i saw them on 20/20 the other night and then did some more reseasch...would u joined them??
"The word freegan is derived 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 in just about every product we buy, from acquisition to raw materials to production to transportation. 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.
Freegans employ a range of strategies for practical living based on our principles:
Waste Reclamation:
Under an economic system where sellers only value commodities and places relative to their capacity to generate profit and consumers are constantly bombarded with advertising telling them to discard and replace the goods they already have, affluent societies are enormously wasteful, so much so that people can survive and thrive by making practical use of resources that would otherwise go to waste. In the process, freegans challenge the injustice of allowing vital resources to be wasted while multitudes lack basic necessities like food, clothing, and shelter. And by making use of waste, freegans reduce the flow of garbage to landfills and incinerators that are disproportionately situated within poor, non-white neighborhoods, where they cause elevated levels of cancer and asthma
Perhaps the most notorious freegan strategy is what is commonly called "urban foraging" or "dumpster diving." This technique involved rummaging through the garbage of retailers, residences, offices, and other facilities for useful goods. Despite our society's sterotypes about refuse, 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. Some urban foragers forage alone, others in groups, happy to share our discoveries with one another, and with their communities. Groups like Food Not Bombs recover foods that would otherwise go to waste and use them to prepare meals to share in public places with any who can enjoy food shared freely with them.
By recovering the discards of retailers, offices, schools, homes, hotels, and other places, 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 can be found in the discards of retailers, institutions, and individuals simply by rummaging through their trash bins, dumpsters, and trash bags. Rather than contributing to further waste, freegans curtail garbage and pollution and lessening the over-all volume in the waste stream.
Eco-Friendly Transportation
Recognizing the disastrous social and ecological impacts of the automobile, from petroleum consumption to road building in wilderness areas to air pollution to collision deaths for humans and wildlife to providing the economic impetus for mass slaughter in Iraq, many freegans choose not to own cars and find other strategies for transportation, including trainhopping, hitchhiking, walking, skating, and biking.
Some freegans find at least some use of cars unavoidable, but eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels by converting our engines to run on “greisel”, literally fueling our cars with used fryer oil from restaurants—another example of diverting waste for practical use. Volunteer groups are forming all over to assist people in converting our engines to run on greisel. And of course, freegans will more readily buy a used car than a new one.
Many freegans are squatters, 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 in places where housing is vitally needed don’t deserve to own those buildings. In addition to homes, squatters often convert abandoned buildings into community centers, with programs including art activities for children, environmental education, space for meetings for community organizations, and more.
An urban movement has been turning garbage-filled abandoned lots into verdant community garden plots. In neighborhoods where stores are more likely to carry junk food than fresh greens, community gardens provide a health food source. Where the air is choked with asthma inducing pollutants, community gardens produce fresh oxygen. In landscapes dominated by brick, concrete, and asphalt, community gardens provide oases of green, places for communities to come together, work together, share food grow together, and break down the barriers that keep people apart in a society where we have all become too isolated from one another.
Working Less / Voluntary Joblessness
How much of our lives do we sacrifice for the ability to pay the bills and buy more stuff? For most of us, work means sacrificing our freedom to take orders from someone else, stress, boredom, monotony, and in many cases risks to our physical and psychological well-being.
Additionally, once we realize that its not a few bad products or a few egregious companies responsible for the social and ecological abuses in our world, but the entire system the exist within, we begin to realize that as workers, we are cogs in a machine of violence, death, exploitation, and destruction. Is the retail clerk who rings up a cut of veal any less responsible for the cruelty of factory farming than the farm worker? What about the ad designer who finds ways to make the product palatable? How about the accountant who does the grocery’s books and allows it to stay in business? Or the worker in the factory that manufacturers refrigerator cases? And, of course, the CEOs of the grocery chain and the veal manufacturer bear the greatest responsibility of all.
By accounting for basic necessities like food, clothing, housing, and furniture without spending a dime, freegans are able to greatly reduce or altogether eliminate the need to constantly be employed. We can instead devote our time to caring for our families, volunteering in our communities, and joining activist groups to fight the practices of the corporations who would otherwise be our bosses. For some, total unemployment isn’t an option—it’s far harder to find free dental surgery than a free bookcase on the curb—but by limiting our financial needs, even those freegans who need to work can place conscious limits on how much we work, take control of our lives, and escape the constant pressure to make ends meet. But even if we must work, we need not cede total control to the bosses. The freegan spirit of cooperative empowerment can be extended into the workplace by organizing shops as part of worker-led unions like the Industrial Workers of the World."
