In June 2004, my wife, Summer, and I arrived at the 40 vacant acres of grass and woods we had just purchased, nestled in the hills of southwest Wisconsin. Summer was six months pregnant, and we had our work cut out for us to get a warm shelter built before the cold set in. We came with high hopes and a solid work ethic. We also brought with us feelings of freedom, concern from our families, and anxiety over what we were about to embark upon. Both of us had been preparing for this step since we were teenagers, saving money and acquiring skills. We worked on conventional and organic farms, learning old-fashioned skills, natural building techniques, and various arts and crafts (including blacksmithing and fiber arts). We also held several intern positions, participated in WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms), and lived enough on other people’s land that we knew we wanted to have our own. As an artist, it had always been my dream to arrive on vacant land and gradually build up my homestead, a lifelong creation.

Our wish list for our dream property included privacy, a quiet road, 20 to 60 acres that were half tillable/half wooded, and, most importantly, a clean spring. Finding all these attributes was not easy, and we looked at more than 40 properties over five months. When we found a parcel that met most of our wishes, our only hesitation was that it was 30 miles from the main social center in the area. In exchange for being so far out, however, we landed amid a thriving Amish community. This was a major attraction for us because we knew people in the community would have rural living skills we could learn. We would also have a direct connection to their horse-drawn lifestyle, and the possibility of borrowing horses and equipment until we got a team of our own.

Making Plans

During the land search process, we started to design the home that we planned to build. It was a small, simple, straw bale structure that I planned to build in a couple of months. Well, more than five years later, we’re still putting the finishing touches on the house. One of the best bits of advice came from my older sister, who suggested I start by building the walk-out concrete foundation and putting on a temporary roof for the first winter. That gave us three solid walls, and I then framed the south-facing fourth wall, which is 80 percent windows. We could then start early the following spring and frame out the rest of the house without such pressure. This made it possible for us to get a dwelling built by October (our baby was born Oct. 6). Throughout that first winter, we had the time to design and build the home we wanted, using the materials we wanted, without having to rush or make compromises because of time constraints.

[Read the rest at Motherearthnews.com]

And as one wise author once said, are you going to eat your silver coins? Definitely not, we seem to be too concerned about consumerism and miss out on the basic necessities of life. When you go into a third world country, you don’t see them living the same we do, with big houses, 2 cars, brand name clothing and a bunch of stuff mountain high. Instead, their focus is on community, helping each other out to survive. They learned the hard way when they were burnt by their government and companies, because they relied on them for help. Instead they took matters into their own hands and started to be self sufficient.

So when will we learn, now or the hard way?

Before we jump on the bandwagon of buying silver, have we satisfied our basic needs? These include, food, shelter, water and to a certain extent social. By social I mean creating communities that become self sufficient because of the members inside of it who understand the goal is to help others out. You can read more about this, here.

Simon Dale resisted the description of the round house he and his family built as a ‘hobbit home’ for as long as he could, but it was futile. “I’ve finally given into it,” he laughs. It’s not hard to see why: built into the Welsh woodland, with a turf roof that blends the house into its forest environment, what else would you call it? But it’s not just about aesthetics. “There’s some relevance in what hobbits were representative of for Tolkien,” Dale says.

“I’m no literary expert, but they seem to be a representation of humans living in a sustainable sort of way. I’m happy with that.”

While Dale claims not to be an expert in literature, he also claims to be no expert in building or architecture – which is surprising given that he’s built two family homes, and is planning more. But then, Dale’s story is surprising. A photographer and graphic designer by trade, he knew from his teens that he wanted to build a home in the countryside. “Photography and graphic design were ways of getting a livelihood that were portable, and helpful for the move to the country,” he says. Building a country retreat was not, however, the stuff of hundreds of thousands of pounds, years of work and according to the strictures of some fashionable design code. It certainly wasn’t the conventional process we’re familiar with seeing on our television screens – but it sounds like it would have made good viewing. In three months, and for no more than £3,000, Simon Dale, his wife Jasmine, and his father-in-law (with a baby and toddler in tow) constructed a cosy, ecologically sound, home in the woods. They did it themselves, relying on serendipity and the generosity of others. They weren’t disappointed.

