Garbage Warrior Is An Inspiration

I'm just just back from the videotheque at the EIFF delegate centre, and I have to recommend a documentary - Garbage Warrior.

Michael Reynolds is a maverick architect who, having decided early on that his training was "worthless," has devoted his career to experimenting and developing eco-buildings that are totally self-sufficient.

The planet is in crisis, and Reynolds is just trying to survive. What's more he wants everyone to start rethinking about the buildings we live in. His message is that they are simply one of the biggest contributors to energy waste in our society and fixing them can help reduce environmental hardship for future generations and free ourselves from unnecessary financial burdens. "We need to be doing something now. Tomorrow morning," he drawls, with characteristic sense of urgency.

Since the Seventies, Reynolds and his motley team of builders, have been creating earthships in the sparce desert of New Mexico. He lives in one himself. The fantastical-looking buildings are completely off-the-grid. No incoming sewage pipes. No water pipes. No electricity lines. He designs his buildings to make greatest use of available energy from light, wind and rainwater. They are freeformed shapes, using curved earth walls and multicoloured bottle domes, and have weird stuff like propellers pointing out of them.

He reuses materials that would end up in landfill - tires, cans, glass and plastic bottles. This detritus of consumer society, mixed in with simple materials like dirt, becomes the walls, ceilings and floors. The buildings are so effective that, even when temperatures out in the New Mexico desert drop below minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit and "your tongue can freeze to your lips," he and his wife Chris still live comfortably. Quite a feat.

The building "experiments" don't always work. One house built into the side of a mountain, was so well heated by the sun that the plastic on a family heirloom typewriter started to melt. But each time the team of eco-builders learn and improve their techniques.

The grizzled Reynolds with his shaggy, grey hair might seem your archetypal ageing hippy, but he's great company as he articulates his passion for sustainable living, with a mischievous sense of humour.

Oliver Hodge's judiciously edited point-of-view piece grows in strength as it follows Reynold's protracted struggle with the local and state authorities who shut down his community of "earthships," in 1997, for building code contraventions. Reynold's response, having been robbed of his livelihood, credentials and self-respect, is to suit up and take his battle to the State Senate, with a mixtured of bloody-minded determination and zealous conviction.

Although the film only touches on the official issues with Reynolds's architectural inventions, it is a story well told and the good-humoured warrior at the centre is an inspiration.

I liked it so much I bought tickets for my parents to it. See it on Sunday 7.10pm and Monday 7.30pm at Cineworld.