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The Scavengers' Manifesto
The Scavengers' Manifesto
saw this in the Chapters book store, anyone here read this ? http://www.craphound.com/images/9781585427178B.jpg |
Re: The Scavengers' Manifesto
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Exclusive: Scavenging 101: Ten Steps to Becoming a Successful Scavenger by Anneli Rufus and Kristan Lawson, authors of The Scavengers' Manifesto 1. Pause and Save. Before every transaction, ask: Can I do this/get this/go there more cheaply or for free? Make this a reflex. Scavenging soon becomes second nature. 2. Find your niche. Are you an urban forager? Thrift shopper? Garage saler? Treasure hunter? Coupon clipper? Seed exchanger Bargain hunter? So many new identities to choose: What kind of scavenger are you? 3. Open your mind. Scavenging means learning to be flexible. Spontaneous. Adventurous. Taking what comes means accepting what comes. Never wore a poncho before or listened to Turkish techno music? If that's what you find, that's what you do. Lose the squeamishness and learn. 4. Open your eyes. Scan every surface, every crevice, because lost and cast-off stuff is usually not in plain sight. Honor your ancient ancestors; become a hunter-gatherer. Find other (legal) means of getting stuff besides brand-new, full-price. Make your new keywords "sale," "half off" "discount" and "free." The more you see, the more you save. 5. Repurpose. Found something you think you can't use? Think again. Then turn it into something else. Doors become tabletops. Calendars become giftwrap. Cut-up mouse pads become coasters. Trophies, bolted to walls, become coat-hooks. Be resourceful. 6. Swap, don't shop. Ask friends, family, neighbors or coworkers to trade their unwanted items � clothes, books, tools, seeds, art, anything � for yours. Your trash is my treasure. Your hated crying-clown portrait is my raison d'etre. 7. Free yourself. From not knowing the difference between want and need. From the insistent ache of buy-more-now-again. Just say no. 8. Wait. Instant gratification is not an option for scavengers, as scavenging means pretty much never knowing what you'll get � or how or where or when or even if. But patience is a virtue. Revive the meaning of "worth the wait." 9. Follow the Scavenging Commandments. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not scam. Thou shalt not leave disorder in thy wake. Thou shalt not hoard. Thou shalt stay safe. Thou shalt not bring shame upon fellow scavengers. Thou shalt not go to extremes just to prove a point. 10. Give thanks. Consumer culture is all about getting whatever you want. Flip that dynamic. Scavenging is about wanting whatever you get. |
Re: The Scavengers' Manifesto
Freegans forage for food, loathe waste
Shoulder-deep in a Coral Springs commercial trash bin, Brian Sprinkle was feeling hot and sweaty -- and lucky. Dented boxes of spaghetti and containers of croissants, plus potatoes, onions, bananas, plastic-wrapped hunks of watermelon and baby portobello mushrooms were stacked outside the Dumpster, in cardboard boxes he had also found inside. ``This is what happens when you have a consumer society,'' Sprinkle said, pausing for a moment between gloveless dives to the bottom of the metal bin. ``Corn in the husk,'' said Sprinkle, 25, of Fort Lauderdale. ``That's my favorite.'' Meet the ultimate anti-consumer. Since a time long before double-digit unemployment, widespread foreclosures and the collective closing of American wallets, a sliver of society has gotten by on the rest of society's discards. Sprinkle, his friends and thousands of others across the country are freegans, people who eschew capitalism whenever possible and loathe waste. ``Freeganism is kind of a protest, a boycott against a society that is pretty much run on slavery and genocide,'' said Brian Mulligan, 22, of Coral Springs. He frequents Dumpsters on his own and with Sprinkle. To avoid contributing to a system he dislikes, he doesn't work. Indeed, the freegan movement is a reaction to the modern global economy, said Janet Kalish of New York-based freegan.info. Many freegans believe that nearly everything produced harms the earth or its creatures in some way. ``We're trying to resist buying and contributing to this system,'' she said. ``We're built on overproduction. We have an economy based on destructiveness. For the big machine of our economy to keep on rolling means we have to be exploitive of our planet.'' Freegan practices can vary from Dumpster diving to backyard gardening, Kalish said. And though freegans get their name from a contraction of the words free and vegan, not all are vegetarian, she said. ``We're just trying to provoke creativity. People can pursue their own way of being apart from the system,'' she said. ``There are people who squat. Or build