Two Eco-films

Film Reviews: Radiant City and Garbage Warrior

By John Taylor; 2009 April 04, Baha 13, 166 BE

I viewed two thought provoking documentaries, each in its way a worthy successor to Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," both of which were consciously produced in response to Gore's film. The first I have already talked about here, Radiant City. You can find out more about it at:

http://www.radiantcitymovie.com/

Radiant City is a Canadian production about the relentless push of suburbanism, what one person in the film calls the "cartoonification" of modern life. A short selection from the film is to be found at:

http://www.viddler.com/explore/kochvideo/videos/15/

This interview starts off with the subject summing up development over the past century: "The twentieth century was a kind of a nervous breakdown for architecture." I remember thinking over and over as I watched this movie, which mixes some fictional elements in with the documentary: "I wish that I could watch this film with the members of the UHJ. Would they be so gung ho about the present program if they knew how deeply, deeply ingrained this non-social set-up is, and how opposed what we are doing is to the way things are here in North America?"

At the same time, there was a telling moment in the film where the filmmakers, perhaps not intentionally, put their finger on the nub of why people are fleeing into the hell of suburban life, into a wholy unnatural flight from social contact -- a suburban dweller can leave home, drive to work, park and enter the workplace without coming face to face with any other human being. The result, over generations, is a total loss of social skills on the part of most in our society. And this has a snowballing effect, we do not have contact, we forget how to treat others well, we flee social contacts and rush even further into the low density housing trap.

Oh yes, the nub. It comes when somebody being interviewed says something like: "We wanted to get away from this and that problem with urban living ... especially the infighting, the fishbowl of lack of privacy, the gossip and backbiting that are basic to both urban and rural life." There you have it. Backbiting is driving this plunge into environmental destruction. We turn social contact into a battleground, then we tisk tisk when everybody flees into subdivisions that eat up land, kill nature, cause endless commutes, and where the two greatest killers of kids are cars and suicide. We are made to be social, but we will do anything to get away from one another, often for good reason.

Which leads me to the documentary that I saw last night, Garbage Warrior. The official website is:

http://www.garbagewarrior.com/

Like all films being pitched, Garbage Warrior is summed up in a meeting. In this case one site suggests: "Frank Lloyd Wright meets Ed Begley Jr meets the local garbage man." The film review site "Rotten Tomatoes" offers this synopsis:

"This documentary looks at the life and work of Michael Reynolds, a pioneering architect who creates sustainable structures using recycled materials. "Garbage Warrior" was filmed over three years, chronicling Reynolds' struggles with the government and his successes at turning a devastated community into a thriving one."

This is a very inspiring film. It shows that an innovator can fight and win against a corrupt system, given a few decades hard work, especially when the interests of the human race are at stake. I have already expressed my opinion on this blog that Reynolds is the only member of his profession in America worth a second glance since Buckminster Fuller. As he points out, there is very little innovation in home building, every shack looks the same as the next because, in part, building codes bog down everything in a hopeless mess of rules and regulations, few of which have the welfare of the people in mind. Here are a couple of interesting snippets from an interview with Reynolds. The first is about his organic philosophy of building.

"Architecture is clearly not addressing the needs of our times. Biotecture  a word I invented, a cross of biology and architecture better describes what I do. So many parts of the world -- Nicaragua, Jamaica, Norway, United Kingdom, France -- are embracing the need for the biotecture method, regardless of what they call it. They are recognizing that conventional housing systems are not panning out."

Interviewer: "Do you see a future in which subdivisions are filled with earthships?"

"Yes! I definitely see cities, villages and towns filled with earthships or buildings that passively heat and cool themselves  and homes that provide their own electricity and water and food, contain and treat their own sewage. All of these utilities can be supplied off the grid in a self-sustaining community.

(from: http://life.gaiam.com/gaiam/p/Garbage-Warrior-Turns-Trash-Into-Houses.html)

Having said all that, though, I must say that the Canadian film, Radiant City, ruined the British-American one, Garbage Warrior, for me. I could not help but look at the earth ships Reynolds is making and think, how inadequate! True, he makes sustainable houses but at a tremendous cost in land. This is an answer only if the number of humans on earth were a few million, rather than several billion. He designs energy independent sub-divisions made of garbage materials, waste tires, bottles, and so forth, but they are subdivisions nonetheless, low-density, separate and wholly suburban. The earthship dwellers still have to drive long distances, wasting time and fuel, if they work outside the home. The syndrome that Radiant City describes, running away from social contact into land hungry housing, is driving Reynolds and crew to build these earthships, innovative as they may be.

True, many of his developments are communally owned, at least at first. That is an all-too-rare step forward. We need to explore alternatives to exclusive, private ownership. But if we hope to keep large numbers of people alive without sprawl destroying the planet, he will have to start designing far more high density, diverse, multi-use cityscapes. We need town planners, as well as architects, who are as courageous, original and innovative as Reynolds.

In one of the interviews included on the DVD the director of Garbage Warrior declares that he made it as a corrective to the negative slant of Inconvenient Truth (and this applies to Radiant City too), where a problem is pointed out but no convincing solution is presented. I appreciate that this film does point to a positive attempt to save us all. I do not want to put that down. Nonetheless, the insular character of English speakers is evident in this film. There is no sense that Europeans are innovating too in this area, with, for example, the pasivhus standard. Third Worlders are passive recipients of his ideas. Yet the round houses he suggests after the Tsunami were invented by aboriginals!

I could not help but wonder which is the better answer for architecture: earthships or passive houses? Earthships make good use of heat sinks and waste materials, but a passive house, made from insulating concrete made with volcanic additives, combined with heat-exchange ventilators, is just as energy independent and can be part of much higher density housing. Perhaps some combination of these with Buckminster Fuller's domed over neighbourhoods would be closer to true sustainability.

I think the best point Reynolds makes is this: in order to improve we have to be ready to experiment and sometimes make mistakes. He is the best in his profession because, over thirty years of breaking all the rules that tie down his conformist colleagues he has made mistakes and learned from them. As he says, you have to be able to have an idea (he literally dreams one up at one point in the film) and then build it right away. Otherwise there is neither art nor science to the trade. As it is, our built world is dominated by faceless bureaucrats and has neither practicality nor beauty. This alone, not to speak of destroying planet earth, is enough of an argument to change the status quo in building.

When I got up this morning after seeing that film last night, I came across the following poem written in Persian by Baha'u'llah. It is the closest I have seen in His Writings to anticlericism, though clearly, He is speaking not necessarily about religious leaders but to the same anti-innovative mind-set that the hippy rebellion was about, the bureaucratic, corrupt misuse of law by the small minded that is leading us all down the slippery slope to planetary destruction. The last verse especially, could have been written for the architectural innovator. "Let thine abode be under the stone, but seek not the shelter of the cleric."

"Be thou of the people of hell-fire,

but be not a hypocrite."

"Be thou an unbeliever,

but be not a plotter."

"Make thy home in taverns,

but tread not the path

of the mischief-maker."

"Fear thou God,

but not the priest."

"Give to the executioner thy head,

but not thy heart."

"Let thine abode be under the stone,

but seek not the shelter of the cleric."

Thus doth the Holy Reed intone its melodies, and the Nightingale of Paradise warble its song, so that He may infuse life eternal into the mortal frames of men, impart to the temples of dust the essence of the Holy Spirit and the heavenly Light, and draw the transient world, through the potency of a single word, unto the Everlasting Kingdom.

(Trustworthiness, in Compilation of Compilations, Vol II, #2050, p. 337)