For a start, the owner of the woods they were building in was keen to have someone living there, taking care of the forest, so they didn’t have to pay for the land they were building on. Next, crucially, the stewardship of the woodland involved some long overdue thinning of the trees. And the type of wood that needed to be thinned couldn’t be sold for anything other than firewood. “It usually requires a subsidy to get it out,” Dale says. “People are paid to remove it because it’s part of an old woodland management plan that doesn’t have a place in modern commercial production.” It was, however, ideal for the woodland home that Dale was building, not least because it was pliable. “It gave us fantastic building opportunities, as well as creative ones because it made such interesting shapes,” he enthuses.

The timber frame went up first, then the roof, so that they could be sheltered while doing the rest of the work. The roof has a layer of straw bales for insulation, plastic over that to render it waterproof, and earth on top. “A turf roof is a really simple way of making a roof,” says Dale. “It’s low-tech, cheap, and it’s got minimal visual impact. Straw bales for insulation may sound a little worrying for urbanites, for whom straw sounds like something rather flammable. Not a bit of it, Dale says. It was used not only for the roof, but in the round wall that made up the building. “Trying to burn it is like burning sand when there’s no air in it – and once it’s covered in an inch of lime or earth, it’s rendered completely fireproof, and will pass any tests,” he explains. The round design wasn’t just for looks: it makes structural sense to build like this – practically, it’s a stable shape, and the minimum amount of wall means little heat loss.

Straw was one of the main expenses: many other materials came for free. “We went to lots of skips,” Dale laughs, “but also people gave us things. Nearby there were power pylons being refitted, and the timber packing crates for the components would have been burnt – we used them as floorboards.” There was also the big row of windows someone had removed from their home to have them replaced with plastic versions – Dale was the willing recipient of these unwanted luxuries.

“I think because everything wasn’t decided in advance, we were able to incorporate whatever happened as we went along,”

Dale says. “We weren’t tied to a hard and fast plan at the beginning, or using materials like cement which you’re then stuck with.”

Inside, the design follows the same philosophy as the exterior – eclectic sources are favoured. “I enjoy diversity and handmade things,” Dale says, and you’d be hard pressed to discover anything from Ikea. Most of the furniture is either handmade by Dale or his friends, or second hand. “Everything is functional primarily, and then aesthetic within the limits of what is functional as well as expedient,” he says. This fits with Simon and Jasmine’s philosophy of living simply, which ties in with the belief that living off the land is an important step in the current times of climate change and faltering resources. And they don’t intend to sit still: their next project – to build nine similar homes in a settlement in Pembrokeshire – is well under way.

Nine families are ready to move in and try living off the land, going back to a way of life before fossil fuels – but with the modern knowledge of ecology. “What was initially for me a love of the countryside has turned into a complex understanding of how we relate to the land,” Dale says. It’s a quiet revolution: we probably haven’t heard the last of this family.

www.simondale.net

[Via Independant.co.uk]

Farmers are resilient folk. Just when the rest of us want a break from all thoughts of food, they bustle off to Oxford for a conference that is about nothing but.

Yet this year it has been worth braving the chill of the city’s Gothic Revival examination halls. For the first time in more than a decade, a government minister has been talking about the importance of growing food, not just to keep the landscape in good order or to provide a habitat for wildlife, but to give our countrymen and women something to eat.

The speech was met with some cynicism, given that it was only four years ago that the Treasury produced a document damning farming as an old-fashioned, high-risk activity. A rich country such as Britain, it said, could afford to buy food from wherever it chose. This system – saving the world by getting developing countries to sell us their sugar-snap peas – suited the Brown agenda, no matter that British agriculture would be sacrificed. So was it just the fact that an election is pending that led the Environment Secretary, Hilary Benn, whose expression always resembles that of a startled rabbit, to wake up with a start and realise that even much-despised rural voters are worth something?

Well, yes and no. Certainly, Benn’s strategy, “Food 2030″, is a 20-year plan of the kind beloved by Chairman Mao, complete with pictures of smiling children welcoming the new dawn. And it’s a bit rich, as one beef-faced farmer at Oxford says, to court his kind after 13 years of what has sometimes seemed like active malevolence: the animal holocaust of foot and mouth, the ruination of the British pig industry when uniquely tough welfare standards were imposed, allowing foreign producers to undercut ours; the refusal to cull the infected badgers who are spreading bovine TB through the dairy herd.

