The Moneyless Man

by Boyle, Mark

  I have one chronic health problem that I knew would hit me in the last week of spring and make my life hell: I am allergic to grass pollen. Hay fever (allergic rhinitis), which affects millions around the world, is bad enough when you live in a city, where grass mostly grows in the space between the footpath and the road. But this year, I was living in a big grassy field; my move from city to country was like someone allergic to dog hair going to live in a dog shelter. During the last week of spring, all I wanted to do was climb under my comforter and put a wet towel on my head. Not the most productive way to survive without money.

  When I was young, nothing had worked against my hay fever. At eighteen, I had a steroid injection, against the advice of my doctor. When the effects wore off, three years later, the hay fever came back worse than ever. Antihistamine tablets from the drug store served only to make me drowsy. In desperation, I looked for alternatives and discovered herbalism, particularly Chinese herbalism. Within one week of taking a Chinese herb, my hay fever had gone. This was my first experience of alternative medicine and I was really surprised by how well it worked. This year, buying Chinese herbs wasn’t an option. I had to look for alternatives to the alternative!

  Through the organic food co-op that I’d worked for, I met a local bee-keeper who gave me a couple of jars of his honey. Being vegan, I never eat honey unless it is made locally by a beekeeper I know and trust. Even then, I’ll only accept it if they let the bees keep the honey they need and don’t replace it with sugar. When bee-keepers do this, for me local honey is no longer local, as it has the food miles of the replacement sugar embodied in it. The honey helped, but only marginally, so I used my blog on the Freeconomy Community website to send out a plea for help. I was inundated with offers of advice and one of them worked. A lady, Grace, advised me to use plantain, a very common perennial weed that grew all around me. Both greater and lesser plantain are rich in anti-inflammatory chemicals. Apparently many people who believe they are allergic to grass pollen are actually allergic to plantain yet, ironically, taking plantain can help reduce the symptoms of the allergy.

  And it seems like the problem is only going to get worse. The results of research by scientists at the Center for Health and Global Environment at Harvard Medical School show that higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere also lead to higher levels of pollen, giving me yet another reason to want to reduce my carbon footprint.

  THE GREAT PLANTAIN HAY FEVER REMEDY

  After carefully identifying the right plant (use a good wild food book), pick ten to twenty leaves. If you don’t get much time for foraging, pick more and dry the rest (you could put them in a pillowcase and leave it on a warm radiator).

  Put the leaves in a teapot. Pour some cold water on the leaves first so you don’t scald them, then top up with boiling water.

  Let it cool and put it in the fridge.

  Drink a cupful a day, starting before your hay fever normally starts and keeping going throughout the hay fever season, or until it stops. It can taste a bit earthy, so if you don’t like the taste add some juice. I find it fine as it is.

  Enjoy your summers again.

  Sometimes, we forget that our minds are part of our body and that the foods we eat affect our moods and level of general happiness. Before I started this year, I’d lived for a year without using oil or any of its derivatives, such as plastic. My diet had consisted totally of organic, locally-grown, vegan food and I hadn’t used any oil-based packaging. At the beginning, I’d felt quite down and emotionally low. My body and mind had got used to the protein, nutrients and minerals that China’s lentils, Bolivia’s nuts and the US’s soya supplied, and it didn’t cope very well when I couldn’t find instant replacements. It’s not that we can’t grow these types of crops in the UK; rather, we’ve subcontracted our food security to countries where labor is much cheaper.

  In the first month of my oil-free year, my sleep was quite disturbed and I felt weak and unhappy. At the time, I had no idea why, but a consultation with a nutritionist revealed that I lacked an essential amino acid, tryptophan. Supplements were out of the question, so I hunted down locally-grown foods high in tryptophan, such as mustard greens, foraged hazelnuts and seaweed, broccoli, kale, sprouted rye grain, and spinach. Within weeks, I wasn’t just back to normal, I was feeling more energetic than ever and sleeping better. This experience stood me in good stead for my moneyless year and I made sure my diet contained a mix of these foods.

  Throughout the winter and early spring, my mental health was really good. But, healthy as it had become, in the middle of the spring it faced its first test.

  11

  UNWELCOME VISITORS AND DISTANT COMRADES

  THE UNWELCOME GUEST

  As anyone who lives outside in the colder months understands, mice and rats are never far away, as they attempt to escape from freezing temperatures and be close to a nice steady supply of food. Modern houses are built to make it difficult for rats and mice to get in; it’s harder to keep them out of low-impact dwellings.

  The question for the outdoor dweller is how to deal with the little roommates you’ll undoubtedly attract. Rats and mice will be your chief visitors, though an infestation of cockroaches can play havoc. These three species – especially cockroaches – could probably survive almost anything, but between rats and mice, mice are the more pleasant. They’re small, they’re terrified of humans, and their capacity for damage is pretty limited. I wasn’t too bothered when one moved into my trailer in mid-February. She had her place in the closet (I never actually ascertained my mouse’s sex but the mess it made reminded me of a few of my ex-girlfriends, so I joked that it was female), she kept pretty much to herself, and she didn’t give me grief for staying up too late at night.

