The Man Who Quit Money (27 page)

It’s possible to compromise. The gamut of those who take to heart the concept of living simply is wider than Suelo and the freegans, and it’s crammed with people who don’t want to boycott everything; they just want to buy less junk and do less harm. As the Center for the New American Dream encouraged people to “work less, live more, and consume more consciously,” a Prius-driving cousin of freeganism emerged, spouting catchphrases like “postconsumer” and “cradle to cradle.” These were less the spawn of Abbie Hoffman than of Helen and Scott Nearing, whose 1954 book
Living the Good Life
inspired the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s. Some celebrated Buy Nothing Day, a counterweight to the buying frenzy that occurs the day after Thanks-giving that has become almost a holiday in its own right. The Freecycle Network, which champions a “gift economy” of giving away used items rather than sending them to the landfill, claims more than eight million members.
Couchsurfing.com
built a worldwide network of hosts and travelers who stay for free in one another’s homes. New books contributed not so much shrill warnings
that we’d acquired too much, but practical visions for surviving with less:
Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future;
Simple Prosperity: Finding Real Wealth in a Sustainable Lifestyle;
and
Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth
.

Thermostats were adjusted, tires properly inflated, trees planted, lightbulbs replaced. I took my own steps toward withholding money from industries I didn’t want to support: I pedaled my bike instead of driving, I installed a high-efficiency furnace, I closed my account at a national bank and transferred the money to a local credit union. That plastic drift in the Pacific came to represent for me all that was wrong: thoughtless use of disposable products, profit-driven mass manufacture of toxic goods, our inability to pick up our trash, technological innovation that had created problems beyond our ability to fix them. I began to reuse Ziplocs and carry cloth bags to the grocery market.

But here was the problem: although these actions made sense, they didn’t make me feel any less anxious, or more free. How many times have I stood at the kitchen sink paralyzed by a plastic baggie? If it were clean, having held, say, a sandwich, I’d simply rinse and reuse it. But this one is smeared with mustard and rancid cheese and even a bit of mold. My instinct is to throw it away. But as we have learned, there is no such place as “away.” This plastic bag, if it doesn’t end up clogging the intestines of some albatross or dolphin, will swirl at sea for decades, and even after it breaks down into tiny pieces, it will never fully decompose: its toxic petrochemicals will haunt us forever.

But then I think:
That’s ridiculous. It’s just one baggie. And the washing of it will not only be a singularly unpleasant use of my time, but won’t I be using precious water to wash it?
And burning natural gas to heat that water. Not to mention the resource depletion and
damage represented by the soap.
And by now I’ve already wasted five minutes thinking about this, time that could have been better spent picking up plastic bags along the river.

So I chuck the thing in the trash, but the next day at breakfast it’s still there, peering up at me accusingly. And the gears of my mind spin. Eventually, one day in the future, I’m going to need a plastic sandwich baggie. And when I do, I’m going to buy a box of them, thus giving my hard-earned money to the Ziploc corporation, or whoever, who doubtlessly engages in all sorts of toxic practices to manufacture these things—I imagine a factory spewing brown sludge into a river, somewhere in the Rust Belt, or maybe China. And I’ll also be enabling my box of baggies to be hauled across the nation on gas-guzzling trucks that grind up the taxpayer-funded highways, which carve through the habitat of grizzlies and moose and antelope, driving them toward extinction, and so on.

Finally I had to ask a therapist about this, and he said, “Why don’t you try going outside and growing something?”

I signed up to volunteer at a community garden not far from my house, and spent two afternoons per week pulling weeds, spreading mulch, picking cucumbers. I worked alongside strangers. They became friends. I had a better idea of what was happening in my own town. My back ached and I was glad about it. The fresh food was a boon (although I’m still not sure what to do with bok choy), and I felt good knowing they arrived on my plate without the use of chemical fertilizers or interstate trucking or exploited migrants. But what I really liked was to be outside, physically
doing
something with other people. Unlike washing (or not washing) plastic bags, growing food made me feel good.

