Bad American

No link yet on CNN.com but if you watch the network long enough today, you’ll probably see a story on the Freegan movement (Freegan is a combination of ‘free’ and ‘vegan’). I’m amazed that a Freegan spokesperson was even allowed on CNN but, not surpringly, the story hook was very simple:

“Oh my God! These people EAT out of dumpsters!!”

Oh, yes they do and for good reason - American companies (restaurants and supermarkets) throw out perfectly good and edible food by the metric ton every day. The Freegan spokesperson was able to get some points out about our waste in the brief time the interview gave her but there is so much more to the Freegan movement than just the dumpster diving.

You can find out everything you need to know here: Freegan.info

Here are some basic concepts which are, obviously, anathema to The American Way:

Freegans are people who employ alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources. Freegans embrace community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing in opposition to a society based on materialism, moral apathy, competition, conformity, and greed.

Wow. Is that un-American or what? I love it.

Freeganism is a total boycott of an economic system where the profit motive has eclipsed ethical considerations and where massively complex systems of productions ensure that all the products we buy will have detrimental impacts most of which we may never even consider. Thus, instead of avoiding the purchase of products from one bad company only to support another, we avoid buying anything to the greatest degree we are able.

Obviously these folks are leaving a small carbon footprint and are serving a useful function as the scavengers of our society. In this case, scavenger is a good term! We need people to cull the largess of the American economy that wastes so much and provide this food and other consumer durables, to people who can put them to use instead of continuing to gorge our landfills. This is good.

We live in an economic system where sellers only value land and commodities relative to their capacity to generate profit. Consumers are constantly being bombarded with advertising telling them to discard and replace the goods they already have because this increases sales. This practice of affluent societies produces an amount of waste so enormous that many people can be fed and supported simply on its trash. As freegans we forage instead of buying to avoid being wasteful consumers ourselves, to politically challenge the injustice of allowing vital resources to be wasted while multitudes lack basic necessities like food, clothing, and shelter, and to reduce the waste going to landfills and incinerators which are disproportionately situated within poor, non-white neighborhoods, where they cause elevated levels of cancer and asthma.

Of course this philosophy is diametrically opposed to capitalism but these folks are spot on. We are brainwashed into believing that wasteful practices are our birthright and are evidence of the superiority of our system and non-negotiable way of life. So we create artificial demand based on ego and status reasons and it fuels an economy that is slowly poisoning both ourselves and the planet we live on.

Here’s some more of what gets reclaimed:

By recovering the discards of retailers, offices, schools, homes, hotels, or anywhere by rummaging through their trash bins, dumpsters, and trash bags, freegans are able to obtain food, beverages, books, toiletries magazines, comic books, newspapers, videos, kitchenware, appliances, music (CDs, cassettes, records, etc.), carpets, musical instruments, clothing, rollerblades, scooters, furniture, vitamins, electronics, animal care products, games, toys, bicycles, artwork, and just about any other type of consumer good. Rather than contributing to further waste, freegans curtail garbage and pollution, reducing the over-all volume in the waste stream.

I would direct Freegans to the dumpsters of every Half Price Bookstore in America where daily, metric tons of perfectly good books, CDs, cassettes (many new and unused) and other materials every day. What I saw thrown away at the store I worked at would be enough to turn the stomach of any lover of literacy. And yes, we did have dumpster divers but they weren’t Freegans - they would either try to sell the discards back to the store or sell them on Ebay.

Now let’s not forget one of my favorite recycling habits - composting:

Because of our frequent sojourns into the discards our throwaway society, freegans are very aware of and disgusted by the enormous amounts of waste the average US consumer generates and thus choose not to be a part of the problem. So, freegans scrupulously recycle, compost organic matter into topsoil, and repair rather than replace items whenever possible. Anything unusable by us, we redistribute to our friends, at freemarkets, or using internet services like freecycle and craigslist.

And yes, they try not to drive either:

Freegans recognize the disastrous social and ecological impacts of the automobile. We all know that automobiles cause pollution created from the burning of petroleum but we usually don’t think of the other destruction factors like forests being eliminated from road building in wilderness areas and collision deaths of humans and wildlife. As well, the massive oil use today creates the economic impetus for slaughter in Iraq and all over the world. Therefore, freegans choose not to use cars for the most part. Rather, we use other methods of transportation including trainhopping, hitchhiking, walking, skating, and biking. Hitchhiking fills up room in a car that would have been unused otherwise and therefore it does not add to the overall consumption of cars and gasoline.

This is tough to do in a society that was largely laid out for the car culture. So anytime you can get around without burning fuel, its a good thing. Walking is wonderful exercise by the way.

And here is a big one for me:

Freegans believe that housing is a RIGHT, not a privilege. Just as freegans consider it an atrocity for people to starve while food is thrown away, we are also outraged that people literally freeze to death on the streets while landlords and cities keep buildings boarded up and vacant because they can’t turn a profit on making them available as housing.

I see that in Chardon where I live and own a business. Landlords continue to keep jacking up rents for local businesses (and renters) and seem not to care one whit that months and months go by without anyone renting their properties which remain vacant with “for rent” signs prominently displayed, which hurts the community’s ability to attract and keep smaller home-grown businesses. A small advertising agency across the street from my shop just had their rent jacked up and were forced to leave their business space and run their business from their house. Now another vacant cavity exists in a business block that already has several such cavities facing the street.

And the landlords just don’t seem to care enough about the community to reasonably work with renters to keep their businesses alive and in town. There’s a shopping strip down the street that is owned by a company in east surburban Cleveland that charges rents so high for their spaces that no locally originated business could turn a profit renting them. And certainly corporate franchises won’t locate in an aging strip shopping center.

I believe there must be some sort of tax advantage built into our tax code for these companies that allow them to literally make money on empty storefronts. There must be since there seems to be no concern for perfectly good retail space that stands empty for months and in some cases, years.

Freegans are, understandably, more concerned with housing people than businesses:

Squatters are people who occupy and rehabilitate abandoned, decrepit buildings. Squatters believe that real human needs are more important than abstract notions of private property, and that those who hold deed to buildings but won’t allow people to live in them, even in places where housing is vitally needed, don’t deserve to own those buildings. In addition to living areas, squatters often convert abandoned buildings into community centers with programs including art activities for children, environmental education, meetings of community organizations, and more.

So its no surprise that you didn’t (and wouldn’t) hear these concepts spoken of during the CNN interview. Dumpster diving, of course, serves to get viewers’ attention and also is a convenient way to suggest that Middle America discredit these people. The representative of the Freegan group that spoke had to have known that was going to be the thrust of the CNN story but took the chance anyway knowing that perhaps, enough people would Google ‘freegan’ and learn the serious and useful purposes of the movement.

Laugh at these people if you will, they are learning survival skills that will help their communities survive in the coming post Peak Oil age. The sooner we all learn and practice the habits, skills and ethics of Freegans, the better we will be able to transition to a way of life that will soon be forced upon us.