Freeconomy Blog
Wed
24 Sep
Shaking foundations & Guide to Freeconomic Living Part II
| 9 comments |
What a week it has been in terms of the global economy. It started badly (or brilliantly, depending on your perspective) with the fall of one of the world’s largest investment banks, got increasingly worse as the inevitable ripple effects caused panic throughout the markets, and subsequently improved with the news that our governments will use public money to bail the banks out, again. Cue front page photographs of lots of happy shoppers, patriotically out there consuming for their country.
Last week was never going to turn out to be catastrophic. Western governments are still strong enough to be able to bail out companies like HBOS and AIG whenever they need to. Last week was merely a mini trial run of what is coming up in the future. And hopefully a wake up call for the masses.
What continually amazes me is that the public – and even most economists – can’t see that this capitalist system we live in is fatally flawed. But the problem has actually little to do with the factors that manifested themselves in last weeks revelations. The real problem is that ecology isn’t a part of the curriculum when you study economics – I studied it for six years and not once did I hear the words ‘delicate ecosystem’ muttered.
Capitalism depends on unlimited growth – four per cent every year, on top of all the four per cents of previous years. If it falls for a couple of periods in succession, we call it a recession and if it gets very grim we call it a depression, just to really cheer everyone up! So the system is dependent on growing towards infinity. The critical point here is that the earth’s resources are not infinite! In fact if the earth’s resources were a credit card, we’d be maxed out on our last card. It is fundamentally flawed and by its nature it cannot survive in the long term.
I’ve no idea when exactly it will crumble – the corporations, especially in the banking and oil industry, will never reveal what mess they are in until the very last minute. So it’s difficult to tell when something very big will happen. But I predict it will be within the next three to ten years, with a bit of a depression and a short recovery coming before it.
Credit has simultaneously been the main driving force behind the rapid growth of the global economy over the last century, and the environmental destruction we see around us. We are all living way beyond our means, and in effect living off future generations. Ask yourself this – if it wasn’t for your credit card, a loan or your overdraft, could you afford your car, that rather large house that you still see as being too small, all your gadgetry or even your annual foreign escape? I doubt it – but because credit lets us pretend we are rich, we can have it all, everything we’ve ever dreamed of! Until, that is, we realise that the whole thing is as illusory as a dream!
Pretend that the Earth was a business. No good business liquidises its assets in order to increase profits for the year. It knows that it would mean the death of the business the following year. For example, a retail outlet won’t sell its shelving in order to put an extra grand on the bottom line. You need the shelves to sell products the next year. Therefore that would be suicidal. Yet that is exactly what we are doing with the Earth. We are consuming our own assets – the rainforests, our oil reserves, even the fertility of our soil. Yeah OK, it is making for short term profits, but you can only sell them once. Then your business is dead.
Anyway that is all I will say about the problem, it’s not something I think is too healthy to dwell on. What I like – and what I think humans are really good at coming up with – is solutions! Yes we are faced with huge challenges in the future, but if we all face those challenges now, and together, not only can we survive it, we may even be happier for it! We humans have an immense capacity to destroy, but as Mike Reynolds, the inspirational Earthship builder states, we’ve the same potential as trees to actually improve the health of the planet, if only we woke up and realised it.
One of the critical factors for me (here he goes again I hear you say!) is that we need to wean ourselves off money as soon as possible. I say this not because I think we are not going to have it in the future (though we will have to survive on much less in real terms) – a system of barter or exchange can always exist in some form – but because it stops us truly connecting with our local community in a real way, and it enables us to remain unskilled, or at best skilled in only one or two impractical things.
In the last blog I introduced the fact that I am about to start a newly titled ‘Buy Nothing Year’, where I give and receive freely for twelve months. Preparations have been going pretty well and I have decided to start it on the 29th November, a day that
Freegans worldwide know better as Buy Nothing Day.
As I also said in Part I, I’ve had to break down every single aspect of my life and find ways of fulfilling my needs without using money. So far I’ve touched on housing and food, and even more importantly, reading!