  However, at the beginning of spring, she decided that she wanted to build herself a nest. And she chose to do her building at three o’clock in the morning. She’d nibble the insulation out of the wall, drag plastic bags and newspapers down from the top of the closet and generally cause a fair amount of disturbance. In my turn, I’d spend half the next day boarding up the hole she had made, which from her perspective was equally inconsiderate. Without fail, the result was a night of rodent rage; the pocket-sized monster would spend the best part of four hours undoing my handiwork by digging another hole just above it. If we’d continued these tit-for-tat revenge attacks indefinitely, the whole wall would have become a series of little boards. So, after my second attempt to shore up her private entry to my house, I conceded defeat and effectively cut her a set of keys.

  If you live with people who party hard at that time of the night, you can get up, join them and have some fun. Not the case here, unfortunately. After a few weeks in which I got very little sleep, the creature started to drive me crazy. I was happy to co-exist peacefully, but this wasn’t peaceful. The final straw came when she chewed into the bag of rye grain I’d spent a day working for. The sack was too big for the press in the trailer and I hadn’t then found a large enough metal container to protect it. Every day, my mouse would make a new hole, and once inside she left her droppings everywhere.

  For most people, the solution would have been simple. Get some traps and some poison, lay them down, and let time sort the problem. But even if I could have bought either, my vegan beliefs meant I didn’t want to. I didn’t want the mouse eating my hard-earned rations, but neither did I think executing her for theft was a fair punishment for her ‘crime’. Those who campaign for greater animal rights say almost everyone acts ‘speciesist’ sometimes, in the same way some people are sexist or racist. If a store owner finds someone stealing a bottle of wine, and the thief doesn’t manage to bolt through the door, the store owner can either phone the police or tell the thief to get the hell out and never return. If it’s a one-off, the store owner might leave it at that; if the problem persists, they might invest in CCTV to dissuade other potential thieves. However, if a non-human animal, such as a mouse, steals a few grains of rye, we impose the death penalt
y, which I personally feel is a bit harsh. They’re just trying to survive in a land in which, because humans have manipulated and shaped it, little wild food remains. You could argue that we’ve stolen their food and they’re merely taking it back.

  How could I dissuade the mouse from soiling my food? I hid every bit I could and made sure I left no cooked food lying around after dinner. This saved the food but it didn’t stop her nightly nest-making waking me up. I tried every possible way to encourage the little thing to move out. A friend suggested I rammed cloth into the holes to plug them up and sprayed the material with peppermint water; mice apparently hate its smell. But nothing worked. I briefly questioned my vegan belief system. And if I hadn’t had such a short haircut I’d have torn half of it out by April. After two months, lack of sleep was starting to take its toll. Between living the slow life, writing and talking about it, volunteering, cycling, organizing Freeskilling sessions and administering the Freeconomy Community website and its global network of local groups, life was really busy. Waking up at three every morning didn’t help.

  Just as I felt I couldn’t take it any longer, the late spring sunshine came out in full force and the higher temperatures persuaded my unwanted guest to move outdoors. In the end, the answer was simply patience. I no longer had to wash the surfaces the mouse walked and peed on every day. Peace and tranquility returned.

  LOW-IMPACT SHELTER

  I got my shelter through Freecycle, but I am very aware that this is not a possibility for everyone. It is difficult to talk about shelter as ‘free’, surrounded as it is by issues of planning permission, land ownership and tax.

  However, there are some types of housing which can theoretically be (and often are) free. Even if you cannot find a way to make or locate any of them completely without money, they will cost just a fraction of the price of a ‘normal house’, enable you to live off-grid for the long term and have very little impact on the environment into the bargain.

  The problem with most housing, for me, is that you have to take out a mortgage that you’ll spend the best part of your working life paying back. This ties people into the wage economy and, in many cases, into jobs they don’t even like.

  LOW-IMPACT DWELLINGS

  Earthships: I dream daily of living in one of these. The brainchild of Michael Reynolds, an architectural genius, earthships are a type of passive solar home made from recycled and natural local materials. (Passive solar homes are houses designed to use the sun’s energy to stay warm in winter and cool in summer without the use of fans or pumps.) Made from old car tires rammed with earth, beer cans, large glass panes, photovoltaic panels and wind turbines, earthships are self-sufficient in food, water and energy. Fantastic design – glass bottles are used to create stunning lighting effects – makes them visually beautiful, to boot.

  Underground houses: Subterranean homes maximize the space in small areas, the excavated materials can be used in the building and they are wind-, fire-and earthquake-resistant. One of the greatest benefits of underground homes is their energy efficiency, as the mass of soil or rock (the ‘geothermal mass’) surrounding the house stores heat and insulates the house, keeping warm in winter and cool in the summer.

  Benders: Wooden frames draped with canvas or another waterproof material. Not exceptionally difficult to design; they can easily be constructed for free from local wood and recycled materials.

