Share & Voice: What the heck is a FREEGAN?

Just the other day, I was reading Marie Claire, a magazine my roommate receives in the mail. I came across and article entitled, “She Lives Off What We Throw Away,” and decided to read it. The entire article was based on freegans. According to http://freegan.info/, a “freegan” is a person who employs alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources. In other words, freegans are radical environmentalists (typically vegan) who reject our wasteful consumer culture by living almost entirely on what others throw away

Listed below are some common practices of freegans:

1. Urban Foraging / Dumpster Diving - The practice of recovering useable items from dumpsters or street curbs that have been needlessly discarded.


2. Food Not Bombs - Food Not Bombs recovers food that would otherwise go to waste to serve warm meals on the street to anyone who wants it. They promote an ethic of sharing and community while working to expose the injustice of a society where fighting wars is considered a higher priortity than feeding the hungry.


3. Squatting - Squatters find abandoned buildings and restore them into rent free housing and community centers with arts and educational programs for low-income communities.
   
4. Wild Foraging - Instead of buying industrially grown, pesticide sprayed, genetically engineered foods shipped half way around the world with resource intensive transportation technologies, wild foragers find and harvest food and medicinal plants growing in their own communities.


5. Free Markets - Events where you can swap goods (You know, the stuff that is too good to throw away but you shouldn’t keep), share skills, give presents, eat food, hang out, dance, sing and have fun—all for free!
   
6. Freestores - Imagine a store where everything is free! A place where you can bring the things that you no longer need but others can use and where others can do the same.


7. Freecycle - Freecycle is an internet swap meet. You sign up for an email group servicing your community then you can announce items you are offering away for free. Other members who want items that were posted can simply arrange with the poster to pick them up. It’s all free!


8. Craigslist Free Section - Similar to Freecycle but you dont need to join, just browse or post.


9. Craigslist Ride Share and Spaceshare - Internet-based ridesharing - easier than the thumb and won’t get you harassed by cops.


10. Guerilla and Community Gardens - Rebuilding community and reclaiming our capacity to grow our own food as an alternative to dependence and participation in exploitative and ecologically destructive systems of global industrialized corporate food production


11. Community Bike Programs and Bike Collectives - Groups that facilitate community sharing of bicycles, restore found and broken bikes, and teach people how to do their own bike repairs. In the process they build a culture of skill and resource sharing, reuse wasted bikes and bike parts, and create greater access to environentally friendly transportation.

My Thoughts
I am pretty sure I wouldn’t go this far to protect the environment, but I think it is an interesting method of conserving resources, which ultimately lessens one’s impact on the environment. It would definitely take a lot of time an effort to obtain your basic needs as a freegan. One thing is for sure: being a freegan would definitely benefit college students!