by Boyle, Mark
FREE PERIODS
When you start to live without money, the first problems you need to solve are those areas where you use disposable products. Obviously, you can’t buy them. And disposables consume both time and resources.
Being a man, the question of moneyless menstruation is a tricky one. Women’s health is certainly not my forté. For coping with periods, most women choose disposable sanitary towels. According to the waste consultants, Franklin Associates, in 1998 6.5 billion tampons and 13.5 billion sanitary pads, plus their packaging, ended up in landfills or sewer systems. For coping with periods without money, there is an obvious solution that even I know about: a mooncup. This is a rubber cup, which the user inserts in her vagina to collect the menstrual flow. It’s held in place over the cervix by suction. Looked after, a mooncup can last a lifetime, enabling you to use less money and really help the environment into the bargain.
Again, the option that saves money is also the option that could well keep our natural environment habitable for humans.
THE FREECONOMY COMMUNITY LONG-TERM VISION
I chose Option 4. I decided to set up a trust fund to which all the proceeds from this book will go. The money will go towards buying the first piece of land where this project can put down roots. At the time of writing, the fine details have yet to be thrashed out: the year itself consumed all my time and the few months since it ended have been entirely focused on writing this book. But I have the vision in my head.
The community will be based on the same principles as the online Freeconomy Community and my year without money. We’ll put the infrastructure in place using as little money as possible and as much local and waste material, human passions, and determination as we can. There will be a transitional period after which money, whether bills, coins, checks or e-money, will not be used. It will be a community with food, friendship, fun, fire, foraging, music, education, resource-sharing, dance, art, care, skill-sharing, experience, respect and scavenging at its core.
In Permaculture terms, we aim to be a ‘closed loop system’, in which we meet our needs from the local environment. However, in terms of inclusivity and outreach, as far as the land is able to support us, we intend to be the most open community we possibly can. Every member of the online community will be welcome to come and get involved. And when they leave, they will be welcome to take away any ideas they’ve found to be useful and incorporate them into their life. But it won’t stop there. The community will be open to everyone who needs it and to those who want to spend a little time exploring moneyless living as an option for their future.
We will mix low-impact living with high-impact education and experience. I believe in education through doing, so much of the learning will come through living everyday life. We will go out on the land with people who know what they are doing and, in the process of helping each other live, everyone will learn what they want and need to learn. I intend the community to become a center of excellence in sustainability, with teaching by the world’s top practitioners. The teachers will give their time and share their skills for free, we will provide the land for free, and the students will learn for free. Hopefully, they will then pass their learning on to others for free.
This is exactly how Freeskilling works. Freeskilling is now at the stage where we don’t have to look for great teachers; they offer to share their skills and we accept gratefully. Sustainability courses often cost too much for volunteers and people on low wages. This will certainly not be the case in the community. I want to see people from all walks of life enrolling, not just those far down the path of more ecological living. Education really can be free. All it needs is the determination of those who can help educate others.
Skill-sharing will be part of life for the people who live permanently in the community. The core group of diversely skilled people living there will share their skills over time. One day, the carpenter will help the forager; the next, the forager will help the grower. One evening you’ll be out collecting waste; the next, you’ll be cooking dinner for those who are working hard on other tasks. Everyone will be able to find out what they really love doing, with the flexibility to do something different if they want to. If someone crucial to the success of the project needs to leave, any number of people will be able to help fill the void until the next suitable person comes along.
It won’t be easy to find the perfect piece of land but I hope it will be within a fifty-mile radius of Bristol. To be self-sustaining, you need resources. Most important is a source of water, ideally a river, not only to provide drinking water, but also for easy washing, energy creation through micro-hydroelectric power generation and, not least, summer swims. Some woodland will be crucial: some established fruit trees would bring us even closer to the perfect plot. But I’m not holding out for perfect; the likelihood is that if it satisfies some of the criteria, it will be viable.
The community will be a kind of sustainability ‘theme park’. It will include every type of low-impact dwelling for which we can get permission: earthships (I’d love the farmhouse to be an earthship), other types of passive solar home, rammed-earth structures, and more. It will have a reed-bed waste system, compost toilets to make humanure, forest gardens, greenhouses, beehives, wind turbines, cob ovens, and rocket stoves. The key will be in the design. If we get that right, we’ll almost completely eliminate waste production. The land will work with us, and we with the land, to make the community as energy efficient as possible.
It’s not clear what the community’s legal structure will be. I do know that, at the beginning, until it can stand on its own two feet, there will be a sort of steering committee. This will guide the community through its infancy and hold it true to its original intentions and integrity. Just like a parent looks after their new-born child, the committee won’t own the child but they will help it through its formative years. There will be a set of core guidelines – like being moneyless and organic – from which the community may not stray, but other than that, its structure will be created by the people who live there.
