In this extract from Mark Boyle’s latest book, Drinking Molotov Cocktails with Gandhi, he explains with beauty and great feeling why we have to stand up for Nature and defend the well-being of the Earth, our home, with ferocity.
‘Hands up everyone who believes that their leg is a part of themselves?’
With the exception of one man who was cheerfully waving his prosthetic limb at me, shouting ‘mine’s not!’, most hands in the audience went up, the others presumably thinking they were too smart for such an esoteric trick. Though the relevance of the question at this point seemed quite unclear, it was one I would regularly ask at the start of talks I gave about my life without money, and the reasons behind why I chose that path. I reassured the crowd that with the exception of our one-legged friend, their legs were, for all intents and purposes, part of themselves. The process of breaking down the modern conception of self, however, was only beginning.