Freeconomist's drive to live on no money

Published on Saturday 29 November 2008 18:51

A "FREECONOMIST" began his quest to survive for a year without money yesterday – relying on friends, the sun and a second-hand woolly jumper.

Mark Boyle, 29, an economics graduate, aims to defy the credit crunch for 12 months living in a borrowed caravan powered by nature.

Boyle says he is sick of living in a "fundamentally flawed and ecologically destructive" capitalist system and wants to prove there is another way to exist.

The social experiment is being launched beside a woodland stream in Timsbury, Bristol, to coincide with national Buy Nothing Day.

Free food will be offered in Bristol, with chefs including the BBC's Roadkill chef Fergus "the Forager" Drennan and Dave and Andy Hamilton, the authors of The Self Sufficient-ish Bible on hand.

Freeconomists are a band of individuals who exchange skills with each other without money changing hands.

On his blog Boyle, below, said: "I want to see what life is actually like living without money in Western 'civilisation'. I need to know whether or not the life that I believe to be most harmonious with nature and that has the least amount of blood and oil embodied in it, is a life I would want for my children.

"I am just sick of having to have a bank account, even with an ethical bank, so that they can then simultaneously issue some human with a credit note and Mother Earth with the debit note."

He will use a wood-burning stove to cook and will wash in a solar shower which, although cold in the winter "will be good for self discipline". His toilet will simply be a hole dug outside the van.

For lighting he relies on solar power, along with a wind-up torch, and will get around on his bicycle.

But he adds: "Most essential of all is the woolly jumper."

Earlier this year Boyle tried to get to India relying only on the kindness of strangers, but his mission ended in Calais, when he stepped off the ferry and remembered he could not speak French.