The Moneyless Man (5 page)

The research was complete and the lists were made. It was time to start getting all the listed items together before the end of November.

When you are trying to figure out what you need to survive, the first things you think of are the basic necessities. Top of that list was shelter.

When I first decided to live for a year without money, I had no idea how I could avoid paying rent. I knew I couldn’t live in a normal house, as that would involve spending substantial amounts of money. I would have to acquire some sort of shelter and put it somewhere I could use for free. In the beginning, I was prepared to consider anything – a tent, a yurt, a trailer, a teepee; I didn’t care. Obviously a tent would not be a great place to spend the winter but I was so determined to start that I seriously considered it. In my ‘breaking-it-down list’, I had budgeted £500 ($750) for housing, which is 0.2% of the average house price in my area. This could get me an amazing tent, a ridiculously small trailer or the left-hand side of a yurt. And I wasn’t even sure if I could afford that. So I decided one morning to try my luck and post an advertisement on Freecycle: ‘WANTED: any type of living structure – tent, yurt or trailer’.

I’d included the trailer almost as a joke. You can imagine my surprise when I got a reply from a woman who said she had a trailer that she would be more than happy to give me. My first reaction was ‘too good to be true’ and that it was probably junk and falling apart. It turned out to be nothing of the sort, just a perfectly decent trailer, which, because it was over ten years old, was no longer allowed on camping grounds. The owner couldn’t sell it without doing more work than she was prepared for and storing it was costing her £25 ($37.50) a month. I asked her what she wanted from me to take it off her hands. She handed me the keys with a smile on her face and said it was mine. This was a
major success – not only had I a much bigger, warmer and sturdier home than I was expecting, it also meant I could wipe £500 ($750) off the money I was going to need to set up my year. Likewise, I hadn’t had to buy something new, which was equally important to me.

Now that I had my home, I had to find somewhere I could park it for free. Renting in any city isn’t cheap; a few weeks
earlier I had worked out that the first seven working days of every month went straight to my landlady. I realized that now I wouldn’t have to pay rent, I would be free to volunteer for projects I really believed in and wanted to support with my time. I had an idea – why not work for some volunteer project that had a piece of land where I could pitch my trailer, without it interfering in their operations?

I made a list of possible organizations. One stood out from the rest: Radford Mill Farm, near Bristol. Although it was further away from the city than the others, it was a project I really wanted to help. They needed me to work more days than the others – three days per week; the equivalent of having to work the first twelve days of every month for the roof over my head. As a reporter pointed out, this compared badly to the seven days, on minimum wage, I would have to work to pay the rent for a room in Bristol. However, this was the kind of thinking I was trying to move away from. As part of the deal with the community of people who ran the farm, I agreed to work three nine-hour days, though this was a flexible and informal arrangement. When you are doing something you want to do, you don’t mind doing a bit extra when needed. I would help grow food and manage the land (the hedges in particular), along with everything else it takes to run an organic farm, such as cleaning and composting. Because the farm had 100 acres, there was plenty of room for me to grow my own food.

The only difficulty I had with my new home was that it didn’t have a toilet. To solve this problem, I decided to build a compost toilet. This isn’t much different to a normal toilet, except it doesn’t have a flush and so doesn’t waste lots of water. It also provides useful fertilizer. There are two approaches to building a compost toilet: one is to spend three days making a beautiful structure, on stilts, that will give you plenty of comfort and the ability to easily produce ‘humanure’ (yes, it is what you think it
is!). Humanure is very good fertilizer if made properly and when it is ready to spread on the land, the stilts make access to the composted waste easy. The other option is to spend half an hour making a ‘modesty structure’ from three pallets and another ten minutes digging a three-feet-deep, foot-wide hole in the ground. This way, you get yourself both a mobile toilet and shower unit. Here’s how it works – you crap in the hole, then clean yourself using your preferred method. Once you’ve finished you scoop some of the soil you dug out over the top of what you’ve produced, so that it doesn’t create unpleasant aromas or attract mice and rats. When the hole is full, you dig another one and move the modesty structure. The structure can also cover you as you shower. Not that I cared, but there was a public hiking trail way next to my trailer and I think the last thing some poor dog-walker needs is to see a naked Irishman shivering under a tree on a frosty winter’s morning.

