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Garbage Warrior: If you like other movies, you might like this one, too.

rpm — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 18:49:32 +0000

I’m lucky in so many ways to live in New Mexico. I mean, it’s not blind, dumb luck, it’s the kind of luck I sought out and it actually turned out to have been worth looking for. One very cool thing about New Mexico that not everyone knows about is Michael Reynolds, the innovative architect who creates Earthship communities up in Taos. If you don’t know about Earthships, he’s got a pretty comprehensive website on them. They’re handmade, self sustaining homes made out of recycled materials. They create their own electricity, cache their own water, and maintain an internal temperature in the 70s all year without any heating or cooling systems other than windows and walls. They’re wonderfully eccentric, with spires and walls with wine bottles in them that let in blue and green light and hand-molded bathtubs, and the south-facing windows are always lined with plants because they cleanse the air, the filter out UV rays, they and provide food, and their roots help cleanse the greywater. It’s a cool setup.

I stayed in an earthship over the summer, and it was eye opening. It really does give you a weird, empowered feeling to be totally off the grid, and you don’t realize how much noise is in your life until you live in a house without a HVAC system and with a silent refrigerator. (Since the houses are solar, refrigeration usually comes in the form of motor home appliances, so they’re either 220v, or they’re propane. This one was propane powered, and it was silent.) My wife ended up waiting to brush her hair in one afternoon because she thought the nearly-deafening racket would wake our daughter up in the other end of the house. I was grilling outside the first evening, and I wondered what the gooshy roaring sound was that I heard – after looking around a little for evidence, I realized it was the sound of beer foaming in the bottle in my hand. You can hear bees 50 feet from you, and dogs from 10 miles away. (When it’s not windy.) So, the house itself is quiet, and together, it makes for a quiet neighborhood.

There’s a newish movie about the guy who started it all, Mike Reynolds, called Garbage Warrior. I committed to my copy before it was even released, and I was one of the first people to get a copy. So of course, it sat unwatched for several months. I finally got around to watching it, and man, what a powerful movie. It’s probably the best-written documentary I’ve ever seen, and definitely most engaging. ”Garbage,” in the sense that an earthship is made with recycled automobile tires and wine bottles and plastic soda containers and aluminum cans, and “Warrior,” in the sense that this guy has passionate beliefs and has put everything he has on the line to defend them.

The story is pretty simple. Boy meets architecture. Boy grows distant from architecture when his needs change. Boy meets new ideas and runs off with them. Government comes in and shuts down the boy. Boy goes to India to help monsoon victims and to Mexico to help Katrina victims. Government allows boy to operate again. That old chestnut.

Reynolds started out with pretty traditional architecture training, and instantly realized that everything in contemporary architecture is based around obsolete ideas. (Bear in mind that I’m not an architect, and I don’t know if every architectural idea is actually obsolete. But he does make a convincing case.) From early in his career, he instinctively explored thermal mass in his construction and water caching and sustainable building practices. He tried things out. He failed. He improved. He tried again. He succeeded. Sometimes. After years of trying and failing/succeeding/growing, he had 2 communities launched and had attracted worldwide interest in his work. But with that global attention came the attention of regional authorities, and then the problems began. To start with, they stopped all his development efforts. Then he lost his architecture license because he was violating so many building codes. Mostly not in terms of safety or building quality, but rather red-tape issues. For example, “communities” are defined as “individual deeded lots with power and water and phone hookups,” and to apply that kind of code to a house that’s designed to be off the grid is short-sighted. He battled New Mexico’s legislature for years, and the movie documents the red tape and hoop jumping with excruciating detail.

This is juxtoposed with other experiences his company has had. For instance, after the big earthquake and tsunami double-whammy that India suffered in 2005, he was invited with his team to go help out. They inspected the debris, and the area was just wrecked. The 35,000 person town he visited had been reduced to 7000 inhabitants. The survivors lived in shanties made of corrugated metal, single room structures with dirt floors and 3 walls, often housing families of 7. Exposed wells with human remains inside, water was actually being transported in in trucks.

He was horrified and awed by how nature can take the work of mankind and undo it in a matter of minutes or hours or days. They got to work. The spirit of the locals was incredible, and over 14 days, Reynolds showed them how to build an earthquake-resistant, self-cooling, water-caching structure using mostly dirt, cement, and locally found recycled materials. (He sent kids out to collect plastic bottles, for which he paid them 1 Rupee each.) The community dove right in and was mixing cement and hammering dirt into the tires with Reynolds’ core team, and the local engineers and architects were amazed and thrilled. With 100+ inches of rain a year, they’d never need to rely on wells, and the first structure could cache 10,000 liters of water. Instant independence. Suddenly, they had hope. In a perfect world, 4/5 of their population wouldn’t have been stamped out in a matter of hours. In the imperfect world the lived in, they took what was in front of them, and with just a little guidance, made something out of it.