As the experiment will be completely off-grid, cooking and heating arose as an issue. So I decided to get myself a wood-burner made by a local freegan from an old gas bottle and some bicycle parts. Not only will this heat my caravan, it will also allow me to cook on top of it, killing two carbon birds with the one stone. The wood-burner is also placed facing my bed so I can watch the embers glow as I read
book on those cold winter evenings. This is not about sacrifice. It’s about a appreciating the beautiful simplicity of life. During the summer, or at any time when it is too warm for the wood-burner, I will cook outside on my rocket stove, a very efficient device you can make from old olive tins.
For lighting I will use a mixture of things. Making candles is pretty simple, all you need is some beeswax. In the medium term I want to keep my own bees, a very important activity in its own right. In the short term I want to build a mutually beneficial relationship with a local beekeeper, though that is still just a thought and something I need to work out.
To compliment this, I have hooked up a solar panel to power a light. The same solar panel latched onto a 12V leisure battery will also, incidentally, power this laptop I write on now. And just on the off chance the sun doesn’t shine very often in the English winter, I have a little wind-up torch as back-up. I’ve also obtained a solar charger for my mobile, something I desperately want to get rid of but something I’ve convinced myself is necessary to enable the transition. It will of course just be for incoming calls, though in effect I am passing the buck onto the caller, so it is a real compromise for me – I’ll be sticking to the letter of the law, but not totally to the spirit of it.
So how will I get around? To get in and out of the city I will obviously be walking and cycling. I recently got my hands on a bike trailer which I will be using to scavenge things like waste and dead wood for the wood-burner, and to transport sacks of grain from the city. On top of that I got a set of water proof panniers for transporting smaller quantities of stuff like food, clothing, a tent and sleeping bag, enabling me to have free, but quite local holidays. My dream is to cycle home to the north west of Ireland for Christmas. Only the sea stands in my way!
However the nature of my life right now means I’ve also often got to go further afield. If it can be done on bike, I’ll do it. If not, I will use a great scheme called
Liftshare, set up by a top bloke called Ali Clabburn. Failing that, you can always stick out your thumb, something which was the norm in my youth but which is now almost non-existent. I once hitched around New Zealand with a giant hand, and the extremely hitcher-friendly drivers there said they hadn’t seen one since a tourist was killed three years prior. Fear is a powerful and often irrational thing. Thousands get killed driving every year, doesn’t seem to put people off driving though.
Anyway that’s enough for this week! Again, if anyone has any hints or tips, opinions or criticisms, please leave a comment by clicking on the link below. If you would like me to respond please ask as otherwise I will assume you are just airing your opinion. If you want a private response, please leave your email address.
Lots of unconditional love.
Comment on this Post:
Nadia Hillman comments ...
I've left a 10 p piece in my bike basket for days and parked up all over town. Noone has taken it and I wonder-does 10 p have much worth beyond a two pence piece's worth in our younger days? I guess not.
You'd need three of them I think to make a local phone call in a phone box....!
Just want to express my respect for what you are doing and offer you a bucket load of love and laughter.
PS Dont suppose you know anyone who might have time to be on GROFUN's committee?
fool comments ...
i left a pound coin on top of the button box at a pelican crossing in the centre of bristol once. it was still there one week later, so i added another pound coin, and it still took 2 more days until someone took them ;0)
markvr comments ...
(II just posted this once but it seemed to get lost so let's see if it gets double posted....)
Dude you write some good stuff but just get real for a bit! You walk to India ended in Calais, you then abandoned you're walk around the UK before getting much beyond London, and now you proposing to live without money for a year....Don't be so melodramatic and grandiose, it takes away from some of the good things you say and failing so soon just makes the media throw the baby out with the bath water as everyone falls about laughing.
I mean seriously. This is a website. It is produced using a computer, which is a product of billions pounds of research, development and production. It is on the internet, which is a global network that costs billions to maintain. And you seriously propose that these things would be possible to produce if money didn't exist? Also money and credit are vital (google Grameen and microcredit) to many things I don't know where to begin to start.
