Gleaning: post-consumption vs pre-consumption environmentalism plus a short vegan critique

The current mainstream approach to environmentalism focuses on dealing with waste after it has been created. Gleaning takes a step or two back using a pre-consumption type of environmentalism. Instead of participating in the established conventions of consumption and creating more waste that needs to be dealt with, gleaning uses the products and packaging that is already there.

By recovering and re-using waste, gleaners can minimise (as best they can) the amount of space taken up in landfill and at the same time reduce the need for creating more products. In this way gleaning does address waste management in a post-consumption way but also traces back to the roots of the waste and refuses to create a demand for the use of more resources and production methods.

As lifestyle-based activism, gleaning can be an extension of or detraction from other forms of lifestyle-based activism or even something entirely different. The current wave of pop activism is of recycling, low-energy light globes and water-saving shower heads. Instead of analysing the consequences of changing our patterns of consumption and resource use, we just utilise minor solutions to environmental problems. Gleaning offers something outside of government campaigns and post-consumption environmentalism. At this point, the limits of gleaning as a mass movement appear because of its “outside the system” nature. Would you ever hear a Liberal or Labor government tell people not to buy things? Hypothetically, if they were to promote gleaning what would be the nature of gleaning? People would glean to the point that there would be nothing left to glean and then would have to go back to buying products. However, by that point, views held by society would see a transition to the production of goods through more ecologically sustainable methods than they did before there was a mass consciousness of gleaning as an environmental solution. From an environmentalist based viewpoint, that will be a complete success in minimising waste.

Of other lifestyle-based forms of activism, gleaning confronts veganism and heavily critiques vegan philosophy. A friend and I in a discussion one day came up with the term “post-vegan” to describe a form of lifestyle that incorporates other factors rather than simply not eating or wearing animal products. We came to a similar conclusion that is made by the “freegans” - that although veganism may help to stop the killing and abuse of animals it doesn’t necessarily address other issues that should be considered when deciding what food to eat and materials to wear, etc. Without considering other factors, vegan food is generally made with the same waste and exploitation of resources as non-vegan food. This includes sweatshop labour, the destruction of eco-systems from pollutants or the use of the land and the costs on the environment caused by the transportation of vegan goods. The somewhat freegan manifesto, Why Freegan? (2000) makes the interesting point that “vegan packaging doesn’t take up less room in landfill”. Consumer vegans are still complicit in these forms of exploitation through monetary support, something that gleaners are not.