Freeganism: thinking outside the capitalist box

This article about the growing "freegan" movement in New York is #1 most emailed on NYTimes.com. (Freegans, according to freegan.info, can be defined as "people who employ alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources. Freegans embrace community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing in opposition to a society based on materialism, moral apathy, competition, conformity, and greed.")

According to Bob Torres, a sociology professor at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., who is writing a book about the animal rights movement — which shares many ideological positions with freeganism — the freegan movement has become much more visible and increasingly popular over the past year, in part as a result of growing frustrations with mainstream environmentalism.

Environmentalism, Mr. Torres said, “is becoming this issue of, consume the right set of green goods and you’re green,” regardless of how much in the way of natural resources those goods require to manufacture and distribute.

“If you ask the average person what can you do to reduce global warming, they’d say buy a Prius,” he added.

I may not be all over dumpster-diving, but there's certainly some thought-provoking stuff here about how incredibly wasteful our society is, and how much capitalism is really a part of that.

Wikipedia has more about freeganism here.