Review for Garbage Warrior

The movie Garbage Warrior follows a man named Mike Reynolds. Reynolds went to school and studied to be an architect. Once he finished, he realized that the school he just went through missed an excellent opportunity to teach people how to create buildings with the future in mind. They needed to deal with water shortages and the wasting of resources, but they weren't. Being a stubborn man, he decided to try to fix it himself and provide an example for everyone else to follow. He set out on constructing houses out of reused materials like glass bottles, aluminum cans, tires, dirt and adobe. He wanted the house off the grid and to be self sustaining. The result was the Earthship.

"You couldn't worry about what it looked like, you just wanted it to work"

Since Reynolds was exploring nontraditional ground for American architecture, he also did a large amount of experimenting. This unstandardized approach brought him issues however. His self designed, eco friendly neighborhoods and homes violated countless laws that city of Taos, New Mexico had in place. So he sets out to comply with the laws and then sought permission to have an experimental community, similar to the resources the government puts into testing out a weapon.

The documentary covers this story and shows you countless examples of these amazing, unique structures and introduces you to some of the people learning the techniques themselves. The houses are easy enough to construct that the process can be taught with relative ease to people in countless situations using the available resources. Because they take advantage of what is available, they are also generally much cheaper to construct than a normal home.

Some people might be turned off by the design of some of these buildings, but if you have any sort of ecological leaning or are interested in sustainable housing, I am pretty sure this documentary can be inspiring to you.