My Right to Tell This Story

Consumerism, for example, was not part of his existence. He had decided to choose a different route. I found that very interesting because his background was relatively modest to say the least. I don't know that Natalie ever used the word impoverished but that was my impression. When you meet people like that they are usually very anxious to enlarge their holdings. Everything that they have in life they want to have more of. If you've had nothing, you want to have something, and something leads to something more etc. In Barry's case he had simply chosen not to go that route. (David Folster)

In the Indigenous oral tradition, the person telling a story includes a preface which describes their right to the narrative. This usually includes where they first heard the story and their right to tell it, whether the story is from their family or they were gifted it at a ceremony. I'm not Indigenous, but I think many people reading a book such as this one, which is about living cheaply, might justly wonder if the author himself knows anything about living in a frugal manner. What that in mind, I thought I would give a brief précis of my financial reality which tempered my way of thinking about consumerism.

I have said below that I was raised in foster homes. That alone would have informed my way of thinking about parsimony, even if I hadn't been placed in a home where I was brought up as though the Great Depression had just ended and we were about to be placed on a war footing. I learned to be careful about money and material goods even from an early age, and I don't think it was an accident that I made my own toys when I was a boy. I had a metal tractor, and a few small cars, so I made wagons from short pieces of board. I cut slices from round pieces of stove wood and nailed through the pith to the sides of the board in order to make wheels. The superstructure of the wagons or trailers was made by hammering other nails into the deck, and before long I had an odd looking but recognizable trailer for my tractor.

I mention that anecdote so that the reader will get a sense of the time and ethos I grew up in and under. When I didn't have something, I did not scrounge for money as much as for parts, and I learned early on to do without or to make for myself whatever I couldn't afford. Once I went to university, I subsisted on student loan, which meant I had barely enough money to afford living with roommates. I shopped carefully, and in the eighties-when I was living on around five thousand dollars a year-I managed to save enough money to buy a used car and move to the University of Victoria on the west coast of Canada. I could afford to pay for my gas and food and was willing to take the risks involved in moving.

I retained those same habits while attending graduate school, luckily, since funding was sparse for an English literature degree and the schools miserly. I combined what I'd learned as a child about living on nothing with my growing knowledge of societal systems. Before long I was building computers for friends from parts the universities were throwing away and haunting the rotten food rack in the supermarkets. Living in a bigger city, I learned more about dumpster diving-what Morgan's mum calls urban farming-and when I returned to the city after a few months of summer travel, I frequently crashed on a friend's couch for a few days until I found an apartment. Then I would walk or bicycle around the neighbourhood on Labour Day weekend until I furnished the place. All I needed was a piece of plywood for a table, since I could cover it with a cloth and make legs out of 2x4s, and some kitchen chairs. Both of those items were easily collected.

When I left to travel again in the spring, I would send everything back to the dumpster where it came from, while a few things-like the futon mattress I put on the floor as a bed-would find storage with a friend. I learned to travel light, and while others spent money on books when writing their thesis or dissertation, I made shelves from crates and bureau drawers and filled them with the two hundred books I was allowed to borrow from the library as a graduate student. On my way to class I would tear down expired posters for notepaper, and found pens in the hallways or abandoned in classrooms.

I ran into Ross, a former peer, after I'd finished graduate school and was working at the university as an underpaid contract professor. Ross said that I was looking good, and then-in a rare honest moment from the other side-suggested that when we shared classes he could tell I was going through a tough time. As we walked away, my friend Karen asked me what he meant. I told her about the clothes I would wear as a graduate student. I have never bought or worn new clothes, and in that way I stood out from the other students. I had all the markings of desperation quite without the reality. "All the time that Ross knew me," I told her, "I had more than twenty thousand dollars in the bank." His reading of my circumstance was based on how I dressed, used public transit, and never bought food on campus.

This type of frugality has extended over my entire life, but when I was older and I began to get a better sense of what it might mean for the planet, I realized I had inadvertently perfected a lifestyle that matched an environmental way of thinking. That inspired me to gather the skills I have learned along the way which have helped me perfect the art of living cheaply and well. The path from that realization to writing about the choices I have made turned out to be a short jump.