their own wigwams. There's people who manage to live on very little money. I don't think it matters whether they call themselves freegan or not.'' Ivania Reyes of Pembroke Park doesn't have a label for her daily trips to the back entrance of grocery stores, where she has become a fixture. She just wanted to figure out a way to help people get by in the mobile home park she manages. She became friendly with store employees, who now supply her with food that is trash-bin bound. Sympathetic workers have provided her with birthday cakes, mangoes, brownies, pineapples and watermelons. A recent coup: 86 unopened boxes of Danish she distributed door-to-door in the Lake Shore Mobile Home Community. ``I really enjoy helping people,'' said Reyes, 51, who is also motivated to rescue food that would otherwise be thrown out. ``I do it to help a lot of people who don't have jobs. I never did this before'' the economy was so bad. Leftover food is the biggest single component of American trash, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Americans throw away more than 25 percent of all food prepared -- about 96 billion pounds of waste annually. And the country spends about $1 billion a year to get rid of it. Reyes said many of the tenants in the mobile home community where she works can barely afford their rent -- 47 of the nearly 100 tenants are behind on their payments -- and she hopes her contributions of salvaged food will help cut their expenses. Sprinkle and his friends also pay forward the fruits -- and vegetables -- of their labor. They cook their finds into curries, soups and stews that they share Friday afternoons in Fort Lauderdale's Stranahan Park with anyone who cares to join them. Kalish, Sprinkle and other freegans acknowledge that, at the moment, the waste products of the very capitalist economy they dislike fuel their ability to live the way they do. ``A certain amount of capitalism has to prevail or there won't be any free stuff or cheap stuff for the rest of us to find,'' said Anneli Rufus, 50, who published The Scavenger's Manifesto with her husband Kristan Lawson, 48, earlier this year. The pair don't consider themselves freegans -- they pay for medicines, housing, eyeglasses and some of their food. But they abide by their own philosophy of ``scavenomics.'' ``We like to get whatever free that we can get for free,'' Rufus said. The Berkeley, Calif., residents haven't bought new clothes in at least five years and grow some of their own food using seeds from fruits and vegetables they've eaten or seeds they acquired for free at seed swaps. ``Sometimes all you can do is cut coupons out of the newspaper. Sometimes all you can do is go to yard sales,'' Rufus said. ``Some people are in it for the environment. Some people do it to save money. Some people do it for political reasons.'' Snowbird and businessman Russ Erickson, who winters in Key West, spends nearly nothing on his modest life of thrifting and foraging for food. He lives much of the year in his van, gets his clothes from yard sales or second-hand stores and showers at truck stops. ``Everybody's got too much stuff in their life,'' said Erickson, 67, a former contractor who turned bitter about the American consumer lifestyle. Now, he is co-owner of a doggy daycare business in North Carolina where he works occasionally. But he is more likely to be found waiting outside buffet-style restaurants until the end of the evening to eat what would otherwise be thrown away. ``People are afraid to take chances and live on the fly because they want their creature comforts and stuff like that. They're spoiled. The whole society is spoiled,'' he said. ``My philosophy in life is that less is more. You can be happy with almost nothing.'' Sprinkle said he and his like-minded friends feel the same way. They find spending time together as fulfilling as others may find shopping. ``We're not a very materialistic bunch. We don't have the craving to buy lots of things. Our main goal is to have lots of good food and get together,'' he said, although the occasional Dumpster score of discarded books is welcome. But a lifestyle of finding treasure in others' trash isn't the ultimate goal of freeganism, Kalish said. ``A better vision is that we won't have supermarkets the way we are now. We won't be Dumpster diving. We will have changed the system so we're not exploiting people and habitats and animals. We'll be growing more locally,'' she said. ``I would think that we can picture a system where it's about responsible disposal of things, responsible production of things and making things that are built to work -- not built to break.'' http://www.miamiherald.com/business/story/1178386.html |
Re: The Scavengers' Manifesto
Zen and the Art of Dumpster Diving