There are many obstacles to this vision: tax, planning permission, social pressures, local opinions, and the small issue of acquiring a suitable piece of land. And that’s just a few of the more obvious ones. All these issues will have to be tackled sometime. And if not by us, then by whom? And if not now, then when? Should we leave it as a battle for the next generation to pick up? After all, it’ll affect them more than us. Or should we, as parents, try to ensure that our children inherit a nice habitable planet when our time is up, in the same way we would like our kids to inherit a nice house that we’ve worked hard, all our lives, to pay for?
BETWEEN THE DREAM AND THE REALITY
My year of living without money officially ended at midnight on Sunday, November 29, 2009. I’d done it. I had an obvious get-out clause, if I wanted one; I’d completed what I’d set out to achieve. But I didn’t want to get out; I really wanted to keep going.
Making the decision not to go back felt like I’d lifted a heavy weight from my shoulders. And the support I received from my friends and family was huge. They didn’t see it as strange; I felt they had accepted my choice not because they loved me, or despite loving me, but because they could see how the experiment had worked and how happy it had made me.
Almost immediately after I’d made my decision, I knew it was the right one. A couple of days after the Feastival, I walked through Bristol’s main shopping mall and I took some time out to observe what was going on. I felt as though people had lost their minds. In the US in 2008, a supermarket employee was killed when a stampede of bargain-hungry consumers could no longer be held back from the start of the sale, trampling the guy to death in their rush to the aisles. A similar situation happened here in the UK in 2005, at the opening of a giant furniture store. Several people were crushed (not fatally) by others looking for the opening event’s bargains. In Saudi Arabia in 2004, three people were killed and sixteen injured in the name of a bargain ‘hunt’. How fa
r have we gone when we trample someone to death to save a few bucks?
It was the height of the Christmas shopping season and the shopping mall was mayhem. Through the bustling shopping crowds came a group of people holding a sign: ‘Free Hugs’. For fifteen minutes, they did exactly that: they gave a free hug to anyone who wanted one. A line formed, such was the popularity of their ‘product’. But free hugs don’t make money; they were quickly escorted out by security guards. The shopping mall looks like the public street but the land is privately owned; they weren’t allowed to give away even hugs for free on corporate land. It seemed to me that in today’s consumerist culture, you’re allowed (indeed, actively encouraged) to consume far more of the Earth’s resources then anyone could actually ‘need’ – but don’t try and hug somebody on the way.
Despite such reminders that I live in a world driven by an addiction to accumulating more and more cash, my year without money had given me a huge amount of hope. Every day, I’d get countless emails and blog comments from people who said that, while they couldn’t see themselves going completely moneyless, they really wanted to make big changes in their lives. Some wanted to ‘downsize’ and cut their consumption, so that they could work less and live more. Many wanted to reduce their carbon footprint drastically. Others just wanted to start recycling their waste. Even more encouragingly, hundreds wanted to come and help create the first moneyless community in contemporary society.
We’re a long, long way from living sustainably, let alone living without money. But more and more people are aware of the future challenges facing humanity. Every year, more and more column inches in newspapers and magazines are devoted to environmental issues, and climate change stays at the top of the news. People really are making changes: some small, some huge, but in a more ecological direction. I know it will take time. But it’s vital to plant as many seeds as we can now, if we want our children to benefit from the fruit. Just because you won’t get to sit under the shade of the oak tree doesn’t mean you shouldn’t plant the acorn.
I got off the bench and walked north, out of the shopping mall, and looked back and smiled. Whatever happens – whether we embrace change or consume ourselves into oblivion – it is important to remember that, in the words of the legendary comedian Bill Hicks, ‘it’s just a ride’. Enjoy this gift for what it is, not for what you want it to be.
15
LESSONS FROM A MONEYLESS YEAR
No matter what way of life you choose, lessons appear every day. The problem is, we’re not usually very receptive to them. Worse still, we often see the lessons as failures, hassles, or even disasters, rather than as a chance to learn something new. In The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck said: ‘Life is difficult ... but once we truly understand and accept this ... then life is no longer difficult’. In some respects my year was difficult and in others it was the happiest time of my life. In the summer of my experiment, I’d accepted that life isn’t always meant to be ‘perfect’ and that I had no god-given right to everything this society tells me I could have. I surrendered to the fact that life was just the way it’s meant to be at all times: perfectly imperfect. After that, accepting the little hassles, the little inconveniences that living without money inevitably throws your way, became fun.
My experiment was a complete change in how I lived. I learned more things in that year than in any twelve-month period I’d ever lived through. Some so subconsciously that I didn’t even know that I learned them.
