The Moneyless Man (23 page)

It was an emotional day. Seeing everyone giving whatever they could to the day, with no thought of anything in return, was immensely inspiring. To me, it was the most beautiful example of how things could be if we chose to live life thinking ‘how much can I give?’ rather than ‘how much can I get?’ Some of the volunteers relentlessly dished up food for twelve hours with barely a break. How many paid staff would do that? But they had genuine smiles on their faces.

And as much as it was really hard work, with little but the joy of doing it in return, we were all sorry when it was over. I met so many amazing people and made so many new friends. The whole experience created a fantastic bond.

For the last few weeks, my head had been over-ruling my heart, telling me to go back to living with money. This was partly because of complications in my long-term vision for the Freeconomy project and partly because I felt I needed a break. Living without money wasn’t as difficult as I’d first imagined, but doing it in a society driven only by the desire for more felt like I was swimming against a strong tide. But I found the Feastival so inspiring that I decided to delay making a definite decision. My emotions were running high and I felt I needed to let things settle. Whatever way I went, it would be a major life decision.

Life had been insanely busy for two months. I hadn’t had a proper chance to think whether I wanted to continue living without money once my year had officially ended. In some respects it was a simple decision, yet, right up until the last day, I was torn. My heart – and many parts of my head – said a huge ‘yes’. I had never felt happier, healthier or fitter in my life; why go back to a less enjoyable way?

However, life is rarely that black and white. I had finalized a book deal a few weeks earlier, which meant that money was waiting for me. The book would be sold for money no matter what I decided to do. And it would generate royalties that I could use however I wanted. I had to choose what I would do with the proceeds:

1. Let the publisher keep the money. This wouldn’t have appealed to my agent, Sallyanne! She had been fantastic to me all year, allowing me to refuse fees that both she and I would
normally have received. And she’d put in a huge amount of work editing the book.

2. Let my agent keep all the proceeds. I’m sure Sallyanne would have been very happy!

3. Give the proceeds to a project I wanted to support.

4. Set up a trust fund to help buy a piece of land for the first ‘real’ Freeconomy Community. If I chose this option, I’d decided I wouldn’t own the land and the community would be run by its members through consensus.

I had no idea what to do, so I posted a blog on the Freeconomy Community website to ask for advice. The response was one of the biggest ever; more than five hundred people either commented or emailed me.

The result was overwhelming. About 95% urged me to take Option 4. (Maybe they wanted somewhere to come and stay every now and then for free!) I made the big decision: go with the majority opinion of Freeconomy members and remain moneyless for as long as I could in the mean time.

I came in for some mild, though very well-intentioned, criticism from the 5% who wanted me to choose Option 3. This criticism was hard to take, coming from people I respected and, more importantly, almost entirely agreed with. At heart, they, like me, were idealists. However, over the years, I’ve learned to let the idealist in me have regular conversations with the realist. Two years ago, without doubt, I would have chosen Option 3. Was I getting wiser or falling off my path?

The critics said the real Freeconomy Community would no longer be moneyless if I bought the land. It could offer no solution to society, they said, and would be a farce. I couldn’t fully
disagree with them. But life, I guess, is full of such dilemmas; all we can do is chose the best option, give it a good shot and question its rationale every day. These critics didn’t know that I’d paid for the Freeconomy Community website, the infrastructure they were using for their comments, from the proceeds of selling my houseboat. Does the fact that I paid for the website negate the fact that it enables thousands of people to move towards a more moneyless life, and the re-building of resilient communities? Or is the work it is doing right now all that is important? I felt the two situations had important parallels to be examined. And there was something else I felt was relevant. Slaves often had to buy their freedom so they and their children could be free. Is it acceptable to make a one-off payment to buy one’s long-term freedom? Or does paying the slave-master reinforce the system you want to change? I still don’t fully know.

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?

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 far 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.