Taos, NM as seen from the back of the Earthship we rented

Back in the states, the fumfering New Mexico legislature repeatedly blocked his experimental housing bill, and were it not for one enlightened soul on the government side who eventually took up his cause and pushed it through person by painful person, it would still be blocked. His “experimental housing” bill wasn’t asking for money, it was asking for the right of individuals to designate specific housing sites as experimental so they’d could be free to innovate outside the limitations of current housing code. One telling moment in the movie was when he was bemoaning his first big government shutdown and, “They took away my right to try and fail.” In post-disaster India, no red tape. In disaster-free New Mexico, hemming and hawing, and Reynolds seems genuinely bugged that it might take another Katrina-level catastrophe to convince people in government to allow any changes to how we’re permitted to house ourselves. He’s not talking about a forced, universal change that would be imposed on others, all he wanted was the right for interested individuals to explore options in how they housed themselves and their families. Doesn’t sound that controversial, but it’s apparently a pretty threatening notion to some people. Personally, I would have quit in frustration less than 4 minutes into the process; I don’t have the patience for red tape that he exhibited in the film, but he might not have either were it not for his conviction. Watching someone fight for what they believe in can be an awesome sight.

Rather than just being a pedantic hippy-treehugger sermon to our culture of consumption, this was a snapshot of a real American and his very real spirit. He’s a crusty individualist determined to survive in the wild and wooly West using his brains and his backbone and his ingenuity. He is a think-different character who practices what he preaches, and rather than just lofty, academic lectures to get his point across, he’s got his sleeves rolled up, his face sunburnt, and dirt under his nails. Like a lot of so-called environmentalists, his concern is humanity, our kids, our kids’ kids, but with him, it’s far more than just words. He’s trying to come up with mostly compromise-free ways of addressing the concerns he has. He’s not saying “stop using electricity!” or “there’s no water, panic, panic!” When he identifies electricity as an issue for the future, he works to create his own solution and creates housing that both creates its own power and also requires less. If water’s the concern, he attempts to address it by creating built-in caching systems that lead to complete independence from municipal connections. He envisions a world where housing not only has a lower environmental footprint, but could actually have a reverse footprint – surplus energy output, home-grown food, impactful use of materials that need to be recycled anyway. Taos, New Mexico gets something like 14″ per year in annual rainfall, and if a house up there can cache enough water to be independent of municipal systems, there are pretty big chunks of the rest of the world that could pull it off, too. Taos can be -13F in the winter, and an Earthship, with no HVAC systems, maintain a constant interior temperature in the 70s just using construction techniques and windows. It’s hard to watch the presentation without occasionally thinking something along the lines of, “Why wouldn’t you do this?” (Much of the movie is spent addressing this; fighting The Man to get one built is a bigger challenge than many of us would bite off. But that might be the only obvious obstacle.)

The movie is inspiring, not in a polarizing “liberal” or “greenie” way. I’d be lying to avoid mentioning that it hits some of those buttons, but it’s the spirit of the movie that really moved me, the independence, free will, celebration of the individual, the pit bull determination, the brazen balls to fight the system when someone believes the system is wrong.

The houses are amazing, Mike Reynolds is a genuine character, and the hope that the presentation instills is invigorating. I know from actually being in one of the Earthship communities up there that there’s an almost giddy naughtiness in the designs – you look a some eccentric spiral or a wall with blue wine bottles in it or a semicircular building shape, and you wonder, “Can you really do that? Is that OK?” Between this movie, my own research, and sampling the real deal firsthand, I know I’d love to live in one of his houses. The film is far from a thinly-masked marketing tool for his company, it’s a film that leaves the viewer fired up to want to make a difference. Somehow. In one’s own way. The feeling you get when you see some of the eccentric spires and rounded walls and blue-wine-bottle inlays is, “Wow… Can you do that? Is that OK? Can you get away with that?” Our ingrained conformity goes deeper than we realize, and seeing someone refuse it provides a strange and uncommon thrill, and knowing you could take part in the refusal – if you wanted to – is even better.

I’m left with the feeling that I’d never force someone else to build or live in housing like his, but I think it’s tragic that more people don’t have the option to because of archaic and inflexible building codes. Or simply because too few people even know to consider them as an option. Ultimately, it’s about expanding our choices, and protecting our freedom to make them. Regardless of your personal stance on global climate change, manmade or otherwise, it’s hard to argue with the idea of letting people be free to live as they choose.

I’ve got a new hero. A highly recommended documentary.

Obama’s inaugural dinner will model Abraham Lincoln’s. And they posted the recipes!

rpm — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 06:07:59 +0000

I just read an article on ABC News’s website that described the great efforts the inaugural committee was putting into emulating what the 16th president served at his own, right down to the china patterns. It’s not the kind of article I usually come across, much less read, I’m all hung up on “real issues” and “substance” and stuff, but this one caught my eye for some reason. I won’t recap it, it’s concise and well written if anyone’s interested.

