Waste? Not! Want! What?

Paul Weideman | The New Mexican

4/10/2008 - 4/11/08

For more than 30 years, Michael Reynolds has been refining the self-sustaining, off-the-grid homes he calls Earthships in the Taos area. He has always been considered an outsider architect building unorthodox dwellings in remote locales, but his time may have arrived.

Although Reynolds has been dealing with sustainability imperatives for decades, in the new millennium, the worldwide alarm over climate change has stimulated intense interest in everything "green." This architect's hard-earned knowledge in the realm of green building is at center stage in the Oliver Hodge film Garbage Warrior. The title refers to Reynolds' modus operandi: building walls out of cultural detritus, with earth as a binder.

Garbage Warrior opens with aerial shots of the Earthship subdivision that Reynolds calls Greater World Community and footage of its leader using a sledgehammer to pound dirt into tires that are stacked into walls along with discarded beer cans and plastic water bottles.

Reynolds studied architecture at the University of Cincinnati but soon began to think that most of what architects did had little to do with people, what they needed, and what the Earth needed. The set of principles and techniques he evolved (and terms Earthship Biotecture) was based on an awareness that Earth's finite resources are overused. His houses would have no power, water, or gas lines coming in and no sewage lines going out.

The Earthship owner collects and stores rainwater, grows and raises food, heats the home and generates electricity using sunlight and wind, and disposes of waste with graywater and blackwater treatment.

That's the situation, ideally. In the film we learn that Earthships have, to a large extent, been experimental, but for Reynolds, progress comes from making mistakes.

Earthships are strange, organic-looking structures. Many of the film's scenes are construction-oriented, and the dirty-hands aspect is echoed in Reynolds' language, which is sometimes a little salty for a film about architecture. The older Earthships have an industrial character, reminiscent of the dilapidated buildings in an old mining town. The newer ones can be quite beautiful. Several scenes show interiors made magical by light coming through the bottoms of hundreds of colored glass bottles in the mud walls.

At one point Reynolds offers another angle to the logic behind his cobbling together cans, bottles, and tires with local mud to make dwellings. "My dad saved everything in the basement," he recalls. "Every mayonnaise jar we'd ever used was down there. He didn't really have uses for it; he just said it's too good to throw away."

That habit provides the building materials for Earthships. But these dwellings are extremely labor-intensive, and the reason it all comes together is that, as Reynolds' wife, Chris, puts it, "Mike's biggest obsession is work."

The fuel for all that work and experimentation is a passion shared by the members of his building crew. Reynolds' foreman, identified only as Phil, talks about how his little daughter "doesn't know the difference between this house and a conventional home like I grew up in. It's just part of her that the house takes care of her and supplies power and heats itself and has plants that provide food, and that the water comes from the roof. She knows all that; she thinks that's the way it is, and that's the way everybody needs to think."

Oliver Hodge was already concerned about sustainability and dwindling resources when he met Reynolds, but his appreciation of the emergency of the situation was inflamed by the architect's fervor.

Hodge worked on models, props, and special effects for films including Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Sleepy Hollow, and Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace. "I've worked on a lot of movies but hadn't done it myself," he said by telephone from his home in England. "This was the first film I've made, and I didn't know where I was going with it."

The director initially planned a 40-minute piece for television — but that was going to be about an Earthship project in Brighton, England.

"Mike went to Brighton in 2003, at the invitation of a group of British eco-builders who wanted to duplicate one of his buildings," Hodge said. "It proved that these buildings work over here in this climate. Four years later, the Brighton planners approved 16 more of these Earthship buildings as a little village.

"I filmed the building of the British Earthship just up the road from me, then I kept going out to New Mexico to tie it in, and after a while I thought the New Mexico story was the strongest part of it. Once Mike's urgency fed through to me, I kind of understood he's on this mission, till he drops dead, really. He's 62 now, and he's still doing it. Mike and his crew are finally being recognized, that they're not a bunch of crazy hippies. What they're achieving now with buildings having a $100-a-year utility bill makes so much sense."

Garbage Warrior tells the whole story, though, and Earthships haven't always worked. Sometimes the experimental buildings were too hot inside or the roofs leaked. There were lawsuits by a few owners, and Reynolds' problems mounted when the Taos County planning department began cracking down on code issues. He ultimately lost his architect's license.

The reason for this is given by Shauna Malloy, an attorney for the New Mexico Board of Examiners for Architects: "Standardized design and construction is so important because it means safety."

The crackdown brought drastic change to the Greater World Community. As Chris Reynolds puts it, "We lost the ability to dream an idea and do it the next day."

In November 2004, Michael Reynolds donned a suit and entered unfamiliar territory, taking his mission to the New Mexico Legislature. Much of the story in the film, up to this point, has been told in retrospect, but now Hodge tracks Reynolds' attempts to establish legal footing for the Earthship strategy as the drama unfolds.

In the midst of the legal proceedings, Reynolds and his crew travel to the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, west of Thailand, a region that has suffered a devastating earthquake and tsunami. There they work with local people to build an Earthship using bottles, tires, bamboo, and dirt. Later, in 2005, they go to Matamoros, Mexico, to build a structure for survivors of Hurricane Rita.

Overall, this is a satisfying and illuminating documentary film. The viewer benefits from Hodge's decision to paint the picture with a broad brush. "I could have done much more about the day-to-day life of these people," he said. "In the old days Mike had a lot of problems in terms of getting the community set up, but I think now the Greater World Community has bankers and all kinds of regular people and it seemed to me the wider political story was really what was going to sell. My thing was to get the film out there to as wide an audience as possible, so people can see an interesting story and pick up stuff about sustainability along the way. We're achieving that, because the film is going to festivals all over the world."

The Garbage Warrior DVD includes 40 minutes of extra features. One of these is an interview with the late actor and environmentalist Dennis Weaver, who built what is probably the world's largest Earthship as his home in Ridgway, Colorado, in the 1980s.

details

Garbage Warrior
8 p.m. Friday, April 11 & 11:30 a.m. and Saturday,
April 12; Michael Reynolds in attendance
CCA Cinematheque, 1050 Old Pecos Trail
$9, $8 students, $7.50 seniors, $7 12 and under; 982-1338