Dirk Jamison's father is a dumpster diver. He's seventy-something now and still dives, but he started in 1973 as a sun-burnished Orange County surfer with a penchant for taking "vacations" away from his wife and three kids. In his memoir, "Perishable" (Chicago Review, 2006), Jamison describes his dad having a revelation and quitting a construction job on the day he met a man eating a thrown-away chicken in a parking lot: "Trashing makes money obsolete. No reason to pay for food. It waits out back" -- behind markets and restaurants -- "same as on the shelf. Maybe it's not as clean or spiffy, but it looks plenty tasty, and it's free." Still-sealed but stepped-on Mars bars proved a marvel, cereal and pies in crushed boxes, jars of pears and pickled eggs just past their sell-by dates. "Making a living," Jamison's dad declared, "means simply finding something edible. Then the rest of the day is wide open." Boiled down to that, it sounds so true. Hippie-esque, but a bolt from the blue now, when even telecommuting is a far cry from "On the Road." Capitalism makes you mistrust free time and freeloaders, makes you even mistrust what's free. Every second of every day, shiny ads for shiny stuff persuade you that price equals quality. Scavengers are neither in nor out of that equation, neither suckers (as some would call you) nor outlaws but odd byproducts, skimming the foam off a bloated system that leaks luxury, a wasteful want-then-toss system, the most wonderful system in the world. Enlisting his reluctant kids in dumpster runs and the subsequent sneaking of cargo past a hulking, class-conscious, compulsively dieting wife who ate barrels of KFC on the QT and believed that knee surgery entailed the Tinker Toys-style total removal then reattachment of legs, Jamison's dad -- he dubbed himself "Aark, the Heathen Scavenger" -- had wide-open days. He vowed never to waste a single one. Yet in short sharp sentences that thunk like timed mallets wired to your temples, Jamison invokes a liar, a quitter, a ditcher, a deadbeat: The sort who gorges on the sweet hearts of watermelons without offering anyone a slice. And here we have a moral Magic 8-ball. Like hopping, say, or sipping water, scavenging is a neutral action: neither bad nor good, itself, nor rendering those who do it bad or good. A scavenger might be a saint. And a scavenger might just as easily be Jamison's dad: self-satisfied, never saving his son from "this shark we'd been asked to call Sister" -- the nameless hitting, kicking, stabbing, rope-whipping sibling, their mother's "little sweetness pie," who beat the future author bloody, daily: "What hurts more, kidney or spine?" Jamison, who has also made a documentary film about his father that played at Sundance, tells interviewers that he remains angry at the old man -- angrier still that the old man has no regrets. Scavenging is neutral, but society's attitudes about it aren't. So if you scavenge, you have to be cool with what folks will say. About it. About you. Which makes every scavenger a rebel, a tower of steel. But is it fair to haul others into the fringes who haven't asked to go there? Especially when dumpsters and food are involved. Double-especially when those others are children, who should never have to scrounge their own meals, whose tender immune systems might not withstand whatever lurks in expired YooHoo, whose sense of self is still amorphous and whose friends might skate past and call them bums. This isn't to put the emphasis on some scavengers being rich and some being poor. They are, but that's not the dividing line. Some have to ragpick, marooned in the margins with no other choice, but most of us are faced with free stuff every day and decide what to do with it. And some scavenge. Some don't. Postmodern scavengers comprise a subculture skulking so far between the cracks that you almost never see it. Secret, because scavengers know how society scorns them as it does the roach, the rat, the vulture, the animal-kingdom cleanup crew. Secret, because like forty-niners, scavengers are territorial. We guard our caches, mines and lodes. Secret because in a culture that defines itself by what it buys, we are not buying. This sets us apart. We do not march out of our homes with shopping lists, but wait and wonder. We sift through castoffs. While this delivers a certain buzz and fuels our ingenuity, our spontaneity and flexibility and creativity -- Old forks! I'll make a windchime! -- we also wonder, deep down, whether we do it because we believe we deserve trash. Then again, some kinds of scavenging aren't about trash. Steven Rinella calls himself a scavenger, but he isn't sifting through anyone else's discards, the broken and outdated and dead. Really he's a predator, a raptor not a roach -- although his prey often comprises creatures that even other predators don't want. Steven Rinella's sense of self is as solid as the Montana plains and