Building a future

OneWorld UK

By Daniel Nelson

Garbage Warrior is a genuinely inspiring documentary about a maverick US architect with an experimental approach to building.

As director Oliver Hodge says, former US vice president Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was a badly needed landmark film, "but only makes us aware of the issues. Bar advising us to change our light bulbs, it does not really provide any radical solutions.

"We wanted to encourage people to act, not just tell them not what to do, or what they are doing wrong.

"We wanted to offer them real solutions on a local human scale so they can be inspired to change their behaviour, and to feel on an individual level that they are capable of changing the world."

His film tracks some of architect Mike Reynolds' ups and downs. Using beer cans and trial-and-error to construct unconventional homes in a strip of New Mexico desert Reynolds and his crew built an energy-independent community, unconnected to centralised power and water utilities. ("If you create your own electricity, heating and water systems, you create your own politics. Maybe that's what they're afraid of", says Reynolds.)

Threatened by a change of guard in the planning authority, which withdraws his architect's licence and now views his independence and unconventionality as a dangerous challenge, he is forced to don tie and suit to lobby the state legislature for a "sustainable building test site". ("If you want permission to do something different, you first have to prove that works. To do that you have to break the law. It's a Catch-22 situation.")

He is defeated by a last-minute filibuster. All looks lost. But in response to the Indian Ocean tsunami he and the crew fly to the Andaman and Nicobar islands to show survivors how tyres, plastic bottles and bamboo can build a house that provides its own drinking water, sanitation and airconditioning. ("Tsunami warning systems are put in after tsunamis, security is tightened after terrorist attacks, and we'll deal with global warming after it happens.")

Back home he is still stymied, but seizes the opportunity presented by Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans to try again to win approval for legislation that would enable his experimental work to continue. His lobbying leads to an exciting climax as the vote is taken.

The hands-on commitment, honesty and exuberance of the house-building scenes are counterbalanced by the frustrating wheeler-dealing, lack of imaginatio and vested interests of the legislative process. Without preaching, by simply showing us the faces, words and body-language of officials and politicians who live in their own closed bureaucratic world, the film vividly conveys the negative response that faces every innovator, in every country, and at every time. ("We have lots of people on the planet who can't see beyond the rulebook.")

Does Mike Reynolds get the law changed? Do his "Earthships" work, despite some early disasters as when the heat entering one house through the front windows is enough to fry an egg? Does he think the race to evolve housing design in time to help prevent climate change will be won? See for yourself.

* Garbage Warrior