But there does seem to be a genuine sea-change at work here. Someone in authority has spotted that, as the world’s population soars towards nine billion, and the amount of land on which it is possible to raise crops starts to decline, we’d better have a strategy for feeding ourselves. Certainly, Peter Kendall, the president of the NFU, is ecstatic: “For the first time,” he says of ‘Food 2030′, “we have a government document which recognises that ‘supporting productive farming’ is the prime object of the Common Agricultural Policy.” Significantly, in yesterday’s speeches, barely a wafer could be squeezed between Benn and his Tory shadow, Nick Herbert. But Mr Herbert doesn’t have to answer for Labour’s record (and bravely, his team is speaking out on the need to reduce the “wildlife reservoir” for TB: not many votes in being beastly to badgers.)

However, even if a golden age is around the corner, it is not yet evident on the ground. Even the barley barons, whom you might expect to be rolling in the predicted boom in cereal prices, speak through gritted teeth. They are adjusting to a new era of extreme price volatility – fantastic if, like the Cambridgeshire magnifico Oliver Walston two years ago, you’ve managed to sell your wheat for £200 a tonne; hopeless when, as now, the same stuff only fetches £80 a tonne. These excessive fluctuations have nothing to do with traditional gluts and shortages: they’re caused by speculators betting on commodities’ futures.

At present, every crop that goes under the combine loses its owner £15-£20 a tonne. But don’t weep: farmers still have the Single Farm Payment to keep them afloat, and since 22 out of the 27 EU countries want the CAP to continue, it won’t go away, whatever the British public might say.

Even so, Mr Benn’s injunction to produce more food, while doing it in a more sustainable way, raises a guffaw from some of the John Bulls listening to him. “Of course we could square the circle,” declares Mr Walston, “but only by using GM, and the Government has caved in to the ‘Frankenstein Food’ lobby.”

Mr Benn expects the revival of farming to be carried on the backs of consumers willing to support British food. There may be something in what he says. Wherever I travel, I see menus boasting of provenance: not just Buccleuch beef in the Savoy, but local sausages on the breakfast table of many a humble B and B. At Christmas, many families were careful to buy the best possible British-reared turkeys and ham: no wonder Waitrose increased its sales by 9 per cent.

But there is only so much that the middle classes can do. Yes, we shall need to grow more food in Britain. Eventually, we’ll have to. But until that time comes, we have to keep agriculture alive. Partly that will involve reining in the supermarkets, as the Tories propose. But that in itself won’t be enough. Most farmers are old men; their skills are not being handed on to their children, who can get better pay, in more comfortable conditions, in other jobs. Thank goodness for the hard-working Poles and Lithuanians, who have kept many farm businesses going. If they ever went home, we’d be sunk.

Clive Aslet is Editor at Large of ‘Country Life’.

[Via Telegraph.co.uk]

The 54-year-old man tried to resist arrest when cornered by police on Wednesday night in Vieira do Minho, but did not use the pistol he was carrying.

The former shepherd, who had a deep tan and a long beard, was serving a 10-year jail sentence when he escaped in 1993.

His family and friends had provided him with food and medicine, police said.

Cave in which the fugitive is believed to have lived
The former shepherd lived in caves in hills near his family’s village

“Since his escape, he hid out and lived in three or four caves in the region, which he knew well,”

Chief Inspetor Carlos Gomes of the judicial police in Braga told AFP news agency.

“He fed himself on fruits and had never seen a doctor, but he seemed to us to be in good health,” he added.

Mr Gomes said officers had carried out surveillance on the caves over the past two years after receiving reliable information that the man was hiding in the hills around his home.

The fugitive “looked like Robinson Crusoe” and had been keen to talk to police after being recaptured, he added.

[via BBC]

“Why?”

The 48-year-old kneels in front of the desert cave he calls home, sips cedar tea from a chipped mug and explains, again, why he has intentionally lived the past nine years without using money.

It’s instinctual to live without money; it’s the way we were born, he says. It’s political. The addiction to money fuels corruption, he says, and he refuses to support a corrupt system. There’s also a spiritual basis for his life, a philosophical framework.

“The understanding that, really, we all possess nothing is the cornerstone of all spiritual endeavors and religions,” he says.

And there are health reasons. Suelo, who was born with the last name Shellabarger, is unfettered with worries about a mortgage or bills or income. Tanned, with a mop of gray locks framing his Buddy Holly glasses, he is a picture of contentment, his lithe frame stretched in the fall sun amid prickly pear cactus and red rock.

