The Day the World Stops Shopping

My sticky notes from The Day the World Stops Shopping, by J. B. Mackinnon: On the problem: The twenty-first century has brought a critical dilemma into sharp relief: we must stop shopping, and yet we can’t stop shopping. At the turn of this new millennium, according to the United Nations’ panel of experts on international resources, consumption quietly surpassed population as our greatest environmental challenge. When it comes to climate change, species extinction, water depletion, toxic pollution, deforestation and other crises, how much each one of us consumes now matters more than how many of us there are. The average person in a rich country consumes thirteen times as much as the average person in a poor one. In terms of environmental impact, that means that having a child in the United States or Canada, the United Kingdom or Western Europe, is equivalent to having thirteen children in a country like Bangladesh, Haiti or Zambia. Raising two children in a rich country is like…