At the Movies: Garbage Warrior
This documentary is centred on architect Michael Reynolds, who has been designing and constructing alternative housing for more than 30 years. He felt that architecture, as it was when he was being trained, was "worthless".
"It had nothing to do with the planet - it barely had anything to do with people and what we need."
In an effort to build houses that were cheap and sustainable, Reynolds used the materials that were plentiful and cheap - old tyres, dirt, and cans and bottles from the garbage stream, or the "goldmine" as he calls it. The houses, called Earthships, were unconventional in shape and were designed to meet all the needs of their inhabitants. They required no power from the grid, no reticulated water and no external sewage systems.
Reynolds says he wanted houses that allowed people to "take every aspect of our lives and put it into our own hands." He calls the process "making dreams happen". Over time he gathered a team of like-minded people around him and they evolved into a community called "The Greater World Community" in Taos, New Mexico.
His main motivation was originally not an environmental one, but man-made changes to the planet's environment have given his work a new focus.
"I started out with quality of life in mind, but now we're talking about survival," he says. "Now we don't have time: we need to be doing something right now, tomorrow morning. We know that we are in the process of making this planet damn near uninhabitable."
Reynolds believes that evolution happens only when mistakes are made - and his early houses had some design mistakes in them. In one instance he was summonsed to one of his Earthships by its owner because the carefully angled windows were capturing the heat so effectively that the plastic on an heirloom typewriter was beginning to melt.
The first major challenge to Reynolds' work was a bureaucratic one. The county building officials in Taos discovered that his work, and especially his free-form approach to subdivision, failed to comply with many regulations. They closed him down and removed his practising certificate.
Reynolds' response was to take on the entire New Mexico state senate. He drafted a law that would allow methods of house construction to be tested at nominated sites - just as other, less life-enhancing things have been tested in New Mexico for decades.
"I wanted to give citizens the right to step outside the law - where the information is - for a few years," he said. He dressed to please the politicians, tucked his draft law under his arm and went off to lobby support for his proposal. Of course, he failed at first.
When the Boxing Day tsunami and Hurricane Katrina changed the way some legislators and planners thought about house construction, Reynolds' radical ideas began to gain some traction. Reynolds and a team of his supporters travelled to the devastated Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal and showed the locals how to construct sustainable houses out of garbage and mud. He encountered few bureaucratic barriers there.
Garbage Warrior is nicely put together, and in places beautifully shot. Reynolds is the central subject, but his wife, Chris, and the members of The Greater World Community have their say, too. The politicians in the New Mexico state senate are all too recognisable, especially the ones who use their positions to avoid making decisions.
Who should see this movie? Well, it's thought-provoking and persuasive, so it's going to resonate with plenty of people in Golden Bay. And so it should. Good on you, Sarah, for putting it on the Village Theatre schedule.
Neil Wilson
GARBAGE WARRIOR (M). US doc. Next screening at the Village Theatre, Sunday 25 January at 5.00pm.