  Roundhouses: Circular houses, with a frame of wooden posts covered by wattle-and-daub or cordwood panels finished with cob. (These are both ancient building techniques, in which a lattice of woven material is daubed with a sticky mixture, often of clay, soil, dung and straw.) Their conical roofs are usually either thatched or have a reciprocal frame green roof (a simple, self-supporting structure that does away with the need for a central roof support; green wood is used freshly-cut as the water content keeps it flexible and easy to build with).

  Straw bale homes: Houses built using straw bales to form the walls of the building. In the UK, the bales can be of wheat, rye or oat straw. They are highly-insulative and can theoretically be made for free and from locally-grown materials.

  Yurts: A circular, wooden lattice frame covered in canvas. The roof is made from poles and has a transparent crown to let the sun’s heat in. They can be insulated using rugs and old comforters. They are very portable and can be made for free from local and recycled materials.

  Teepees: Large conical tents, made from ten to twenty poles, a canvas and suitable insulating material. They differ from normal tents in one crucial way: they have an opening at the top, which allows the dweller to cook and warm the teepee with an open fire. Like yurts, they are portable, easily made and ecologically sound.

  The humble trailer: Terrible, terrible things. Buying a new one can never support truly sustainable living, as they are made in highly-industrialized factories. However, if you can get a second-hand one for free, then it’s a great resource, just like birds nesting in old, run-down buildings. Paint it green to blend it into the natural landscape.

  Planning permission is always an issue, no matter which structure you want to go with. Seek advice from your local government. Or, don’t bother, just do it and deal with the consequences when they arise!

  MY DISTANT MONEYLESS COMRADES

  The longer days and increased sunshine of spring gave me more solar energy to play with. Over the winter, I’d known I was receiving lots of emails about my experiment, but I couldn’t store enough power in my battery to read or respond to most of them. This compounded the slight feelings of isolation I had around the time I broke up with Claire.

  As well as charging my battery, I think the sunshine re-energized me. For the first time in my life I was living almost entirely outdoors. By April, I’d developed a tan I normally wouldn’t have built up until at least the middle of June. With my body and battery brimming with more energy than ever, I decided to dispel my feelings of loneliness and try to locate fellow moneyless humans out there in the world. As I was pretty sure no one else was doing it locally, I turned to the internet.

  Most people who talked to me about my life thought I was the only person in the world living completely without money. I was (as far as I knew) the only person doing it in the UK, but by no means the only person living this way in contemporary society. Compared to two others that I became aware of, I was a rookie. Heidemarie Schwermer, the sixty-seven-year-old German author of Das Sterntalerexperiment – Mein Leben ohne Geld (‘The Sterntaler Experiment – My life without money’), has being living almost completely without money for thirteen years. (She keeps back a few Euros from her pension each month for train fares; the rest she gives away.) In a movie about her experiences, Living without Money, she explains how she worked for many years as a teacher and psychotherapist in Dortmund. Like most people, she spent most of her time earning money to buy the things she needed – and also things she didn’t really need. As a psychotherapist, she met many people who were depressed and frustrated, over-worked and with very little spare time. Among the unemployed and poor she often found those who thought themselves worthless. I had heard something of Heidemarie before I started my year, through Markus, a friend of mine who spoke German. At the time, her writing was all in her native language, so I wasn’t able to explore her thinking and experiences unless Markus translated. However, as the media has become more intrigued by the concept of a moneyless society, she has tried harder to communicate with the English-speaking world.

  Heidemarie started an exchange circle, a Tauschring, through which people with little or no money could trade objects and favors (Gib und Nimm; ‘Give and take’). Through the exchange circle, people came in contact with each other in a new way. They felt useful and worthwhile and appreciated the social aspect of their contact. After a while, Heidemarie decided on an experiment. She gave up her apartment, donated her possessions to friends and started a new life based on exchanging favors without using money. At the start, she stayed with friends and acquaintances, took care of their
houses when they were away on vacation or traveling, and in return received food and a place to live. Over the years, she has inspired exchange circles across Germany. The only people she hasn’t convinced are the managers of the national train service, which is why she keeps some money for fares. I wondered why she didn’t hitchhike, but I suppose that’s much easier for a thirty-year-old guy than for an elderly woman. Heidemarie’s goal was simply to create a ‘greater awareness of the relationship to money and consumption’. And while she wasn’t living completely without money, her exploits were enough to inspire many to use it less and less in their everyday lives.

  Another person who has shot into the limelight, as a result of a similar surge of interest in moneyless living, is Daniel Suelo, a forty-eight-year-old American guy from Moab, Utah, who has been living totally without money since 2000. That put my minuscule year into proper perspective. I hadn’t heard of Daniel before I started, but my research in April made me aware of his blog, which seemed hugely over-looked, given how long he had been living like that. In the middle of my year, when media interest was, thankfully, taking a rest, the well-known American magazine Details ran a story on this ‘caveman’, from which MSN put the story on their homepage. Interest in Daniel went from almost zero (just like his bank balance) to (unlike his bank balance) millions of people overnight. His blog, in a similar manner to mine, became a forum for intense debate. Cynics, without taking a moment to understand his motives, felt it their duty to tell him what a low-life he was. Who would have thought that living in a cave, and having a zero carbon footprint in a world whose climate is changing rapidly, would be such a social crime?