Garbage Warrior

I just watched an excellent film "Garbage Warrior" which I'd love to share my recommendation for everyone to watch. The film is about architect Michael Reynolds who, for 30 years in New-Mexico, he and his team have designed and constructed "Earthships", autonomous homes that are on the verge of being completely environmentally self-sustaining. Reynolds initially began experimenting on his own home with rammed-earth in car tires as wall structures as well as regular cans or bottles cemented into the walls. The houses would use indigenous materials to the whole planet while reusing wasteful materials whenever possible. They would also generate their own utilities such as electricity, hydro, even food! This makes the homes nearly independent from the “grid” so they would be less vulnerable following natural disasters or dependable on expensive, dirty or sometimes non-sustainable resources. The earthships would finally be able to be constructed by the average person. The documentary followed Reynolds and his team to Indonesia following the tsunami disaster as well as three other countries, where locals were quickly able to grasp the low-tech construction of the homes, making habitation cheaply accessible to everyone, in theory.

A big part of the film reveals how (literally) dormant and antiquated the American legislative system is and how entwined it has become to corporate businesses, to the point where changes in legislation is nearly impossible. Reynold's lobbying for the right to make a sustainable living site is repeatedly annulled by the State through subversive means, maintaining suburbia's ongoing choke hold on the environmental crisis. One last great feature of the film is that 80% of the cars filmed run on vegetable oil!

Watch this film, it renews some of the profession's integrity that many of our "starchitects" have pissed away over the past couple decades.

Trailer:


Design Principles for an Earthship:


+Earthship Biotecture website
+Walrus Magazine Article "The Earthship has Landed", and bidding the Postmodern Horse Adieu