Imagine having a home in which a 70-degree temperature is achievable year-round… for free. No heating bills. No electric bills run sky high from air conditioning. Now imagine that clean water also runs freely in this home where your heart is. And get this– you can pick bananas in your living room. Skip the grocery bills too if you like. You are self-sustainable.
Garbage Warrior is a stunning new documentary about architect and sustainable-living pioneer Mike Reynolds. His off-grid communities in and around Taos, New Mexico prove that we can live in a symbiotic way with our environment. And Mike believes that some day we’ll have to. He’s been dubbed the garbage warrior, because he creates the luminescent stained-glass effect in his walls with discarded glass bottles. And the heat I mentioned earlier– it endures New Mexico’s 30-below winters because Mike has harnessed the insulation power of old tires, packed with earth’s thermal heat. Plus, he’s replaced bricks with beer cans! You know how they say one person’s trash is another person’s treasure? Well I would treasure one of these “earthships.”
My husband and I are excited about our upcoming move to Buffalo, NY, where we will be looking for our first house this May. While we’ll strive for “green living,” we know that we won’t find one of Mike’s homes there. Earthships are on the market in Taos, but even there it’s been an uphill battle for Mike to continue building. His experimental approach over the last thirty years led to the loss of his architect’s licenses and an onslaught of lawsuits.
When the 2004 Tsunami struck and took over 200,000 lives, building laws were the last thing on anyone’s mind. Mike and his team were invited to the Andaman Islands. There they met survivors who had no shelter from the heat and no way to safely harvest rainfall for drinking water. Using found refuge such as plastic bottles and tires, they built the first South East Asian earthship. Watch the documentary, and you’ll see the community come together around this building.
This turn of events begs the question– Must we wait for catastrophe in order to make way for new ideas?
“People need water, power, sewage disposal, food & comfort. They need those things, and what we have discovered over thirty five years is that those things are available straight away from the sky. The sun is up there, rain falls down, thermal mass is in the earth, garbage is out there with people not knowing what to do with it, we are taking these things that are really easy to get and making homes that provide everything for people.”
–Mike Reynolds
Very cool. And I love the glass bottle walls.
Christina,
I’ve been in some of these earthships in Taos and they are unbelievable feats of imagination. Woah. Thanks for reminding us of them.