On our Bookshelf this Month

October 2024

And then it happened. What started as a journalist’s musing, ‘What if the world stopped shopping?’, became real. One day the world really did stop shopping. In Zero Waste Melrose’s monthly series, What’s on our Bookshelf this Month?, we highlight books on the subjects of zero waste and sustainability.

No longer was it just in economists’ models or sociologists’ theories, but consumers stopped shopping as the pandemic set in and the world closed in early 2020. In The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves, J.B. MacKinnon explores the pandemic shutdown’s layered impacts and the consequences that consuming, and conversely not consuming, have on the world. From the negative impacts of fast fashion and rampant resource use to the positive impacts of blue skies that appeared over polluted cities and de-consumerism, MacKinnon includes heat, air conditioning, social media – just about everything –  in the concept of consuming less.

Available online through booksellers and Audible, as well as hoopla, which is accessible for free through the Melrose Public Library.