as in grow your own food etc? if you could afford some land maybe, but you'd still need cash for some things, maybe selling some of what you produce could work. or do you mean recycling / renewable energy and that kind of thing? I think there's an electricity supplier you can sign up to who source from renewables, obviously gas is out. For consumer goods that would be tougher, as would food packaging, but the green market is growing all the time so it should become progressively easier to live in a sustainable way if you make the right choices.
i mean how easy is it to live without money, to only use energy you can replace and live a life in harmony with the world and opt out of a capitalist society, any ideas?
Basically impossible. There are communes and stuff where you can quite close to it (By quite close I still mean very far off), but thats it
its possible there is the no money man http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2010/jan/25/mark-boyle-no-money-man now hes living mainly on thrown away food I would imagine, and hes lucky to have someone to let him park his caravan on their land for free and those people pay for the land . he could squat or just camp until he gets moved on, people do do that, you could live in a gypsy caravan horsedrawn, you feed the horse by tethering him on roadsides . Ive lived in a caravan on a gypsy site that cost £5 thats not free but very cheap and on a site . you could live on a boat , you could find a job and ask to get paid in food http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/meet_the_freegans/ http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/i_love_trash/ you could buy a place and just do enough to pay for council tax and live with no electricity or mains water you would then have to do enough work to pay the council tax which would be pretty low as you wouldn't be making much money .
When I lived in Britain I grew all my own fruit and veg, made clothes for other people which I swapped for other stuff, tried to keep energy bills down to a bare minimum but, be totally self sustaining, I don't think so. It's impossible to survive with out some source of income and access to services.
There are neo primitivists who wish to go back to a hunter gatherer existence, In theory it might be possible to do in the uk although you cant bowhunt here legally, theres still a lot of wild food you could gather, so if you knew what you were doing I don't think you would starve . There is a german survival expert who crossed germany just doing that eating mainly road kill and wild plants he lost weight but that was most likely because he was doing so much walking , the problem he found was finding clean water because most of the rivers were in a bad way . but again its possible to do . I think he may have taken a small knife I'm not sure and that would be cheating , another guy Ive heard of lived in canada with just stone tools, you can learn to do flint knapping and then you would be self sustaining . you could make a skin tent to live in or just make shelters from things you found reeds etc. actually years ago I met a man in wales living in a anglo saxon roundhouse he was living pretty much like the anglo saxons had a wife and kids he had built the house himself
The wife and kids thing , it would depend you do have horse-drawn Romany's they have family's . You can find people of both sexes who might like this sort of life, even if you didn't want to go totally neo primitivist you could live off grid in a voluntary simplicity sort of way .
Do Romany Gypsies not use money? Do they "live off the land" etc? I can't remember them being renowned for that. From memory they are fairly ostentatious people Well, some of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEa03N1sp0Q&feature=related"]YouTube- Gypsy Wedding Daniel & Tasha's Wedding Part 1 I can appreciate it isn't totally impossible to raise a family in a self sustaining way, but it is twice/three times harder (Dependant on No.s) You have to factor in education too (It's mandatory)...that isn't cheap if you are home-schooling.
Opting out of the capatalistic society and living sustainable lives are not the same thing. If your desire is to live sustainably, you can, anywhere you live. Find employment somewhere that is beneficial to a sustainable lifestyle (ie, organic farm, nature conservatory, etc...), find a place to live that has room for you to put up pv panels and/or wind generators, grow as much food as you can. The things you can't produce yourself, you can buy with your wages from the job, and pay the bills you will have. Living sustainably isn't about not using money, its about not causing net long term damage to your environment. As in, the world will be better off for having you live on it. Now, if your goal is to escape capitalism, as jonny2mad said, there are people who claim to do it, although all the cases I have seen, they depend on the charity of others and still accept the benefits of the capitalistic society. IE; using a public computer at the local library may not cost the person any money, but it did cost others to supply it for them, gathering 'found food' from dumpsters, wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for capatalism, etc etc...
One of the things that I dislike the most about the Uk is that we have very little wilderness. There is really nowhere to go that isn't somebody's farm or owned by the national trust. Which is why I am considering moving to north America to experience forests.