I could have chosen to make films about careful and responsible living, made paintings about my choices, or negotiated with companies for sponsorship as I touted their product. Instead I write books, and it's worth noting that such a choice is not exactly an accident. Writing is the cheapest art form, just as soccer is the poor person's sport. All you need to play soccer is a will, for a ball can be made out of torn nylon stockings-as Felipe tells me they did as kids in Chile-or a leather case wrapped around fabric in Africa or, a flexible plaited bamboo ball they call a takraw in Thailand. Once the balls are made from local materials all they require is willing children and a relatively flat surface.

Of all the arts, writing requires the least investment. At most I need paper or a paper substitute-a word processor or old computer-and a pen, or a pencil, or something sharp that leaves a trace on the surface. When pondering the requirements of the other arts-the canvas and the paint and the stone for sculpting-no one will be surprised that books became my medium.

Over the years, my friends have many times asked me to write about living modestly, incorporating what I know about dumpster diving and camping in the wild, about traveling by car and backpacking through Europe and South East Asia. I largely ignored their requests because I considered my way of living to be the inevitable if unenviable result of budgetary constraints and the frugality I'd been taught as a child. The way I live is nothing special, I told them. Anyone would live the same given my background, although not all my skills are transferable and not everyone is living in my circumstance.

Times have changed somewhat, for both me and the planet. I have a job, or more correctly a series of jobs which pay me more than double what I require to live. Before you get too excited you must remember that I live on very little and that's what this book is about. As well, I maintain the same lifestyle I developed over the last few decades.

In general, people are starting to acknowledge that the materialist life of the west, for all its benefits, does not seem to be increasing our net happiness. They are turning to alternative ways of living because they are starting to realize that the more money they spend chasing the elusive moving target of consumer satisfaction, the harder they have to work to earn more to spend that money. That leaves them with less time to enjoy the fruits of their labour, and they've found themselves accumulating for its own sake.

This has recently became even more apparent, as the world staggered under the fear induced by a world-wide pandemic. The economic toll the Covid shutdown had on millions of workers was profound. Coming merely ten years after the economic slowdown which cost many people their homes, the lockdowns greatly affected people who could ill-afford to lose their income. When many American workers miss a paycheque, they are already in trouble, but missing two or three pay periods meant they were suddenly homeless or taking on more debt than they could afford. In their anxiety, some took on extra hours at another job while they waited for their day job to give them some money, and others discussed their bills with the banks, hoping for a mortgage payment delay and a month's grace on their credit card.

These are real concerns, and I do not mean to minimize the trepidation of the workers, but I was shocked that people with a stable job were living so close to the edge that the loss of a single paycheque could put them in distress. My friend Fu Mengsong came from China as a foreign student, and every year she put some money into savings. When she told me that, I asked her if she were able to do that even during the year she only made six thousand dollars for teaching one course. Her answer, "I am Chinese," summarized what it was like to live in a country without a social safety net. She had kept those values despite living in North America.

Amongst those who seek a different path, some join intentional communities, or try to set up their own by offering plots of land for others who wish to build sustainable houses. Others are concerned that the relatively stable climatic patterns that we have enjoyed throughout humanity's agricultural history are shifting, that we are irrigating fields to sterility, that the toxic cocktail of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides-which have their origin in rapidly diminishing fossil fuels-are rendering the rich soil lifeless. Still others worry that we are depleting the forests not just for newspapers and toilet paper, but to maintain a corporate and societal avarice that in retrospect seems suicidal.

Although the short history of humanity's modern occupation of Earth reads like a litany of despair, I don't believe that our choices are inevitable or the destruction that we cause is necessary. I think that Mike Reynolds, of Earthship fame, is correct when he outlined the scope of human potential: "Trees have the power to enhance the Earth. We could go much further. We could make the Earth sing." In order to make the Earth sing, however, we first have to change the way we live.

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