Story of a person living without money

I received this in an email from my friend Rima who's an avid writer.

Dear all,

Recently I read about a person called Mark Boyle. He has published a book named The Moneyless Man- A Year of Freeconomic Living. This person lives in Briton, in a place called Bath. This man grows his own food, so he does not have to spend money shopping, uses a mixture of cuttlefish and fennel seeds for toothpaste, and prepares washing detergent by boiling foraged soap nuts. He powers his laptop by solar power and has a hole in the ground for a toilet. He occasionally rummages through supermarket bins. According to him, you can find anything you want in super market bin and it is symbolic of the world we live in.

Mark was once a student of economics and now he lives a life in a caravan, as he saw Mahatma Gandhi’s film in the fourth year of his studies, which left a deep impact on him. So he began to read as much as possible about this Indian leader and his principles and quotes influenced him greatly, especially the quote, be the change you want to see in the world. After completing his studies, Mark worked for Organic food industry, but he realized that the industry suffered from the same problems of excessive packaging, uses a lot of plastic, massive food  miles and big businesses buying small one. He also realized that money disconnects people from what they are consuming and till the degrees of separation between consumer and consumed is decreased, nothing would change. Boyle has been living TV free too, as he realized that TV wastes a lot of man hours. (Recently when I was in India, I was talking to a young girl about her T-Shirt and I just mentioned that the work on it is beautiful, whoever has done it, must have spent a lot of time, she immediately told me that he was paid for it, without realizing that the person has really put in a great effort.) Boyle is saying in his book that he wants to reduce administrative work and want more people to work in primary industries such as farming. Recently he hosted a party for 700 people and 90% of the things came from supermarket bin. He found 700 jars of chocolate spread, which costs 2000 British pounds, but just because it had expired, they were thrown out. But no one understands that it would have not gone bad till 2020 because of its sugar content. He has found out from official sources that an average American throws 40% of his food in the bin, where as in Britain, it is 35% and he feels that when millions of people don’t get one square meal, wasting so much food is criminal. He says that as recycling was not a good word ten years ago, food wasting should also be seen in the same way, it has to be a cultural change more than the law changing it. He has published this book and whatever money he gets from selling this book, he will buy a land, where he will train people on how to live without money to live sustainably. After that, he will build a project for charity.

I really liked the idea. I don’t know how much we can implement it, but it is always good to see the other side of the coin. Let me finish this mail here.  Hope all of you are fine there.

Regards

Rima

I found more info on this article: http://dontgiveupworld.com/short-essays/the-moneyless-man-how-did-mark-boyle-spend-a-year-without-spending-a-dollar-submtd-by-sandeep-rajbhushan/

In the narrative, Boyle talked about getting so many of his things for free on freecycle. Well, if he can, then so can we!
Here is the Freecycle group in Pune: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Freecycle-Pune/

Here's another nice site mentioned: http://www.justfortheloveofit.org - use this to share skills in your community for free.