[Solar-general] freegans (para hacer frente a la crisis?)

[Marcos Guglielmetti]

http://www.freegan.info/



What is a Freegan?

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.

After years of trying to boycott products from unethical corporations 
responsible for human rights violations, environmental destruction, 
and animal abuse, many of us found that no matter what we bought we 
ended up supporting something deplorable. We came to realize that the 
problem isn't just a few bad corporations but the entire system 
itself.

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.

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.

Freegans employ a range of strategies for practical living based on 
our principles:

Waste Reclamation
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.

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. Some urban foragers go at 
it alone, others dive in groups, but we always share the discoveries 
openly with one another and with anyone along the way who wants them. 
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 
anyone who wishes to partake.

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.

Lots of used items can also be found for free or shared with others on 
websites like Freecycle and in the free section of your local 
Craigslist. To dispose of useful materials check out the EPA's 
Materials and Waste Exchanges directory. In communities around the 
country, people are holding events like "Really, Really, Free 
Markets" and "Freemeets". These events are akin to flea markets with 
free items. People bring items to share with others. They give and 
take but not a dollar is exchanged. When freegans do need to buy, we 
buy second-hand goods which reduces production and supports reusing 
and reducing what would have been wasted without providing any 
additional funds for new production.

Waste Minimization
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.

Eco-Friendly Transportation
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.

Some freegans find at least some use of cars unavoidable so we try to 
eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels by using cars with desiel 
engines converted to run on “greisel” or "veggie-oil" literally 
fueling our cars with used fryer oil from restaurants - another 
example of diverting waste for practical use. Volunteer groups are 
forming everywhere to assist people in converting diesel engines to 
run on vegetable oil.

Rent-Free Housing
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.

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.

Going Green
We live in a society where the foods that we eat are often grown a 
world away, over processed, and then transported long distances to be 
stored for too long, all at a high ecological cost. Because of this 
process, we've lost appreciation for the changes in season and the 
cycles of life but some of us are reconnecting to the Earth through 
gardening and wild foraging.

Many urban ecologists have 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, the trees in community gardens produce 
oxygen. In landscapes dominated by brick, concrete, and asphalt, 
community gardens provide an oasis of plants, open spaces, and 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.

Wild foragers demonstrate that we can feed ourselves without 
supermarkets and treat our illnesses without pharmacies by 
familiarizing ourselves with the edible and medicinal plants growing 
all around us. Even city parks can yield useful foods and medicines, 
giving us a renewed appreciation of the reality that our sustenance 
comes ultimately not from corporate food producers, but from the 
Earth itself. Others take the foraging lifestyle even farther, 
removing themselves from urban and suburban concepts and attempting 
to "go feral" by building communities in the wilderness based on 
primitive survival skills.

Working Less / Voluntary Joblessness
How much of our lives do we sacrifice to pay 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.

Once we realize that it's not a few bad products or a few egregious 
companies responsible for the social and ecological abuses in our 
world but rather the entire system we are working in, 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 high level managers of the corporations bear the greatest 
responsibility of all for they make the decisions which causes the 
destruction and waste. You don't have to own stock in a corporation 
or own a factory or chemical plant to be held to blame.

By accounting for the basic necessities of food, clothing, housing, 
furniture, and transportation 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 bossing us around at work. 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 of us 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 as part of worker-led unions like 
the Industrial Workers of the World.

For additional definitions of freeganism, click here.

-- 
Marcos Libre
(podés emplearme con cualquier fin, estudiarme, copiarme y mejorarme, 
siempre y cuando siga siendo libre)


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