DailyGood

For the last 27 years, DailyGood newsletters have offered a daily email that inspires you to respond to life with creativity and kindness. To join a community of 148,961 subscribers, subscribe here.

Jun 30, 2007

"If you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days." --Annie Dillard

Not Buying It: The Freegan Movement

The day after New York University's class of 2007 graduated, about 15 men and women assembled in front of an N.Y.U. dormitory. They had come to take advantage of the university's end-of-the-year move-out, when students'discarded items are loaded into big green trash bins by the curb. Ben Ibershoff, a dapper man wearing two bowler hats, unearthed a Sharp television. Autumn Brewster, found a painting of a Mediterranean harbor. Most people were there in response to a posting on the website freegan.info. The site provides information and listings for the growing subculture of anticonsumerists who call themselves freegans, and is the closest thing their movement has to an official voice. According to this NY Times article, for its members it serves as a guide to negotiating life, and making a home, in a world they see as hostile to their values.