Freegans Invade CosmoGIRL! Magazine

Me, a Dumpster Diver, in CosmoGIRL! Magazine?

This is the strange, but true story of how I ended up in CosmoGIRL! Magazine's September 2008 issue. I'm involved with Freeganism and dumpster diving. I've been dumpster diving for years and I also helped organize workshops on it at Wesleyan for the annual Food Politics Week.

I work (and play) with a group of New York City activists who identify as Freegans and who contribute to Freegan living spaces, events, services, and a popular website dedicated to promoting Freeganism in the U.S., www.freegan.info.

The Freegans in NYC have been spotted in the mainstream media several times over the past few years, with one member making it onto Oprah and another being featured in Life and Style. When the organizers who act as media coordinators for the NYC Freegan group got an inquiry from CosmoGIRL! about doing a piece on Freeganism, they jumped at the chance to expose the magazine's demographic to the philosophy and practice of Freeganism. I'm one of the youngest members of the group (and I'm, like, totally the most stylish), so a couple members asked me to be in the piece. I thought it was a silly idea, but I understood the implication very clearly: national coverage for a "fringe" movement. I agreed to take CosmoGIRL! up on the offer.

I found out later when CosmoGIRL! contacted me that I was to take a photographer from the magazine dumpster diving so that she could snap shots of me in action. The location for the photo shoot was to be Chinatown. The time was set for midday. It seemed like the worst time and place to go dumpster diving possible in the NYC area and I despaired of finding anything worthwhile. It turned out that the dumpsters we peered into were filled with nice clothes, books, shoes, cooking supplies, and a variety of other useful implements. I was pretty surprised to find so many things and pleased that the photographer would be capturing some candid moments.

She used a lot of film taking pictures of me, but only one shot made the cut: me standing atop a dumpster outside a public housing project in the Lower East Side, looking tough in my black jeans and shiny purple belt.

Naturally, all the friends I've shown the magazine to have cracked up laughing. A word to those who don't know me: I'd probably be voted "Least Likely to Be in CosmoGIRL!" -- if such a designation existed in high school year books. (And for another thing, I don't even identify anywhere close to whatever a CosmoGIRL is supposed to be! I'm gender-queer and probably one of the queerest looking people they've ever had in the magazine.)

But, despite laughing along with my friends, I have to say that I hope that the CosmoGIRL! piece does more than amuse. I hope that it exposes a generation of young consumers to Freeganism. I look forward to seeing more people, from fifteen-year-old CosmoGIRLs to young activists to suburban kids looking for fun, reclaiming trash from the curbside, the dumpster, and the local dump.

I personally think that dumpster divers are excavating the future in our society. We're seeing the effects of runaway consumption and a crisis of overproduction first-hand. It's a fascinating movement, Freeganism, and worth checking out if you're interested in environmental activism, anti-consumerism, alternative economics, and all kinds of other yummy foods-for-thought. For many activists in on this end of the spectrum, it seems that becoming a practicing Freegan is the next step towards realizing their political, social, and environmental views.

In addition to doing to the photo shoot, I submitted a short essay about Freeganism to CosmoGIRL!. For spatial considerations they cut the piece down quite a lot. Here you can read my full response to CosmoGIRL!'s inquiries about Freeganism. This is what I originally sent to them:

I got involved with Freeganism in high school in Los Angeles and I have been something of a Freegan activist throughout college (at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT). I have organized workshops on Dumpster diving and I recently finished a short documentary film on the subject of waste at wealthy colleges, Operation Ivy: Dumpster Diving at Elite Colleges. I started writing a book in one of my classes this Spring with the working title: Trash Tells: Waste, Recycling, and Redemption in America. I’m writing about what our trash says about our society and how we can rethink (and hopefully reduce) waste, over-consumption, and disposability.

This year I co-coordinated a waste-reduction program at my college called Waste Not! Our team of students collects stuff that students would likely discard at the end of finals week, sorts it, and stores it in a building on campus. At the beginning of the Spring semester, we’ll hold a huge tag sale so that students can buy back stuff they need for their dorms (lamps, alarm clocks, rugs…) for a cheaper price. We’ll donate the proceeds to local organizations. Last year, we donated hundreds of dollars to a local food pantry and an environmental organization.

Freeganism is a portmanteau, a pun on the words “free” and “vegan.” While it’s an amusing word, it has some important meanings for me and other people who have chosen the freegan way of life. We believe that people should be able to meet their basic needs without harming the environment, other people, or animals. We see shopping as a potentially political act, and at least a social act, within a global, corporate consumer culture. We live in a consumer culture dependent on over-consumption and waste. Freegans reduce waste by reclaiming, repairing, and refashioning discarded items and consuming what would otherwise be thrown away, in turn decreasing the need to produce and purchase new items.

Many of my close friends are skilled at remaking discarded stuff into all kinds of marvelous ‘new’ things. A few of my friends circuit-bend old children’s toys to make ‘new’ electronic instruments. My friend, Katie Shelly, makes jewelry from trashed computer circuit boards. Several of my friends are involved with the Freegan Bike Workshop in Brooklyn, a dingy and amazingly friendly place where you can fix up your bike with spare parts and supplies for, you guessed it, free. Many of my friends show me what the D.I.Y. ethic means every week, whether you want to describe what they do ‘Freeganism’ or ‘Dumpster diving’ and I’m inspired to keep on finding new uses for old things and spreading not just an anti-consumerist message but a pro-active practice of trash reclamation and waste reduction.

** I should mention as a side note that the word “Dumpster” is capitalized in many texts because it actually refers to a proprietary model of trash can developed by two guys named the Dempster brothers.
FREEGANS IN THE MEDIA

Adam Weissman on Life and Style TV http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqHhQGI-5KY

Madeline on Oprahhttp://www.oprah.com/slideshow/oprahshow/oprahshow1_ss_20080227/1