it really all starts to point towards what a lower-consuming lifestyle might look like.

(16:56):
And I guess the question would be, then we talked just briefly about the economy when we slow our shopping down, how does that affect the economy? Does it survive?

(17:06):
The economy definitely can survive. I mean, certainly another of the lessons of the COVID 19 pandemic is that the economy is very adaptable. And, and so are we, it's challenging to slow down an economy, but it's certainly far from impossible. If we do see the economy shrink because of a reduction in consumption, then we have to take steps, like making sure that the wealth of the economy is producing is distributed fairly, at least as fairly as it is today. And we have to make sure that the opportunities to work that are there are also distributed at least as fairly as they are today and in both cases, preferably more so, but if we do that, if we take a, a kind of planned approach, a controlled approach to slowing down consumption, then there's no reason to think that it's going to end in the end of civilization or a trip back to the stone age, as people often say, and you see this in places like Japan, which has had 30 years with almost no economic growth.

(18:02):
And they have a very rapidly shrinking population because a large proportion of the population is elderly. And Japan is a highly livable nation. It's experiencing a kind of steady-state economy at the moment. It's certainly not resulting in any terrifying crash in quality of life. And in fact, many of the people I spoke to there are appreciating the slowdown in the economy. So I think there is this notion that as Margaret Cher put it, there is no alternative. We can only live with the perpetual growth of a consumer-driven economy. I think that we're starting to see more and more clearly that that's that's a myth. And if we have the courage to choose to do so, we can certainly live in a lower consuming manner

(18:50):
And talking about Japan, actually, one of my favourite stories from your book was the 400-year-old confectionary business. How does the long game matter when it comes to slowing our shopping?

(18:59):
I talked to a number of businesses where the business has survived for centuries. I mean, in some cases, 400 years, 600 years, there are companies that have been on the planet for more than a thousand years. And of course, one thing that a lot of these companies have in common is that they do not attempt to grow in perpetuity. If you're gonna have a business for hundreds of years, it's quite difficult of course, to grow every single one of those years. So they have quite different orientations. And one is that you know, very high value for those businesses is that they need to make a profit. And if they don't make a profit, the business will not survive, but they don't concern themselves otherwise with growth. They concern themselves with the values of the business and they concern themselves with the continuity of the business part and parcel of that is the social and environmental context that the business exists in.

(19:52):
So you have these businesses that they're thinking 500 years in the future. You're just more naturally going to be concerned with the state of the planet or the state of society and what kind of impact your personal business is having on that context. So yeah, these long-lived businesses are really interesting. And also, again, going to this idea that endless growth really doesn't seem to be essential. You have these very large businesses in some cases that are not in any way dedicated to growth. And then if you think about our typical cities and towns, we're surrounded by businesses that don't grow. You know, your local pizza shop does not perpetually grow your neighbour, borrow doesn't perpetually grow the people who do your dry cleaning. You know, a large part of the economy is made up of companies and businesses that are not attached to this idea of perpetual economic growth and a, you know, a smaller number are. And that may in fact be the model that we should be concerned about in terms of its impacts on society and the environment.

(20:51):
Yeah. And I feel like the, at least the mainstream model is that perpetual growth. And that's really, what's gotten us into this mess in the first place. Right. So I think having that long view makes total sense.

(21:02):
Yeah. When you're not answering to shareholders who are expecting a dividend, you know, every quarter, and instead you are operating a family business that you hope to pass down to the next 10 generations of your relatives. You just have a very different perspective on the world. And of course, that idea of thinking about how do we in this generation pass down a planet to the next generation that's in as good or better shape than the one that we received. That's very much in keeping with this kind of approach to business that, that takes the long

(21:32):
In the epilogue, you confessed that as a result of writing this book, you actually found yourself shopping more. Why was that?

(21:39):
Yeah, I mean, it is kind of a contradiction, but I can explain it this way. I suppose I'd gotten kind of frozen in my consumer purchasing and probably a number of your listeners and maybe you yourself, Michael have had this experience of just feeling a bit paralyzed about how to consume when the act of consumption has so many potential consequences. And so working on this book really showed me that, you know, there is, a sensible way that we can consume. And that is if we can think about goods we might buy or services that we might pay for and ask ourselves, well, are these really going to improve my quality of life? And if they are gonna improve my quality of life and prove really useful, then I'm going to invest in them in a way that is in the case of services, really meaningful, something I can really engage with.

(22:30):
And in the case of goods, something that I can keep with me for a long time. So I suddenly realized, well, there are some things that I want and I will buy them in quality so that they last, I will make sure that my values are embedded in the production of those products and those services. And then I'll just go ahead and consume them and not have to feel racked with guilt about it at the same time. Of course, I, you know, I have reduced my consumption in other ways. And certainly I, some of the consumption I'm doing or more of the consumption I'm doing is secondhand goods than it was in the past. For example, I've reduced the amount of travel. These are just different things that spun out of the thought experiment for me.

(23:07):
I guess my last question, of course, is this show is about empowering citizens to take action on the climate crisis. And we have touched on some of these elements, but just briefly, what can people do today to start lowering their consumption?

(23:21):
I think the obvious answer is that people could consume less, but I'm going to go with something slightly different. And that is to suggest that people look at ways they are spending their time in a low-consuming manner right now, and start to pay attention to those things and celebrate them a bit more. I mean, we might discover that we really like meeting in the park with friends and having a picnic and maybe we could do more of that and use that to substitute some other practice in our life. That's higher in consumption and less meaningful. And I think that's really, the key is getting to this place where we're not giving things up. We're gaining things by paying attention to what's really meaningful in our lives and what we can really deeply engage with.

(24:07):
I totally agree with that response. Well, this has been very informative, JB, thanks so much for coming on the show.

(24:14):
Thanks, Michael. It's been terrific to be here.

(24:17):
Well, that was my talk with JB. We covered a lot of ground and I think my biggest takeaway was how our society changes when we consume less. It's not this dystopian horrible place. It's potentially a better place to live with more time with family and friends and connection and less time-consuming. And don't forget to stick out the website, www.andovermyheadpodcast.com. You'll find shows I've been on where I talk about living with less and pictures of the tiny house. So that's fun. Well, that's all for me. I'm Michael Barts. Here's the feeling a little less in over our head when it comes to saving the planet. We'll see you again, soon. In over my head was produced and hosted by Michael Bartz original theme song by Gabriel Thaine. If you would like to get in touch with us email info@inovermyheadpodcast.com. Special thanks to Telus STORYHIVE for making this show possible.

(25:08):
I'm trying to save the will someone please.