The Scavenger's Manifesto: Why Dumpster Diving Can Save You from Going Off the Deep End

By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet. Posted March 21, 2009.

I last bought an umbrella thirteen years ago in Hong Kong. Since then, I have found them: striped ones, plain ones, plaid ones, flowered ones, large, small, fold-up or not. One replicates a painting by Renoir. Their former owners left them behind on benches and buses, leaning against walls under pay phones and ATMs. I buy my groceries at discount stores, bruised fruit marked down. Faced with a choice, I always ask: Is there a way to do this/get this/eat this legally for free? I have been this way all my life. It is a reflex. Not scavenging feels unnatural.

To me, ten dollars is a lot.

How can I tell consumers this? Here's what they see: In one sense, nothing. In one sense, we are invisible. But when they search, they see: Scavengers touch the ground. How gross. Who dares finger the sidewalk and the street? The scavenger as vector. Roaches, rats and vultures spring to mind — and football teams are not named after them.

We do not spend enough to please consumers. Worse, we do not spend at all. Consumer culture hates this. We touch trash. Consumer culture fears this. We think for themselves. Consumer culture hates and fears this most of all.

Scavengers are the last scapegoats in an almost-open-minded world.

We're freaks.

No matter how or why we scavenge, even if we’re just re-using Christmas ribbon or picking fruit from branches that overhang the sidewalk, we are radical. Without half trying, we are capitalism's naughty children, sprinting through the gate. By rejecting the standard retail cycle, scavengers reverse the basic order of consumerthink, which is: want-get. From infancy, consumers learn that whatever they want, they get. Must. Will. Right now. For scavengers, however, it's get-want. We find whatever, then decide whether we want it. Then — take it. Or leave it for a later scavenger. Committing yourself to not buying things full-price mandates having to wait. That is: waiting until something approximating your desire surfaces at the local thrift shop, yard sale, swap. It might mean waiting for the seeds on those strawberries and tomatoes you buried in your backyard to sprout. You just get used to waiting. While you wait, you realize how little you really need.

We do not expect to get everything we want.

Thus we want less.

We always get something, sooner or later. But in flipping the equation, in embracing want-get, scavengers trade choice for chance. We trade control for the lightning flash of surprise.

We sing their anthem backwards. No wonder we scare them.

Broke a shoelace? Ran out of giftwrap? Consumers replace lost or broken things right now with perfect replicas, brand-new, full-price. Not us. Scavengers improvise. For us, absent and broken things are hassles but brain-teasers too. Wrap presents in calendar pages. Knot the shoelace, or replace it with wire, yarn or dental floss.

Repurpose. Found something you think is useless? Use it. Cut-up mousepads become coasters. Doors are tabletops. Trophies, bolted to walls, are coat-hooks. Bandannas make dandy halter tops. Ever resourceful, scavengers plumb inner strengths. I am emerging from the rummage sale with seven white porcelain sake cups, a map of Uruguay, a pillowcase embroidered by someone sometime somewhere, and a baking pan shaped like a guitar. What will I do with these, and when? Scavenging links us to each other, to all former owners and all future owners of whatever we have now.

Yet ultimately we are on our own. Scavenging forces us to feel and act and think. I was out walking when a thought occurred to me which I longed to write down. I had no utensil, no pad. I was miles of sterile suburban sidewalk from the nearest store. I found a paper clip. I tore part of an outdated announcement from a phone pole. Unbending the clip, I scratched my thought with it into the blank side of the paper. Later, held up to the light at home, the letters revealed themselves like cuneiform.

 I know: absurd. I do not ask you to admire this. I only ask you not to mock it.

The dictionary defines economics as the study of "the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services." What's missing from that picture? Um — what comes after consumption? Mainstream economic theory has glossed over this bothersome detail for centuries. It went like this: Consumer buys product. Consumer brings product home. Consumer consumes product. The end.

But hey: Will that consumer utilize that product forever, until the end of time? Of course not. Eventually, in five minutes or fifty years, the product — providing we are not talking about food or drink here — will become broken and/or outdated and/or unwanted and/or its owner will die, and/or sundry other eventualities could occur which land that item in the trash.

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Anneli Rufus is the author of several books, most recently The Scavenger's Manifesto (Tarcher Press, 2009). Read more of Anneli's writings on scavenging at scavenging.wordpress.com.

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