—Systemic change begins with personal change—
J.B. MacKinnon is the author or coauthor of four books of nonfiction. His latest, The Once and Future World, is a national bestseller in Canada and won the U.S. Green Prize for Sustainable Literature. Previous works are The 100-Mile Diet (with Alisa Smith), a bestseller 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.
As a freelance journalist, MacKinnon is currently a contributor to The New Yorker on consumer issues and ecology. His work also appears in publications ranging from National Geographic and Reader’s Digest to vanguard outlets such as Adbusters and Nautilus. He has won more than a dozen national and international writing awards in categories as varied as essays, science writing, and travelogue. MacKinnon is an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and regularly gives public lectures and writing workshops.
MacKinnon also works in the field of interactive documentaries. He was the writer for Bear 71, which explores the intersection of the wired and wild worlds through the true story of a mother grizzly bear. Bear 71 premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was named Site of the Year at the international Favourite Website Awards, among other honours. He was also text editor for Welcome to Pine Point, which won two Webby Awards, and wrote Wild Canada, an interactive book app about the Canadian wilderness, for the CBC.
MacKinnon is also a rock climber, mountain biker, snowboarder, and birdwatcher. He lives with his partner Alisa Smith in Vancouver, Canada.
Our world values cheap and disposable---in food and doof packaging, furniture, cars, and near the top of the list, clothes, especially fast fashion. The world is paying for it in the sense of overfilled landfills, plastic disrupting endocrine systems of animals including us, oil wells everywhere, garbage patches in the ocean, and so on. I see us paying the price. We're always craving. Stuff always breaks. We feel compelled to buy new phones when the old ones should have kept working. We're obese from snacking. We're twisted up inside polluting while trying to convince ourselves we're not. J. B. MacKinnon's new book The Day the World Stops Shopping examines this part of our culture and for this podcast he committed to go against that trend by buying a quality pair of jeans from a place he knew the sourcing, labor practices, and everything else, the opposite of fast fashion. He also paid significantly more for them. Was the premium worth it? Should you do the same? What can we learn from his experience? We talk about these questions and he experience from many perspectives.
J. B. MacKinnon's book The Once and Future World influenced my view of nature as much as anyone's. I thought I knew what nature was---what we were trying to conserve or preserve---but I wasn't even close. I found his writing gripping and colorful. I link below to a couple recordings I made that quoted the book at length. We've been talking about our work, his new book he's nearly finished, my book I've just started, and how he was thinking of acting on his research personally. He was sharing so personally about the challenge he was considering for himself, impromptu, I asked if he would consider recording a podcast episode. We just jumped into it. Here's both of us unrehearsed, unprepared. I loved getting to learn the backgrounds of wildlife, Hawaii, all the things I read from Once and Future World, and how and why he found out about them. I hope you're all also on your path to discover variety in food, clothing, community, and so on that our culture obscures and makes us feel backward about. Partly I'm impressed with myself at remembering those parts of his book unaided, but really that recall illustrates the power of the book and sadly what we've done to our world. But hopefully what we can restore. I'm always impressed with how fast nature rewilds when we take our foot off the gas. And how much we enjoy the surprising discovery of simple, sustainable living.