Angela Fields
Environmental Yoga
10/08/15
The Garbage Warrior
Garbage Warrior is about architect Mike Reynolds and how he built self-sustaining housing in what he called an Earthship style. In my paper I will show some examples of products and ideas he used in his house designs. I will also explain the trials that Reynolds and his company went through in his processes. The bases behind the houses he built were that they could be made anywhere and would be made primary of materials that are commonly thrown away in societies today. Mike Reynolds has been working on building these sustainable houses for over 35 years primarily in the New Mexican deserts and calls his practice Earthship Biotecture. The houses he built heat themselves, provide their own water, grow their own food, recycle their own waste, have their own power source and don’t require expensive technology.
He did this because he believes that the human race is headed toward real economic troubles and worsening natural disasters from how we contribute to the environmental hardships of this planet. He does this for many reasons but also for one we can all understand and I quote he is “trying to save his butt (censored). And that is a powerful force.” He faced many challenges including: the revoking of his architect licenses, building code violations, permits, social uniformity, and some saying his houses were “cosmetically unappealing,” and simple trial and error problems as he ventured into the realm of unexplored building designs.
He says that “I feel like I’m is in a herd of buffalo, and that they are stampeding towards a 1000 foot drop off. They are just running over the edge. And I’m in that herd. And I’m like I ain’t going there! You know. I’m not going to go down that way. So I have to somehow affect the whole herd so that they will take a left turn or a right turn and not go off this edge. And so if humanity takes the planet down the tubes. Huh, I’m dead.” He feels we need to start thinking in these building terms for survival’s sake. Also if we continue on the paths that we are currently on, that the planet will be nearly uninhabitable in the future. This will happen even without great booms going off from wars, a super volcano explosion or meter crashing through our atmosphere. This change needs to happen now, if we ever hope to survive.
He would dream of rooms and house designs and then would take them to his architects who would figure out how to build them. They would use multiple ideas and find out which one would work. For example they tried to use glass bottles as tiles for bathrooms or other rooms and the final projects would turn out looking like they stain glass jewels in the walls. They would also use beer cans for bricks to build walls with. After a few trials he began to orient windows to the south to allow light into a house for heat and also solar gain for internal green houses.
They began using tires that were resilient, thermal, weather resistant, and are really strong and that wouldn’t need cement. They would beat dirt into the tires which would hold in heat using the principle of thermal mass. With the windows facing the sun, catching lower winter sunsets for heat, this would also get pulled into the tires and stored there keeping the house warm. Heating bills became a thing of the past for the people that used this house design.
With all the off grid innovations they made, they were free of the financial burden often caused by water, electric and waste bills. Not to mention the tax burden of anyone that pays taxes towards road maintenance leading to a house, or land and property tax. They bought up a good deal of land out in the New Mexican dessert and plotted it out to build many houses for people. The plots could also be used by people to build their own who wanted to own a self-sustaining house and work through the possible difficulties in their creation. They built a community that lived and grew together and worked together to live.
After requests poured in for more Earthship communities and even for cities, they bought and built on a slope in Reach, New Mexico to further test their off grid theories. Heat was an issue with some of the designs since the entire sides were being made of glass. This would bring in too much sun and heat. Clients would have to sign papers stating that they were buying the houses knowing that it was a test project and problems could come up. Lawsuits became major issues when people expected what was found in normal house designs over the radically different ones found in the Earthship ones they had signed up for. When the lawsuits started to draw the attention of the architect board, Reynolds lost his architect license.
After they rejected his license in 1990, they started looking at his previous work and claimed that he was in violation of subdivision laws by not building standardized housing. These Laws state that you must follow many expensive rules such as: you must build roads to and within the communities, provide utilities (power, water and sewage) and each person has to own their own piece of land to be considered a subdivision. People waiting to have residence within these places were declined. It seemed like everyone was against Reynolds and his company’s ideas, trying to stop him any way they could. They had to have every phase checked with the board at great cost, for the right to be known as a subdivision. For example 20,000 dollars was spent to have archeologists come out and walk around the land to check for aero heads. Reynolds said that “people just can’t see past the rulebook and what’s beyond the rulebook is global warming.” It took him 7 years to get through this bureaucracy in Tao’s county to allow the project to open again. In March 2004 the county voted to allow Reynolds’s company to build again if they followed the agreed rules.
He had to hire a specialist engineer to continue without a license. They were then made to build small unchanging houses just to keep the business going. “They had lost the freedom to fail.” Then they came up with the thought that if New Mexico can dedicate thousands of acres to test atomic bombs, why couldn’t they do it to have an area to test experimental house building techniques? They decided to try to get this bill passed in legislation. This is where it was picked apart word by word and repeatedly, wasting time and who knows how many tax dollars to get nearly nothing done Unfortunately Reynolds was nearly out of time for the bill to pass. Reynolds found one person to really listen to him Renni ‘Zee’ Zifferblatt, who was from the bill analyst judiciary committee. She went to each and every senator and pitched the bill on his behalf. Sadly, the house burned up all the time they had left, on purpose and the bill did not pass.
Around the same time the tsunami hit Indonesia in the Indian Ocean killing hundreds of thousands of people. Reynolds and his people were hit hard by the news and set off at once to help them, choosing to go to the island of Nicobar. They were taken aback when they saw the devastation, “floored” as they put it. Originally there had been 35k people living there and nearby islands, now only 7k remained.
They wanted to help with shelter, sanitation and clean water which the natives desperately needed. They used the tire brick design along with the plastic bottles as bricks. The roof they choose to put on the house would collect some of the 100 inches of rain water they receive every year. There wouldn’t be much need of community wells, each house would keep its own water and with it the water would also cool the house. The roof was also built with the 2 umbrellas principal, where one is on top of the other which would keep out some of the high heats. The natives were over joyed to have Reynolds and his friends there helping them and called the houses “magic and very beautiful.” This was unlike America where they had to fight tooth and nail to build the Earth Ships.
After Katrina hit New Orleans, Reynolds tried again to pass his bill in Feb of 2006. Renni told Reynolds “it’s something that people are resistant to. Because they don’t want to look at the problem to begin with. If you don’t want to look at the problem then why would you want do you want to hear about a solution?” “People are terrified. And it’s just feeding on itself…But the Earth is burning.” Reynold’s bill again hit a wall and failed. He then said “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 about having a career, a lawn and all the amenities it’s how do our children and our children’s children even have a chance at life.”
After Hurricane Rita hit Matamoros, Mexico Reynolds and his group were at it again trying to help people in countries that were in desperate need of relief after the disaster, by building them an Earthship. After the architect boards learned of Reynolds work in the Andaman Islands in Oct. 2006 and after fighting for 17 years they finally asked him to reapply for his license and his bill was successfully approved in March 2007. Mike Reynolds has since been featured on Steven Fry in America in episode 5 aired in 2008. In the documentary Mike takes Steven on a tour of one of his houses and shows him how the whole place works. Mike was also asked to give lectures by the board of architects in his current headquarters in Colorado.
All of the Earthship house designs many have seemed to people extreme, but resources continue to decrease and its methods like these that can begin to undo the massive hoard of garbage we have created. Our number of viable natural capital is finite, since we are currently in a closed system. What is here is all that there is and we don’t have any means of obtaining more. We all need to start thinking in these terms and begin utilizing ideas like Mike Reynolds if we want to continue to survive and possible thrive as we have before.
My references:
The movie Garbage Warrior is a film released in 2007 taking 3 years to film. It was filmed in the USA, India and Mexico, and was an Oliver Hodge film. I also used IMDB for source material and Wikipedia for dates.