“I think taking things as they come naturally is the key to good health,” he says.

A decade ago, Suelo was dizzy with depression. His University of Colorado degree in anthropology wasn’t fulfilling. He had just returned from two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador. He was disillusioned with his job working at homeless shelters and enclaves for battered women in Denver and Boulder.

Eventually, he concluded his growing despair was tied to fretting over his financial ability to maintain his stuff. Stuff, he realized, he didn’t need. So, he gave it all away.

“We use all our energy to maintain our possessions, and it becomes an ugly cycle,” he says.

He doesn’t barter or work for food or rent. Barter is another form of money, and Suelo doesn’t deal with any form of currency. Today, he embraces an ascetic life of “art and philosophizing.” He’s hardly the growling hermit, instead circling town on his trash-bin-built bike, engaging a wide circle of pals.

“He is truly the happiest person I have ever met. He is so deeply peaceful, it’s contagious,” says Damian Nash, Suelo’s college roommate and a high school teacher in Moab. “He is living proof that money can’t buy happiness.”

Every summer, when the heat in Moab reaches unbearable — especially for a cave-dweller — Suelo hits the road, visiting friends and gatherings along the West Coast, where he is known only as “Suelo.”

“I have no idea what the future holds, and I don’t worry about it. But the longer I do this, it seems absurd to go back,” he says. “It would be like going back to slavery. There’s just too much of a price to pay.”

His cozy cave is an hour’s stroll from town.

Maybe 15 feet by 5 feet, the one-man crevice is crammed with buckets holding a few days’ worth of rice and beans, books and cooking pots.

The hole in the wall is tidy, with his bedroll neatly folded into a nook. Cupped ridges on the wall hold knickknacks. While the cave carries a strong smell of patchouli oil, Suelo doesn’t import any odoriferous whiff of homelessness. He bathes daily in the stream below his cave. His clothes — which he found in the trash — are uncommonly formal for a man who camps year-round. Dress shoes and slacks, shirt buttoned to the top and a fresh wide-brimmed hat form a Suelo style that is more Bohemian chic than homeless bum.

Suelo lives an abundant albeit frugal life, thriving on the waste of a small town. Every week, he inspects Moab’s trash, finding more than he needs. Supermarket throwaways keep him well-fed. He eats healthily, often eschewing the abundant supply of day-old doughnuts or expired sweets — although, he says, chocolate is “my gold.”

The wild onions, watercress, prickly pear fruit, serviceberries, globe mallow and pine nuts that grow near his home add fresh-grown flair to the trash-bin-derived dishes he cooks over fire-branded coffee cans molded into stoves. He occasionally cooks roadkill gathered around Moab, and says he has never fallen ill from spoiled food.

The piles of trash behind Moab’s half-dozen self-storage facilities provide a steady supply of clothes, tools, bedding and utensils.

“People don’t realize how much perfectly good stuff is thrown away with just a blemish,” he says. “Even after all these years, I’m still asking myself, ‘Why would anyone throw this out?’ ”

He used to bristle when he heard people call him a mooch, a leech or sponge off society. The occasional “get a job” comments from friends, family and readers of his blog (which he writes from computers in public libraries) don’t bother him much anymore. He says he has stopped worrying about what people think about him.

Filmmaker Gordon Stevenson a few years ago made a short documentary about Suelo called “Moneyless in Moab.” Response to the film was largely positive but varied. A few thought he was insane. Others saw a conflict in Suelo’s rejection of money but dependence on a society anchored in commerce.

“His lifestyle does depend on a group of people using money, and some people saw this as a contradiction, but Daniel comes out pretty clearly that he is a parasite of sorts,” Stevenson says. “Some people were angered by the idea that using money leaves you tainted or immoral. But I don’t think Daniel thinks like that. You might think he is, but he’s not judgmental.”

Nash hears often from people who harbor hostility toward his friend.

“I think he makes people angry because they have this belief that if only they had a little more money, they’d be happy,” Nash says. “His lifestyle is a challenge to their Holy Grail, the American consumer capitalist dream.”

There is one thing that makes Suelo seethe: store owners or police who tell him he can’t search a bin of garbage “for his own safety.” He’s had plenty of run-ins with both, but not so much in Moab, where he is well-known.

“They seem so mad about it. If they want to be livid about something, how about how much food we throw away,” he says. “I know that there is enough food to feed a village in one Dumpster behind Wal-Mart or Sam’s. All I’m taking is a few crumbs falling from this opulent table.”