mountains he plies. He won't apologize. Most people "happily pay good money for dead animals," Rinella writes in his book, "The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine" (Miramax, 2006), "so long as the animals are killed by proxy executioners and sold in grocery stores. But many of those same people are suspicious of folks who enjoy killing their own food. � So let this serve as a warning about what kind of guy I am, and what kind of book this is." What kind of guy he is is young and dazzlingly articulate, a contributor to Outside and The New Yorker, a world-traveling postgraduate who is tender toward his dying father and vegetarian girlfriend -- and who loves to hunt. He shoots. He hooks. He snares. He nets. He hacks the heads off things. He guts. He flings fillets onto flames and freezes the rest to make elkburgers, pickled liver, snapping-turtle soup. He's a manly and literate man who happened upon a 1903 cookbook by Auguste Escoffier, the King of Chefs and Chef of Kings. Friend to superstars and sovereigns, Escoffier invented Peach Melba. Rinella was startled at the book's lusty how-tos for slaughter, its recipes entailing roasted songbirds, rabbit blood, crayfish-shell paste, ducks sewn inside pig bladders and poached. Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire "wasn't directed at some passive, armchair history buff. It was directed at a guy like me": creative and not afraid to kill. Rinella envied Escoffier for living "at such a cool time in history," when restaurants served baby pigeon, millet-fattened blackbirds, and elephant trunk -- "and here I was, stuck in a time when collecting and eating such things would be considered hickish and repulsive." So he spent a year collecting and eating such things, crisscrossing America with rifles, rods and reels. It's a gimmick. But it feels so natural and he writes about clamdigging and nest-robbing with an insider's ease, because rather than coming on all madcap and out of nowhere, the Escoffier project simply supersized how Rinella already lived and ate, and what he already was: a hunter-gatherer. That's what he calls himself. A literal description, in his case. He notes that "up until ten thousand years ago, every human being survived by hunting and gathering." Two thousand years ago, half of the world's population survived that way. Over the last 400 years hunting and gathering has, in the strictest sense, become nearly obsolete. But soften the sense, and all scavengers today -- whether at dumpsters or curbside free-boxes, fly-casting from piers, even in second-string, not-quite-free milieux such as yard sales and dollar stores -- are hunter-gatherers. Define it as foraging, taking what comes. Sublimating choice to the bigger thrill of chance. Saving cash, working less. Define it as waiting, catching as catch can, the adventure of acquiring items with built-in histories. Define it as sidestepping whatever market sector some genius thinks you belong to. Define it as dressing in discards from a throng of strangers, thus you cannot be read. You are a mystery. Hunting and gathering in Midcity, eyes to the ground, I found a pearl-and-diamond earring and a ten-dollar bill, yesterday. A clutch of perfumey, fuzzy-fleshed, creamy-meated Chinese loquats from a dark-leaved tree. Some days nothing. Some days a pile of shirts. I go days at a span without opening my wallet. My garden grows with scavenged seeds. Tomatillos, parsley, five kinds of bok choy. You never know. Scavenging is at once primal and postmodern. Both precivilizational and poscivilizational. Escoffier cooked at the Ritz, yet "his recipes demonstrated a frontier sense of thrift and economy," notes Rinella, who sees every downtown whose pigeons he doesn't catch and eat as "a pageant of missed opportunities." Mainstream life -- that is, being a sucker -- lets inborn scavenging skills atrophy, makes one lazy and incurious and dull. Choice is a delusion anyway in a corporate culture: the brand-new and the mass-produced, sleek surfaces. For the jolt of the random, the authentic spark, rifle through junk. I draw the line at dumpster food. But from the dumpsters of sedate Berkeley residential streets I have drawn model ships, oil paintings, punchbowls, a complete naval uniform from the Spanish-American War, pressed and folded small, stashed in a shoebox. I am married to someone who will climb over the edge and inside, rummaging while I perch on its gunwale pointing at lamps and volleyball trophies and saying that. One day in a dumpster in the '80s, we met a punk girl named Donna Dangermouse. http://www.alternet.org/story/37315/ |
Re: The Scavengers' Manifesto
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Re: The Scavengers' Manifesto
I really wouldn't want to eat from a dumpster but our American consumer society makes me want to puke.
