Joel Mathis

There's something initally Waldenesque and seductive about Mark Boyle's vision of a world without money , but I'm not sure that it stands up to any kind of scrutiny. Boyle decided to test himself by living for a year without cash, and decided to keep on keepin' on after the year came and went. What makes the whole endeavour seem a bit of a swindle, frankly, is that while he didn't himself use cash, his existence is made very possible by piggybacking off a world that does, in fact, use money as a way to facilitate the exchange of goods and services. Boyle lives in rural England in a trailer he spotted on Freecycle.org . He feeds himself by growing everything from barley to potatoes, foraging wild edibles like berries and nettles, and occasionally dumpster-diving for luxuries like margarine and bread . He cooks with a wood stove fashioned from large restaurant olive cans ; brushes his teeth with his own mixture of cuttlefish bones and fennel seed; and makes paper