Little did I know, I’d stumbled into the most vibrant wing
of voluntary simplicity: the local food movement. In the past decade there has been a blossoming of homegrown produce, community shared agriculture, volunteer gardens, and farmers’ markets. Although the trend had percolated through the grassroots since the eighties, its jump to the mainstream coincided with recent economic and environmental calamities. Eric Schlosser’s 2001
Fast Food Nation
exposed the moral costs and health hazards of cheap eats, and caused many to change their habits. Michael Pollan turned the heretofore soporific topic of food production and distribution into a 2007 best-selling page-turner,
The Omnivore’s Dilemma,
which along with Barbara Kingsolver’s
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
celebrated what was by then a national tide of local sustainable farming.

Chris Conrad’s Sol Food Farms, where Suelo was a regular volunteer, typifies this movement. Like Free Meal, its reason for being is loftier than to merely provide food. The word “economy,” Chris Conrad told me, comes from the Greek terms for “home” and “management.” In other words, it means “taking care of your home.” The Greeks were largely an agrarian society, he said, so one could interpret their economy as “people who properly manage their homeland.” Grassroots operations like Sol Foods could provide a new template for the way humans steward the land.

However, when I visited, the idealistic operation had yet to turn a profit. In its first summer Chris had ended up giving away surplus crops. I asked if he wasn’t worried about financial security.

“Spinach,” Chris Conrad said. “That’s my retirement. I’ve always been interested in self-sufficiency, and I like knowing I’ll always have my own food.”

When I still didn’t see how this was going to translate to a salary, he clarified that his business plan was based largely on a
new economy that would emerge “after the collapse.” In the era of peak oil, the belief has become widespread that our current system of trucking food from California and Iowa, or flying it in from Peru, is simply doomed. “Imagine if semi trucks can’t get into City Market because we’ve run out of fossil fuels,” Brer Erschadi told me, referring to a local grocery store. “This town will clear off the shelves in a matter of days. Then what?”

Chris Conrad is not quite so apocalyptic, but he does mention that his irrigation system, the old gravity-fed ditches carved by settlers over a century ago, could function just fine without electricity. He anticipates not only the failure of the fossil-fuel grid, but also the collapse of the monetary system. “We even issued our own currency,” he told me. He printed “Sun Dollars,” which exchanged at a one-to-one rate with United States dollars. Sun Dollars could be redeemed at the farmers’ market for produce or burritos or whatever Chris was making that day. It was a clever ploy to get folks to prepay, but Conrad sees deeper implications. “After the collapse, one Sun Dollar might be worth two green dollars, so you’d be smart to hold on to them.”

“But what if the collapse doesn’t happen?” I said. “Or what if it takes twenty years?”

He’d considered this. “Maybe it will just be the rich hippies who buy my produce and pay my mortgage. And I guess I’m fine with that.”

The most pressing concern, meanwhile, is merely keeping the crops in the soil. As most utopias have learned, idealists don’t always make the best laborers. Ultimately, a volunteer like Suelo didn’t really care whether or not Sol Food delivered its vegetables to market and turned a profit. By the end of summer, he was more interested in harvesting feral crops like rye that had
sprung up on the farm’s periphery—he said it was more in line with his hunting-and-gathering ethos.

And farming is a fickle business, not like a lot of modern jobs where you get paid just to show up. That day I worked in the orchard, the wind picked up. The willows leaned hard, and an acre of cottonwood leaves that had been spread as mulch sailed into the sky. Chris Conrad grimaced. “We need to get that stuff tilled before we lose it all.” Still the gales increased. Sheets of corrugated tin from a nearby construction site soared into the air and rolled across the fields. Dust and leaves and thorns batted against us. “The gods are angry with us!” Suelo called, tumbleweeds swirling overhead.

And then, the hoop house, a prized ten-by-thirty-foot growing structure, lifted off the ground, backflipped violently over the deer fence, and crashed down on top of Chris Conrad’s truck. “It’s times like this I’m glad I’m just a volunteer,” said Brer.