Spend, buy, borrow, unpayable debt, compete with the Joneses. How big is your big screeen TV? 42" or 52" or 217 inches? Another new car and a 4 wheel drive truck to pull your new bass boat while you wait for your new Harley to be delivered. All the while husbands and wives work like dogs while their kids live at the daycare joint. Until the stress gets to be to much and the parents get divorced. I wonder how in the world do people afford to live like this? Then next thing you know their house is being foreclosed on and they file bankruptcy. Oh yea, this is the 2nd time they filed bankruptcy. I for one do not need this. [rant off] |
Re: The Scavengers' Manifesto
I understand and would participate in dumpster diving, garage saling, coupon clipping, etc., but this "freegan" thing is crap. They're not even willing to work? I'll be sure to make certain that all food I throw away is poisoned if I see a freegans lurking by my trash. They are just stealing from the stray cats and mice that rely on that food anyway.:ARMS1:
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Re: The Scavengers' Manifesto
I have to question the sense of buying a book on anti-consumerism. Seems self defeating to me.
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Fortunately, the cops made placating noises and then ignored her, as they should have. Not all cops are stupid. |
Re: The Scavengers' Manifesto
well i finally broke down and bought this book
as i was thumbing thru it . . . . . again i kept thinking of the book " The Road " i don't think of it as buying a book, . . . . . i'm buying information and if a few bits of helpful information ( from this book ) can help me get threw TSHTF money well spent nothing is garbage anymore . . . |
Re: The Scavengers' Manifesto
somewhat on topic
by charles long a review of; how to live w/o a salary This humorous but practical and easy to comprehend book or guide, by Canadian journalist and writer, Charles Long, is about being a conserver. A conserver is a person who learns how to get by with less and make do with what he/she has. A person who lives as a conserver lives "the conserver lifestyle." Despite the book's title, it is actually a book for everyone: for those employed, for those without a salary, city dwellers, and country dwellers. Or to put it another way this is a book for everyone "concerned with the diminishing purchase power of their dollar." Long practices what he preaches! All the philosophy and economic theory behind the conserver lifestyle came from him (and his family) living and surviving without a salary. This eleven chapter book, as the author states, revolves around three key premises: (I) Control expenditures and save money. The author shows you how in his four chapters entitled: 1. The Secondhand Market 2. Auction Buying 3. Alternatives to Buying 4. Cheap Tips (II) Income of some sort is still required (for those who decide to survive without a salary). This income does not have to be made through employment. The author has a full chapter entitled: 5. Casual Income (III) Preparing yourself for the conserver lifestyle takes time (especially for those deciding to survive without a salary). The chapters covering this are entitled: 6. Assessing Yourself 7. Needs 8. Getting Ready There is even a chapter on how to answer questions if you decide to live the conserver lifestyle without a salary. It's entitled: 9. What Do You Do For a Living? (and other difficult questions). So far I have mentioned nine chapters. Even though all chapters mention this, one chapter is devoted exclusively to the philosophy of the conserver lifestyle. (This chapter also discusses other relevant topics.) It's entitled: 10. What's the Catch? Another chapter discusses taxes & insurance and how to save on them. It's entitled: 11. Caesar's Due. There are three problems I had with this book: First, there are no (foot)notes (or hardly any). True the book profiles the author's personal experiences but I did notice some numbers and statistics given that were not given credit. Second, the author sidesteps the issue of health care. Perhaps it is because he is Canadian and they have universal health coverage. However, countries like the United States do not have this and since health care is expensive, it would be difficult for most Americans to leave a salaried position. They, however, still could be conservers and live the conserver lifestyle but with a salary. Third, although this is not absolutely essential, it would have been helpful to have a brief summary in the form of a list at the end of each chapter. Note that this book has no index but since its table of contents is so comprehensive, an index is not really needed. Finally, there is another book that that gives a slightly different and perhaps a more comprehensive spin on this subject. It's called "Your Money or Your Life" by Dominguez and Robin. Another useful book is "The Joy of Not Working" by Zelinski. In conclusion, this is a book that outlines an alternative lifestyle called the conserver lifestyle. Discover for yourself why "[t]he greatest security is not in having the most, but in needing the least!" |
Re: The Scavengers' Manifesto
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