the rhapsodic cineaste

“The American Dream, in my opinion, is in the toilet. It’s history. It’s gone. The American Dream is now how do we survive the future. It’s not having an eight bedroom home with eleven bathrooms. It’s not having the career and a lawn and all of the amenities. It is simply how do our children and our children’s children even have a chance at life.” – Michael Reynolds

Garbage Warrior wears its bias on its sleeve. A documentary about architect Michael Reynolds, the film is largely told from Reynolds’s point of view. It champions the architect’s perspective, it advocates his ideology.

The film’s not really a white-wash though. We see that Reynolds can be abrasive, dismissive of authority and that some of his designs are dysfunctional. We learn that there have been angry clients and lots of lawsuits.

To be clear though, with Garbage Warrior director Oliver Hodge is evangelizing on Reynolds’s behalf. Either you accept the designer’s belief that climate change, dwindling natural resources and overpopulation are potentially catastrophic or you don’t. If you accept Reynolds’s thesis, the film is a call to action, a blueprint for sustainable living. If not, well then Reynolds and his designs probably come across as sheer lunacy.

Though not really the focus of the documentary, it’s impossible to talk about Reynolds, or Garbage Warrior without discussing his creations, dubbed earthships. So what exactly is an earthship, anyway?

An earthship is essentially a passive solar home, situated for maximum southern exposure. The home’s south face is usually glass, and absorbs light from the sun. The earthship’s foundation, using principles of thermal mass, consists of old cans, plastic bottles and tires. The tires are filled with “rammed earth,” dirt tightly packed with a sledge hammer. When filled with as much mass as possible, the stacked tires are plastered in adobe.

Using these innovative techniques, earthship’s both capture and store the sun’s energy. Without heating or cooling systems, the homes traditionally remain a consistent 68° F, regardless of the external temperature.

Reynolds and a rebel gang of misfits and malcontents have been building these homes outside of Taos, New Mexico, where land is cheap and unconnected to the utility grid. Through the use of solar panels and grey water recycling systems, earthships can effectively remain off-the-grid, and free from utility payments.

Much of Garbage Warrior focuses on Reynolds as he battles county and state government to build earthship communities free from zoning laws. Flagrantly disregarding the law, he is stripped of his architectural licenses. And Taos County closes one of his earthship developments for code violations.

In the film, government employees claim that these were good faith efforts designed to keep the community safe. Other participants suggest that utility companies, threatened by the potential loss of revenue, successfully lobbied against Reynolds and his communities. I suspect one’s opinion about the state’s true motivations largely depends on one’s political philosophy. The film does offer a hint to the director’s opinion though.

After the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and subsequent tsunami that claimed more than 200,000 lives and displaced more than one million people, Reynolds and his team traveled to the Andaman Islands. Presented as a contrast to Reynolds’s fight with the New Mexican government, the Indian government is eager for any assistance and training that Reynolds can provide. Similarly, in the aftermath of Hurricane Rita, Reynolds’s crew visit Mexico, building an earthship for victims there.

In the wake of calamity, governments are only too eager for sustainable alternatives, forgoing bureaucracy to get earthships built as quickly as possible. But Reynolds’s point is that we’re all facing disaster. His mission is to build as many of these homes as possible, before we all run out of time.

I thought about Reynolds this morning as I read that Nicholas Gotelli, a professor at the University of Vermont, was invited to a debate with creationists from the ironically named Discovery Institute. Gotelli responded that:

Academic debate on controversial topics is fine, but those topics need to have a basis in reality. I would not invite a creationist to a debate on campus for the same reason that I would not invite an alchemist, a flat-earther, an astrologer, a psychic, or a Holocaust revisionist. These ideas have no scientific support, and that is why they have all been discarded by credible scholars. Creationism is in the same category.

I mention this because it reminds me of the inane pseudo-debate on climate change, in light of the potential perils we face. If we accept that catastrophic climate change has a basis in reality, with broad scientific support, it strikes me as insanity that we’d continue to simply go about our business as usual.

I have an enormous respect for former Vice President Al Gore, and the attention he’s brought to global warming with his film, An Inconvenient Truth (2006). But if you believe, as Gore does, as Reynolds does and as I do, that we are on the precipice, does it seem more intelligent to hypocritically rack up outrageous utility costs, as Gore does? Or does it make more sense fighting to build energy-independent housing, as Reynolds is doing?

Claiming that we face enormous challenge but ignoring potential solutions seems quite irresponsible to me. Garbage Warrior demonstrates that Reynolds is offering solutions, risking his reputation and livelihood to deliver them. Anything else is simply whistling past the graveyard.