DON’T UNDERESTIMATE OTHERS
One of the hardest things about moneyless living was the thought of what other people might think. I wasn’t so bothered about society in general, but I was worried that my parents would think I was throwing away everything I’d worked hard for. This concern turned out to be completely unfounded: the aspect of the year that I have felt happiest about was my parents’ reaction. I’m not sure what they thought about it at the beginning; we didn’t talk about it much. I’m lucky: even if they had disagreed with my stance – and they may well have – they’d have given me whatever support they could. It may have been hard for them to take at first. They’d watched me work thirty hours a week for four years to pay my way through my degree, and they’d helped me out a lot along the way. Now they watched me renounce it all.
It’s been interesting for me to watch them go on their journey since I started along my path. At the beginning, I’d ranted on, telling them how everything they were doing was wrong, how my opinion was right, and how they needed to change. Understandably, this erected walls, defenses through which none of us could properly communicate. But it was I who needed to change. What made my opinion more correct than theirs – or anyone else’s for that matter? I stopped my pestering. It seems children’s pester-power only works if they are trying to get their parents to buy more, not less.
About six months after my decision to leave them in peace, I noticed small changes. One time, my mom phoned to tell me she and dad had decided to become vegetarian. Another, she rang to say that she was going to stop buying so much stuff. Just by me providing information, with no judgment or claim to rightness, my folks started to question things themselves. Not because I was telling them to, but because they wanted to. Eventually, they got right behind my moneyless plans and life. There’s no sign they’re going to join me on the path, but they are constantly questioning how they live their lives and are making little changes almost weekly. They’ve offered to help in any way they can with the setting up of the community. I don’t expect them to live like me, just as they don’t expect me to live like them. They’ve given me lessons about what it takes for us to co-exist on this planet.
I would never recommend not standing up for what you believe because of what other people might think. But I am beginning to realize I have no right to criticize others for flaws we all have, or have had. It is much more constructive to support each other in making even the smallest change that is positive for the whole planet. This way, walls get demolished, and we can have a proper dialogue.
A HALF-WAY HOUSE
I would love to live in a moneyless world. No doubt about it, that is my ideal. But while I will work and move in this world as if that were a real possibility, the realist in me knows it isn’t going to happen, at least not in my lifetime. The overwhelming majority of people have no desire to give up money: they think it is a very useful tool. And many of those who would like to give up money have told me, repeatedly, they don’t believe they could.
The support I received over the year, both from the media and the public, has given me so much hope for the future. I truly believe that we can make the changes that the world’s ecologists believe we need to make. One change I believe we can make, one that is realistic, if not imperative, is to move to local currencies. A local currency operates purely within a town, village or small area. In the UK, examples include the Totnes and Lewes Pounds, but there are examples in other countries. Local currencies aren’t legal tender, more a kind of formalized barter, in which produce or skills are traded for an agreed amount of local currency, which the receiver can then ‘spend’. Local currencies aim to keep ‘money’ circulating in a community, build relationships between producers and consumers, get people thinking about where and how they spend the currency, and encourage local businesses and trading. While users of local currencies must still partake, to varying degrees, in the global economy, local currencies are a huge step towards re-localization of economies.
Local currency is based on exchange and therefore doesn’t have some of the deeper benefits that I believe pay-it-forward economics could have, but to me, it’s a good half-way house. Local currencies are a fantastic method of reducing the degrees of separation between the consumer and the consumed; users of local currencies have a much fuller appreciation of the processes of production and whether the producers’ needs are being met. If some communities could make a complete transition from the current monetary system, this would be a sustainable model of living that other communities coul
d copy.
COMMUNAL-SUFFICIENCY
When people learn that I live without money, most assume that I must be almost completely ‘self-sufficient’. That was my plan, but I quickly learned that independence is one of the biggest myths in modern society. At the very least, we depend on bees, earthworms, and micro-organisms just to survive. Not only did I realize that I couldn’t become completely self-sufficient even if I had wanted to, I also realized that I had no desire to be; some of the greatest happiness in my life comes from the relationships I have with people in my community. What I believe works best – and what I find most desirable – is for small numbers of people to work interdependently, together building ‘communal-sufficiency’.
Robin Dunbar, the British evolutionary biologist, has studied the tribe size of non-human primates, from which he has developed his description of the ‘Dunbar Number’. He estimates that humans can maintain stable social relationships with approximately 150 people. These communities can be streets, suburbs or towns. Around this size, I believe communities can benefit from the economies of scale that come into play as we produce things for larger and larger numbers, without causing the ecologies-of-industrialization that arise when that scale becomes so large that it becomes inherently unsustainable. Because I lived my year in relative isolation, I had to do most things myself. To cook my dinner, I needed to gather and chop the wood, gather and chop the food, feed the rocket stove for thirty minutes, serve up, and wash the dishes. If this had been an interdependent process, I would only have had to do one or two parts, giving me time to relax or do something creative. The beautiful thing is that you don’t need money when you live within a community – you bring what you can; your reputation, in a way, becomes your currency. The more you give, the more you’ll find that you receive. That has been my experience, anyway.