"The word freegan is derived 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 in just about every product we buy, from acquisition to raw materials to production to transportation. 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.
Freegans employ a range of strategies for practical living based on our principles:
Waste Reclamation:
Under an economic system where sellers only value commodities and places relative to their capacity to generate profit and consumers are constantly bombarded with advertising telling them to discard and replace the goods they already have, affluent societies are enormously wasteful, so much so that people can survive and thrive by making practical use of resources that would otherwise go to waste. In the process, freegans challenge the injustice of allowing vital resources to be wasted while multitudes lack basic necessities like food, clothing, and shelter. And by making use of waste, freegans reduce the flow of garbage to landfills and incinerators that are disproportionately situated within poor, non-white neighborhoods, where they cause elevated levels of cancer and asthma
Perhaps the most notorious freegan strategy is what is commonly called "urban foraging" or "dumpster diving." This technique involved rummaging through the garbage of retailers, residences, offices, and other facilities for useful goods. Despite our society's sterotypes about refuse, 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. Some urban foragers forage alone, others in groups, happy to share our discoveries with one another, and with their communities. Groups like Food Not Bombs recover foods that would otherwise go to waste and use them to prepare meals to share in public places with any who can enjoy food shared freely with them.
By recovering the discards of retailers, offices, schools, homes, hotels, and other places, 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 can be found in the discards of retailers, institutions, and individuals simply by rummaging through their trash bins, dumpsters, and trash bags. Rather than contributing to further waste, freegans curtail garbage and pollution and lessening the over-all volume in the waste stream.
Eco-Friendly Transportation
Recognizing the disastrous social and ecological impacts of the automobile, from petroleum consumption to road building in wilderness areas to air pollution to collision deaths for humans and wildlife to providing the economic impetus for mass slaughter in Iraq, many freegans choose not to own cars and find other strategies for transportation, including trainhopping, hitchhiking, walking, skating, and biking.
Some freegans find at least some use of cars unavoidable, but eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels by converting our engines to run on “greisel”, literally fueling our cars with used fryer oil from restaurants—another example of diverting waste for practical use. Volunteer groups are forming all over to assist people in converting our engines to run on greisel. And of course, freegans will more readily buy a used car than a new one.
Many freegans are squatters, 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 in places where housing is vitally needed don’t deserve to own those buildings. In addition to homes, squatters often convert abandoned buildings into community centers, with programs including art activities for children, environmental education, space for meetings for community organizations, and more.
An urban movement has been turning garbage-filled abandoned lots into verdant community garden plots. In neighborhoods where stores are more likely to carry junk food than fresh greens, community gardens provide a health food source. Where the air is choked with asthma inducing pollutants, community gardens produce fresh oxygen. In landscapes dominated by brick, concrete, and asphalt, community gardens provide oases of green, places for communities to come together, work together, share food grow together, and break down the barriers that keep people apart in a society where we have all become too isolated from one another.
Working Less / Voluntary Joblessness
How much of our lives do we sacrifice for the ability to pay the bills and buy more stuff? For most of us, work means sacrificing our freedom to take orders from someone else, stress, boredom, monotony, and in many cases risks to our physical and psychological well-being.
Additionally, once we realize that its not a few bad products or a few egregious companies responsible for the social and ecological abuses in our world, but the entire system the exist within, we begin to realize that as workers, we are cogs in a machine of violence, death, exploitation, and destruction. Is the retail clerk who rings up a cut of veal any less responsible for the cruelty of factory farming than the farm worker? What about the ad designer who finds ways to make the product palatable? How about the accountant who does the grocery’s books and allows it to stay in business? Or the worker in the factory that manufacturers refrigerator cases? And, of course, the CEOs of the grocery chain and the veal manufacturer bear the greatest responsibility of all.
By accounting for basic necessities like food, clothing, housing, and furniture without spending a dime, freegans are able to greatly reduce or altogether eliminate the need to constantly be employed. We can instead devote our time to caring for our families, volunteering in our communities, and joining activist groups to fight the practices of the corporations who would otherwise be our bosses. For some, total unemployment isn’t an option—it’s far harder to find free dental surgery than a free bookcase on the curb—but by limiting our financial needs, even those freegans who need to work can place conscious limits on how much we work, take control of our lives, and escape the constant pressure to make ends meet. But even if we must work, we need not cede total control to the bosses. The freegan spirit of cooperative empowerment can be extended into the workplace by organizing shops as part of worker-led unions like the Industrial Workers of the World."
