Freegan-ism

My dear friend, Elizabeth -- who ranks as one of the funniest people I have ever been blessed to know -- sent me an email yesterday that said the following:

"Julie, I love that you are into all of these causes -- but if you ever become a 'freegan' I fear I'll need to host an intervention for you."

"What, dare I ask, is a 'freegan'?" I wrote back.

And, in response, she sent me the following link: http://freegan.info

Here is a portion of what you'll find on the website:

The word freegan is compounded from "free" and "vegan". Vegans are people who avoid products from animal sources or products tested on animals in an effort to avoid harming animals. Freegans take this a step further by recognizing that in a complex, industrial, mass-production economy driven by profit, abuses of humans, animals, and the earth abound at all levels of production (from acquisition to raw materials to production to transportation) and in just about every product we buy.

Sweatshop labor, rainforest destruction, global warming, displacement of indigenous communities, air and water pollution, eradication of wildlife on farmland as "pests", the violent overthrow of popularly elected governments to maintain puppet dictators compliant to big business interests, open-pit strip mining, oil drilling in environmentally sensitive areas, union busting, child slavery, and payoffs to repressive regimes are just some of the many impacts of the seemingly innocuous consumer products we consume every day.

Perhaps the most notorious freegan strategy is what is commonly called "urban foraging" or "dumpster diving". This technique involves rummaging through the garbage of retailers, residences, offices, and other facilities for useful goods. Despite our society's sterotypes about garbage, the goods recovered by freegans are safe, useable, clean, and in perfect or near-perfect condition, a symptom of a throwaway culture that encourages us to constantly replace our older goods with newer ones, and where retailers plan high-volume product disposal as part of their economic model.

Okay, while I fully admit that my blog entries of late do have an air of "anti-capitalisist freegan-ism" to them, and while I am all for recycling products which still have lots of life left in them, please trust me when I say that if any of you reading my blog ever witness me partaking in "dumpster diving," I completely endorse a massive, immediate intervention!! I'd like to think that I am creative and smart enough to actually figure out a way to deploy capitalism to help solve some of the mass-production economic ills we face, rather than resorting to "urban foraging." But who knows what these chemo drugs are actually doing to my brain, so I'll take all the back-up help I can get! :)