While my compost toilet is a bit of a joke to some folks who come to visit, to me it is the symbol of everything I am trying to do. The compost toilet represents sanity and respect, not just for the environment but also for our fellow human beings. I really believe that until we stop polluting the rivers that give us life, nothing will change. Change will only come when we learn a greater respect for nature. For me, the ‘normal’ toilet represents everything insane and destructive in the world. We take clean water and defecate in it. Human shit is great for the soil but terrible for the water supply. To make it clean again we build large water treatment plants, blast the water with all sorts of chemicals and then put it back into the system. This not only takes lots of energy, it also means that we drink water that once had shit, and now has chemicals, in it. It is absolutely crazy and illustrates perfectly how our current way of living treats the environment with disdain.

During the years that India was peacefully fighting for independence from Britain, Gandhi used the spinning wheel as
the symbol of the movement. He knew that real independence would only come when India had economic independence and that India, as a nation, needed to earn the right to be free. The Indian people’s refusal to buy British cloth and their decision to restart producing their own brought them independence in the end.

Now that I had set up a relationship in which I could have a roof over my head without the need for money, my next concern was how I was going to make my own energy.

Living without money and off-grid meant producing all my own energy. There would be no bottled gas, no disposable batteries and no hook-up to the national grid. If I weren’t off-grid, I would either have to pay a bill or live completely without energy; neither of which was feasible.

I had wanted to go off-grid for a long time, as I believe we should take responsibility for looking after our own energy and waste disposal needs. This gives us a better appreciation of what we consume. On top of that, you couldn’t imagine a more wasteful energy network than the national grid. While it’s great to fill your kettle half way and change your lightbulbs to more energy-efficient ones, these actions seem insignificant when you consider the grid’s larger, systemic, problems. According to Greenpeace, ‘our centralised model of production and transmission wastes an astonishing two-thirds of primary energy inputs, requiring us to burn far more fuel and emit far more carbon dioxide than necessary’. Two-thirds of all the electricity that is produced and fed into the grid is lost before it even gets to your outlets! This is the idiotic system that governments are clinging on to and as they don’t look like they are going to do much about it, it is up to us as individuals to take the lead.

How easy it is to go off-grid depends on how much you have to spend. If you have $15,000 to make it happen, it’s easy. But if your budget is $500, it’s very different. The challenge of proving that you don’t have to be rich to live in a more environmentally-friendly way was a huge motivation for me. People always tell me organic food is only for those who can afford it, but it’s not. If you care about what you put in your body, keeping chemicals, pesticides, synthetic fertilizers and additives out of our food is more important than having a couple of hundred television channels. In 2008, I managed to eat a 100% locally-grown organic food diet on a part-time job’s minimum wage. In the fall of that year, this diet became the trigger for a successful national campaign,
Eat the Change
, in which thousands of people across the UK pledged to do the same for one whole week.

There were a few basic things I would definitely need: a stove, something to heat the trailer that used waste local materials, a light, a wind-up flashlight, a shower, and an energy source for the laptop and cell phone – my ‘transitional tools’ – so that I could communicate and document the year. The most important was obviously the stove; without it, I would be eating raw food for the year. The first idea that sprang to mind was to combine heating and cooking and consequently use half the energy and effort. However, this would have meant that during the hot summer months, cooking my food would have meant cooking myself at the same time. So I came up with another solution.

A few weeks earlier, I had organized a workshop with a great friend of mine, Chris Adams, as part of the Freeskilling evenings that our local Freeconomy Community group puts on each week. On these evenings, one member of the community gives a free demonstration of their particular skill to anywhere between 15 and 150 other members. This workshop just happened to be on how to make a rocket stove: a very fuel-efficient stove made from recycled materials. Chris was just about to leave on an
overland around-the-world trip and he had a lovely rocket stove he wasn’t going to need. Knowing it couldn’t possibly find a home where it would get more use, he kindly offered it to me. I now had shelter and a stove, both stuff other people didn’t want any more, and both for free.