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

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

Standard consumption affords no such touchstones. Brand-new full-price items just reflect consumers back upon themselves.

Is religion a source of charity? Check, albeit mostly inadvertent. Strangers transfer souvenirs into our safekeeping without intending to, neither knowing nor caring who we are. By becoming their beneficiaries, we transform them into benefactors. We transform their loss and their waste into generosity. Thus we redeem them from themselves.

Is religion a way to heal the world?

Is religion surrender? Check. In a consumer culture, choosing not to choose is brave. No towels in your bathroom match, and some who visit you might actually care. The scavenger surrenders to the magic and, depending on your level of commitment, the cruel humor of the random. One day when you are out and it turns very cold and you are unprepared, you notice, through the window of a laundromat, a box of items which, unclaimed after a few weeks in the lost-and-found, the manager put out. The box says FREE. Along with insubstantial slips and single socks you find a heavy sweatshirt. It says FIREMEN HAVE LONGER HOSES. It is clean. You're cold. Six hours remain before you can go home. You put it on. Another day, two guys are handing out free bookbags on the college campus near your job. The bookbags bear the logo of the college polyamory club. You are not polyamorous. But these are well-made bags, the right size and shape for your gym gear. Passersby will misread you and misinterpret you, based on the bag.

You might not mind. The most committed scavenger would say: I must not mind. Is this religion?

Other scavenging commandments:

Don't break laws.

Don't be aggressive or abusive.

Don't leave messes in your wake.

Don't harm plants, animals or people.

Don't endanger your safety or health.

Don't gross yourself out just to prove a point.

Don't be a parasite.

Don't mooch.

Consumer culture is a shiny sparkly whirling waste-producing world-engulfing pick-your-favorite-product fusillade at hyperspeed, nonstop.

We wish not to participate. Except to follow, gathering detritus, in its wake.

We might look like consumers but no: We are the fringe-dwellers, the bottom-feeders, living in the realm of never-knowing. We are the revelers and rescuers out here among the lost and the abandoned and the trashed, the designated-worthless which we pluck and scrub and sometimes love.

We know what is worth what.

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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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