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Out
of Sight, Out of Mind:
The Hidden
Truths of Dumpster Diving
It all started with flowers.
The woman slowly
made her way across the parking lot with an armload of Gladiolas.
A wave of disbelief washed over me as she threw the fresh flowers
onto the dumpster.
Insolence! Disgust!
Bewilderment!
The woman had
scarcely fled before the gardener within me was compelled to liberate
the gladiolas from their unceremonious fate. As I dug to the bottom
of the pile, a surprise waited.
“Holy
crap,“ I yelled to my compatriot, who was also busy tearing
down her farmer’s market stand. “There’s a few
hundred pounds of fresh produce in here!”
The gravity
of our discovery compounded exponentially as we pulled out tomatoes,
cucumbers, eggplant, potatoes, carrots and basil – all stuff
that was fetching a pretty good price at the market about an hour
ago. After cleaning and distributing enough food to feed 30 people
for a week, the far-reaching implications of the experience began
to set in.
Perhaps the
reason our country consumes roughly 25 percent of the world’s
resources is that we don’t really consume them. We just
throw it all away with a delusional sense of affluence equating
success with discarding a nearly-new plasma screen in order to
make room for the latest version. Why are food prices skyrocketing?
Why are gas prices out of control? Why are we fighting wars over
dwindling resources? Why do consumer electronics keep getting
more expensive? The answers may be much closer to home than you
think. Go look in a dumpster.
Most Americans
pay good money for stuff I often acquire personally from the trash.
Cars and trucks notwithstanding, it’s all in there: TVs,
computers, radios, power tools, clothing, construction materials,
food, and – if you have the dumpster deities at your back
– beer, wine, and other necessary medicines. There is such
a proliferation of perfectly good items being found in the trash,
it’s spawned an entire movement of individuals living off
of these discarded materials in an attempt to reduce their participation
in an exploitive consumer economy.
“The
junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer,”
William S. Burroughs writes. “He sells the consumer to the
product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise, he
degrades and simplifies the client.” He then adds, “The
more junk you use the less you have and the more you have the
more you use.”
Burroughs, in
his attempt to explain “The Sickness” of opiate addiction,
instead nailed down capital theory in an age of a permanent war
economy. This could just as readily describe the sickness of material
addiction at work in our society.
So, is dumpster
diving the revolutionary panacea it’s purported to be, or
just the pastime of over-privileged white anarchists desperately
trying to get people to take them seriously?
Well, that depends.
If your eyes are opened to the true nature our culture’s
equity distribution just by learning who’s throwing what
away, it’s a window to revolutionary consciousness. I don’t
think saving stuff from a dumpster is the best method to address
the sickening amount of waste consumerism creates, but it’s
a way for me to challenge perceived stigmas on social behavior.
It opened my eyes to hidden truths about how business operates
in my own community, and consequently it can’t be dismissed
as a simple past-time for those who don’t care to buy their
own goods. Anything that enlightens and empowers you to create
your own vision of how society should look holds limitless revolutionary
potential.
Every time we
rescue food or other useable goods from the trash, we de-link
ourselves from the wage-slave system. We are free to have some
time to chase dreams, free to help organize autonomous local systems
– such as our wildly expanding Community Supported Agriculture
(C.S.A.) system or our fledgling local currency. The act of diving
should consistently be used as a freeing tactic to devote more
time towards organizing a locally based autonomous economy, otherwise
it runs the risk of being a superficial act of marginalized and
effectively useless style for jet-setting anarcho-wannabes.
Dumpster diving
therefore, like deep breathing exercises, should simply be one
of many habits that focus your awareness to more holistic forms
of social existence. Combine it with growing your own food, making
your own clothes, creating your own art, and generating your own
electricity. Do this and you may have just created an unstoppable
revolutionary tide. Who knows, maybe there’s an epiphany
waiting somewhere for you in the bottom of a dumpster
Ben
Ruggles is a farmer and cultural radical who has been liberating
trash for six years.
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