Suelo often bows to the generosity of others, while never asking for help. Self-sufficiency isn’t a goal in his moneyless life, he says. So, he will sometimes house-sit, but it makes him antsy and he pines for his cave. If someone presses him to take something, he doesn’t argue. He recently began taking yoga classes offered by a friend. If they insist on giving him money, he gives it away immediately.

“We are all completely dependent on everyone else. The point is to live freely, in the present, freely giving and freely taking, which is the way of nature,” he says. “The idea is to give up control of credit and debt, and just trust the cycle of nature.”

Suelo’s friend Ray Pride nearly a decade ago took Suelo up to Alaska for two months of salmon fishing on his boat. After filling the holding tanks with thousands of pounds of bright-red sockeye salmon, Pride tried to slip some cash into Suelo’s stuff. Suelo was planning to camp and hitchhike around Alaska for a couple of months before hitchhiking back to Moab. Pride was sure he could use the money.

“He found it and left it on the boat,” says Pride, who lives in Moab. “So, I gave him $200 when I left at the airport.”

Suelo gave it away right there in the airport, and the next day, he says, “I found a backpack.”

He toured Alaska for two months, penniless, living off the land. He ate mussels, kelp and seaweed while along the coast; mushrooms, berries and fish when he hiked inland. That was the trip that began his purely moneyless journey.

Suelo grew up in an evangelical Christian home and is well-versed in biblical teaching. He also quotes from the Koran, the Torah, the Book of Mormon and an array of Hindu teachers. While hiking in Alaska, he mulled his spirit’s direction and felt a sort of hypocrite.

“Seek first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added to you,” Suelo says, citing a passage from the book of Matthew. “Did I really believe that? The only way to know is to try it. I want to be able to talk from my heart and live it too.”

[Via Salt Lake Tribune]

After managing a couple of organic food companies made me realise that even “ethical business” would never be quite enough, an afternoon’s philosophising with a mate changed everything. We were looking at the world’s issues – environmental destruction, sweatshops, factory farms, wars over resources – and wondering which of them we should dedicate our lives to. But I realised that I was looking at the world in the same way a western medical practitioner looks at a patient, seeing symptoms and wondering how to firefight them, without any thought for their root cause. So I decided instead to become a social homeopath, a pro-activist, and to investigate the root cause of these symptoms.

One of the critical causes of those symptoms is the fact we no longer have to see the direct repercussions our purchases have on the people, environment and animals they affect. The degrees of separation between the consumer and the consumed have increased so much that we’re completely unaware of the levels of destruction and suffering embodied in the stuff we buy. The tool that has enabled this separation is money.

If we grew our own food, we wouldn’t waste a third of it as we do today. If we made our own tables and chairs, we wouldn’t throw them out the moment we changed the interior decor. If we had to clean our own drinking water, we probably wouldn’t contaminate it.

So to be the change I wanted to see in the world, it unfortunately meant I was going to have to give up cash, which I initially decided to do for a year. I got myself a caravan, parked it up on an organic farm where I was volunteering and kitted it out to be off-grid. Cooking would now be outside – rain or shine – on a rocket stove; mobile and laptop would be run off solar; I’d use wood I either coppiced or scavenged to heat my humble abode, and a compost loo for humanure.

Food was the next essential. There are four legs to the food-for-free table: foraging wild food, growing your own, bartering, and using waste grub, of which there is loads. On my first day, I fed 150 people a three-course meal with waste and foraged food. Most of the year, though, I ate my own crops.

To get around, I had a bike and trailer, and the 34-mile commute to the city doubled up as my gym subscription. For loo roll I’d relieve the local newsagents of its papers (I once wiped my arse with a story about myself); it’s not double-quilted, but I quickly got used to it. For toothpaste I used washed-up cuttlefish bone with wild fennel seeds, an oddity for a vegan.

What have I learned? That friendship, not money, is real security. That most western poverty is of the spiritual kind. That independence is really interdependence. And that if you don’t own a plasma screen TV, people think you’re an extremist.

People often ask me what I miss about my old world of lucre and business. Stress. Traffic jams. Bank statements. Utility bills.

Well, there was the odd pint of organic ale with my mates down the local.

• Mark Boyle is the founder of The Freeconomy Community

[Via Guardian.co.uk]

[Via Popular Mechanics]