Indeed, after a second year in the red, Chris Conrad ended the commercial venture. He told me that he’d still be growing food for his own larder, but he wasn’t sure if or when he’d go back into business. Sun Dollars, however, would still be valid. “If you have Sun Dollars you’d like to spend, please contact me,” he wrote on his website. “I continue to believe that local currencies (like Sun Dollars) will surpass the value of the US Dollar in the near future.”

Free Meal suffered a similar fate. In 2011, after August Brooks couldn’t find someone else to offer a kitchen, the program was indefinitely suspended. The problem with utopias is that they rely almost entirely on the commitment of their founders—a sure recipe for burnout.

Such setbacks notwithstanding, Sol Food Farms and Free
Meal and projects like them all across the country are changing the way we grow and distribute food. They are cutting the amount of chemicals and fossil fuels in the food system, and reducing what gets thrown away—two considerable feats. They may never counteract the seemingly apocalyptic conditions that necessitate their existence in the first place—they are up against global warming and a monetary system rigged in favor of bankers, and how many tons of tomatoes will unpaid philosophers have to grow to reverse that?—but as I learned at the garden where I volunteered, it ain’t about the tomatoes.

Maybe the process of trying to change the world is as valuable as actually attaining that change. Because what’s gained is a renewed sense of community, of knowing your neighbor. And ultimately, building community may solve problems like excessive consumption that result from Americans’ extreme version of individuality.

In the final months of Free Meal, August Brooks got a glimpse of how something as simple as free food could break down barriers between social classes. But he soon encountered a hard fact of activism: it’s easier to give away food than to change people’s hearts. After all, building community forces people to confront the fears and judgments that caused them to withdraw from community in the first place. One of my most idealistic female friends aborted her maiden voyage to Free Meal when, before she even exited her vehicle, a drunk bum solicited a cigarette and her phone number. I had my own qualms. After a half-dozen lunches accompanied by conspiratorial rants among the regulars—“Rich people want a nuclear war, that’s why they’ve all built private bunkers”—I found myself thinking, in defiance of my progressive inclinations,
Why don’t you people get a job?

“People say, ‘I want to support what you’re doing,’ and they want to give money or donate food,” August Brooks says. “I tell them the best thing they can do is come down and eat with us. But most of them never do. They’re afraid of the stigma of getting a handout, and also they’re uncomfortable to mix with what they perceive are poor people.”

Which is all a way of saying: this whole project of changing the world is hard work. And as much as we seek a balance, straddling the line between individualism and community isn’t a recipe for freedom. It’s the opposite. When you try to balance the anxiety of maintaining wealth (savings, mortgages, insurance) with the anxiety of being an ethical person (eating local food, lunching with hobos, reusing baggies, withholding taxes), you don’t free yourself from either. You end up with twice the anxiety. It’s sort of like going on a diet. Unless you’re willing to go all in—run six miles a day and eat only fish and broccoli—you’ll never have those sculpted abs you see in magazines. But neither will you have the unabashed joy of scarfing double-frosted chocolate cake. Instead you nibble away at half a piece, your enjoyment negated by your guilt that you couldn’t refuse it altogether.

The person with the least worry over the compromises he must make is, of course, the person who doesn’t compromise: Suelo. “Before, my hardships were long-term, complex anxieties,” he says: “What am I going to do with my life, how am I going to pay rent or pay insurance, what’s retirement going to be like, what am I going to do for a career, what are people going to think if I do this or that? To me that stuff is actually unbearable. And I think most people are dealing with it. Now my hardships are simple and immediate: food, shelter, and clothing. They’re manageable because they’re in the present.”

The most important result of his quitting money, then, is not a reduction of carbon emissions, or a lasting protest against the money system, but drawing a map to the freedom that lies within every person’s grasp, even if we never choose to pursue it. Unlike the rest of us, Suelo is unaffected by the chaos of the markets. In the twelve years since he quit money, while the economy has convulsed, his life has not changed much. Amid travels, volunteering, and friendships, he’s achieved a sort of stasis. The drama of his path from faith to despair and back, which dominated twenty years of his life, more or less ended when he stopped using money. He seems to have lost track of the years, which may be a product of middle-aged absentmindedness, but I’d attribute it to his genuine success at escaping a linear model of time.