UnderwoodGarbageWarrior

Garbage Warrior

To be completely honest, I watched this film because Mike Reynolds is one of my architectural heroes, so I may be a bit biased when talking about this movie. It’s called Garbage Warrior, was directed by Oliver Hodge, and released in 2007, so it’s pretty recent. Basically, the film is about Mike Reynolds, and his efforts to build sustainable architecture. He builds houses called ‘Earthships,’ which are made of garbage, mostly tires, cans and bottles. These houses are completely self sufficient—they don’t need heating or electricity, they gather their own water, and have their own sewage systems. I think they’re genius, but not everyone thinks so, and that’s the problem.

Mike Reynolds has figured out a lot to make the houses self-sufficient. He’s figured out that you should orient windows to the south for solar gain. He’s realized that packing tires with dirt gives them thermal mass, which retains heat all year long. He’s figured out how to build houses that stay 70˚ F all year long, summer and winter, without heating or cooling. But he hasn’t figured everything out yet, the houses do have problems. In order to be able to solve these problems, he needs to be able to experiment, because there isn’t a pre-existing knowledge base for him to draw from. However, legal systems don’t really like the idea of experimental housing.

Mike lost his architecture license, because he had to break a lot of laws to build his Earthship communities. In November 1997, an injunction was issued to stop the communities from building, and the settlements were later ruled illegally conveyed in breach of planning law. The problem is that subdivision laws require roads, sewage, water, electricity, and the like. These are all things that Earthships don’t need, so the communities were built without them. After a legal process that took seven years and thousands of dollars, they were finally allowed to build in their communities again, but they weren’t allowed to do any experimenting. They had to build based on what they already knew. This is a problem because they can’t gain any new knowledge without experimenting.

Mike decided to draft a new law that would allow for testing of experimental building, and he took this law to the 47th Legislative Session of New Mexico. He spent days there, going through torturously long legal processes, only to have his bill not even reach the table for a vote due to filibustering. This is a clear example of our legal system as a sustainability problem. Our legal system is too slow to be able to deal with issues like global warming. Some of the lawyers in the film said that it’s fast if a bill is passed in three or four years, and average if it takes seven. That’s just too long when things are changing daily. There’s also a lot of corruption and stall tactics, like the filibustering. Aside from that, there’s the huge bureaucracy that’s involved. In architecture we have a saying that design by committee is the death of design, and it seems like it’s the same with the legal system. If you have too many people involved, it takes way too long and is too difficult to really do anything. That’s what our legal system has become, a huge system with too many people that can’t make quick action because no one can agree on anything. To accomplish anything legally, you need to know someone on the inside, which really isn’t how it should be. The legal system is also way too influenced by big corporations, which is made apparent by the senators telling Mike that his proposal would cause problems with the electric companies.

In 2005, Mike and some of his crew went to the Anduman Islands to help rebuild after they were devastated by a tsunami. They didn’t even have water, because salt water had flooded all their wells. Mike came in and introduced the idea of building houses from tires and bottles, and they loved it. Their government and engineers were honestly excited by his ideas, and all the villagers pitched in to help him. They built an Earthship in fourteen days. A big part of why the people were so open to his ideas was because of the tsunami. They were seeing, in the aftermath, how the system that had been in place didn’t work, so they were willing and eager to have new things, new ideas, new building types. If we could have that mind set here, we could get a lot more accomplished on all the sustainability issues that often get pushed aside because people don’t want to change the way they live.

After that, in 2006, Mike re-presented his law to the New Mexico legislature, but it was voted down again. Later that year, Hurricane Rita hit Mexico, and Mike again went to help the people rebuild. Because of his work in disaster areas, the U.S. Board of Architects invited Mike to reapply for his architecture license, and in 2007, his law was finally passed by New Mexico.

I personally thought this film was wonderful. I thought at first that it would just be about cool, sustainable architecture, but it really makes clear the problems within our legal system, and just people’s attitudes in general. A major problem we will have to face is people’s “everything’s fine, I don’t want to think about it” mind sets. His accomplishments, both in architecture and in the legal system, give me a lot of hope for my own career, because this is the type of architecture that I want to create. I really think anyone could watch this film and get a lot out of it, because what he’s doing is really different, and really interesting. Maybe lawyers shouldn’t watch it, because they aren’t portrayed so nicely in the film, but then again, maybe they need to watch it, to see what kind of problems our legal system (which includes them) creates.

I definitely encourage everyone to check out some of Mike’s architecture, because it’s freaking awesome ([]). I also looked up New York State buiding codes ([]) and found that Earthships may be difficult to get permits to build in New York, although I’m not very fluent at reading legal documents, so I don’t know exactly how hard it would be. There would definitely be issues with the fact that they don’t need utilities, like they encountered in New Mexico, and there were also some definitions of what the structure needs to be like that Earthships may not fully meet. If they could change laws in New Mexico though, we can do it here too.