An Essay Review of On Dumpster Diving

I found the essay On Dumpster Diving by Lars Eighner quite by accident. I opened my anthology and it was just there. I’m glad it was one I turned to. Lars writes of his homelessness and his dog, “Lizbeth”. He engages me by first telling the rules and regulations of the proper dumpster diver, what is edible and usable and what items should be left. Then he compares the non-traditional “can-diver” to the true scavenger. The can diver, he says, is there only for the money and stirs everything in the dumpster up making it harder to find the truly good items like the new pair of shoes. Lars also says the can divers he’s seen have the audacity to go through individual containers in front of peoples homes, something a true diver would never think of.

I read a bit deeper into the essay and see that he finds out about people as a whole by what they throw away and he talks of how as a society, our garbage says a lot about us. He finds prescriptions and diaries and things we throw out that if we were to let any other person see, we’d be embarrassed. He says there “..is no value in the abstract..” when one is homeless so he only keeps items that are reusable. I think one of the reasons that he has an issue with the can divers is by their going through individual cans of garbage, the process becomes much more personal and that may be why he shuns that method of acquisition. By going through only the large dumpsters he is able to distance himself from individuals. I think he makes this point where he says “I avoid trying to draw conclusions about the people who dump in the Dumpsters I frequent”. He also talks of that distance being ethical as he does also see their bills and letters.

The most interesting point of the essay is the last paragraph where Lars compares himself to the ultra-wealthy. The treasureable baubles he finds are passed by since he knows that similar to the very rich, there are many more from where that came. It is all of us that are in between those two stations in life that have a need for the tangible. As I think of how he’s written the last paragraph, I relate it to my own place. There is always something that I need, a new CD or gallon of gas or pair of shoes, and it is always money that stands in the way of that new large screen LCD TV. His analysis is it is the truly rich or the truly poor who don’t want or need. I think of pictures of homes of the truly rich, not the millionaires as they are a dime a dozen, but the billionaires. When I see photos of their homes I see a starkness, large rooms without the gaudy and perhaps that is the comparison that Lars makes, that he and the super-rich don’t need the items the rest of us do, he can just go out and find them.