Garbage Warrior

If you can see this see it.

Essentially its a classic story about rebel vs state, however what makes this story even more pressing is that Michael Reynolds, the eco-architect, is harrassed by the government for achieving his own personal eco-paradise. The state tries to have him disband his community on the premise that it is unsafe. Sure… garbage is not the most attractive material for abode construction but it is more about the government controlling who has the right to construction .

It makes me think of why consumer society needs people to NOT enact their own control of the own destiny’s… obviously this guy has felt it important to trailblaze a particular design concept and gets slammed for it , only to realize that people in India , who obviously need a bit of technical expertise he finds that his skills are accepted if not celebrated. A garbage king in the most resource rich environment , a disaster zone.

I really feel this guy. Just being resourceful is not enough to be recognised. You need a lawyer , an accountant , a PR expert blah blah. This brings to mind two school’s of design thought that have had similar bumpy road to recognition that is , Synergetics and Permaculture.

Synergetics was born around 1930’s from the incredibly ground breaking Buckminster Fuller , he was often criticised for his overly romantic notions of ecological design within architecture and engineering , and was sometimes regarded as a crackpot. Similarily Permaculture legends Bill Mollison and David Holmgren found it difficult to have their ideas of ‘an ecologically permanent culture’ accepted within institutions , obviously institutions that find ideas about being careful and clever with resources as something dangerous to laisez faire late-capitalism. Both Bill and David kind of had an idea about practicing their ideas without the difficult paper fight that is recquired to often have a concept recognized. Simply leading through example, and examples of practice is what is urgently required to mitigate against the encroaching doom aka collapse coming to a society near you. We really don’t have the time.

There really needs to be someway that design-art-culture-ecologia can somehow ‘just do it’ without having so much beaucratic wrangling. Learning by doing rather than being to pent up about the possible litagational effects a particular action. Aaah… the idealism…. but in someways a financially entrepreneurial society is fantastic at rewarding innovation and hopefully ideas as presented in Garage Warrior can become more widespread as the destruction to the life-supports of the planet are taxing peoples credit cards. Hope can be what you throw out.

Here’s another video with an interview with the man –  Michael Reynolds on Al-Jazeera.