Get real!
It's all well and good for one person to scavenge food, hitch hike etc, but if EVERYONE did that then it wouldn't work. The problem with all this hippy shit is it works for one or two people but doesn't scale up to masses.
The world needs solutions that work in their billions. It's the worst form of self-indulgence to proclaim something like this that only works because OTHER PEOPLE provide a lot of what you need.
I love hitchiking, it's great fun and you meet great people but I'm not proposing it as a transport system for the majority because it WOULDN'T WORK for obvious reasons.
What happens if you get ill? Would you goto hospital? Bearing in mind that hospitals and modern medicine are constructs of a modern money based economy to provides the billions needed to research and develop medicines?
I like the idea of freeconomy and this website, and for sure the world is going to hell in a handbasket and needs dramatic solutions, but all this unrealistic, naive hippy stuff really just makes most people laugh and ignore what *is* important which is that the world needs solutions for EVERYONE.
To really live without money walk naked into the forest and see how long you last...
sebastien comments ...
Sorry if it s a double, the first one get lost!
Hi,
Your wish to live without money and avoiding almost everything from the society remind me the story of Christopher McCandless. His life is described in the movie “into the wild". Basically, he tried to do what you are trying and died of starvation and cold in a forest. His story shows us that, whatever happens, even if you successed or fail, this would not have any consequences on all the other human beings. People will still act as they do.
The society as it is now is not perfect but should not be avoided, it should be changed. I am convinced that very little changes would allow to create a much better condition for all. For instance, we often critize the international enterprises which make a product in China to sell it in Europe. These enterprises are doing something very great!!! They create link between people who were before apart. This link is now used to make some profite and to serve the interest of the enterprises, but this is simply a transitory state. It is a wrong used of something which is good. These links between peoples will allow to share more and to transfer any kind of knowledge, food, medical assistances to the one who need them. Then this will establish a better world. In conclusion, living in a forest does not seem very usefull, and I would say to live apart from others and the world is a mistake.
What is it the most needed? It is to make people understand deeply in themselves, that they are not alone on the earth. And, to teach them that it is not appropriate to act and behave in an egoist way without considering others, the environment... Let‘s imagine what would happen if more people would be more respectfull toward everyone. Very probably, they will regroup and get collectively involve in resolving the major problem that we are facing now. The directors of the actual enterprises would be sued for crime against humanity. Necessarily, good will people would get engage in politic and take the control of the states. The gouvernement would stop to spend money in military dispense and provide more education and assistance to those who need it. We should not forget that hate and negative grow from poverty and uneducation.
So, we should spend our energy to try to establish a perfect life not on the individual level but on the collectif level. What will happen when you will have spent on year without money? It will be a success for you but poor people will still be starved!!! And no more good relationship would have been established on the earth. The real good idea of the website is to promote help and assistance between each of us. In your actual society, this is a very original idea which is needed to be taught and developed. But living without money is not a good idea. I simply remember the story of a guy, published on this website, saying that with his extra money he paid the hospital of one of his employee.
Soulwoman comments ...
Hi Saoirse,
I'd like to know how you get water- I guess I've missed the blogs in which you explained that.
I'm really interested in how you get on . Sounds like a very romantic if tough way of living.
Nadia :)
Jo comments ...
Hi Mark,
You will be pleased to know I successfully hitchhiked with a bicycle the other day. Only waited a couple of minutes and a huge white transit van pulled up! :)
Jo x
HuberLula comments ...
People deserve good life time and loan or car loan would make it better. Just because people's freedom relies on money.
BenderConstance comments ...
All people deserve very good life and credit loans or just bank loan would make it much better. Because people's freedom depends on money state.
MonicaBarrett18 comments ...
Have no a lot of cash to buy a building? Worry no more, because this is achievable to receive the loan to work out all the problems. Therefore get a commercial loan to buy everything you require.