What I thought was cool was that the inaugural staff has not only posted the menu itself, probably as expected, but also the recipes! I’m probably not going to make me any pheasant any time soon – you really ought to hunt your own if you’re going to eat pheasant, and I’m not going to hunt my own – but I’m pretty tempted to scale down that seafood stew/puff pastry recipe my damn self. (The recipe calls for 6 Maine Lobster tails. I’m thinking of a quantity that is more in the zero-to-one lobster tail range.) My kid will probably make “that face” at me if I offer her some, she’s not big on seafood or creamy soups, but if it’s good enough for the leader of the free world (am I supposed to capitalize some of that?), it’s durned well good enough for my family. No matter. More for the grownups.

As far as the article went, it was followed by the expected “Obama’s so cool for invoking Abraham Lincoln, I can’t wait until he’s in office and fixes everything!” and “Obama’s such a phony for invoking Lincoln, I can’t wait until he’s in office and shows everyone what a big, Lincoln-invoking phony he is!” blog comments. Almost totally polar, just like everything political over the last 8 years and beyond. Oh, well.

Meanwhile, in the midst of the expected Tastes Great/Less Filling blog comments, there was a rational, non-partisan comment: a person pointed out what should have occurred to every reader right away – basically, what they ate in Lincoln’s time wasn’t really a matter of fashion, in Lincoln’s day, they ate what was local, and they ate what was seasonal.

(I guess you could say it was partisan in the sense that the post was about sustainability and eating local, stuff that is usually attributed to the left, so the person who wrote the post was probably a so-called liberal, but the whole left/right thing has gotten so twisted these days that I hesitate to use the terms to label actual values, and without the blog commenter either praising Obama or slamming Bush, I’d be guessing anyway.)

I can’t say Lincoln wouldn’t have loved him some kiwifruit, but we’ll probably never know. Meanwhile, in the brave new world we live in, the whole localvore movement is preaching the same thing: eat what’s local, and eat what’s in season. I can dig it. Not just foodwise and nutritionwise and environmentwise, but local-economywise. And personally, I can dig the localvore thing a lot more than the organic movement, well intentioned though the organic movement may be. Those organically grown strawberries from California aren’t helping the environment too much if they have to be transported to New York City, not to mention the nutritional wrinkles that long distance transportation of food introduces. I’m not anti-organic, don’t get me wrong, but I like organic stuff for easily debatable health reasons more than anything related to sustainability. Free trade goods? All for it. Local? Fantastic. Organic? Well, maybe. That’s a whole ‘nother area to explore. Please note that I didn’t use this as an opportunity to make a single milk-hormone/breast size joke. I’m all sensitive about stuff like that now that I have a daughter, so you’re welcome.

Another aside: I’d feel a whole lot more enthusiastic about embracing the localvore thing if I didn’t live in New Mexico. New York City is surrounded by verdant farm states that provide endless variety. Portland, Oregon residents could “buy local” until the cows come home. Here in New Mexico, I’d have to pare whole limbs off the FDA food tree if I stuck to eating what was grown within 50 miles. My wife has had pocket gophers literally pull plants out of her hand and into the ground, so there aren’t a whole lot of gardeners in our immediate area, and living in a mountainous/rocky/high desert area takes care of some of the rest. We do what we can, of course, but you can’t live off piñon nuts, honey, organic soy candles and green chile forever. (“I’m on the Santa Fe diet – please pass the smudge sticks. “) I exaggerate, of course. We also have red chile. (“Nurse, this man has the worst turquoise deficiency I’ve ever seen – get me 20ccs of Cerillos Green, and fast!” I’ll stop now.)

Anywhoo… This inaugural dinner was not crafted in a vacuum. OF COURSE they were aware that the Lincoln tie-in has solid PR value. And why not? They’re very aware that fans and enemies alike will be reading meaning into his hat choices and what kind of Blackberry he carries and what kind of shirts he appeared in in college photos. And his menu choices at inaugural dinners and such. Haven’t come across too many anti-Lincolnites in my travels, so it seems to be a pretty safe gesture, and the naysayers always were going to say nay to whatever got picked anyway.

Obama’s decisions are more closely scrutinized than any other single person on the planet right now. If these decisions have to be made, why not make them with some thought, and when they’re made with some thought, why pick on him for it? His choices continue to be encouraging to me for the most part. His campaign won largely because he assembled a strong team and let them do their thing, and it seems like he still has a good team and they’re still doing their perspective things. If I was him, however, I would have been tempted to add some lamb shawarma or basmati rice or hummus or something to the menu just to let the “He’s an Arab” types squirm a little. But then again, I can be kind of a prick.

Bluenergy solar turbine

rpm — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 20:25:35 +0000

A friend pointed out a recent article in our local paper on a really interesting new alternative energy for homes and small offices. It’s a sculpural-looking turbine covered with solar material – if it’s windy, it spins, if it’s sunny, it sols. Or whatever Solar things do. If we’ve got anything out here, it’s wind and sun. They’re not like the big Danish windmills you see proposed every time there’s an article on a “wind park,” they’re just a couple yards tall. I didn’t dig up the exact height, but they’d appear to be between 2-3 yards or meters high, so you could probably install them on your property in a wide variety of places without violating any zoning or covenants. Don’t take my word for it, though.

Since the solar materials rotate, you eliminate many of the placement issues that come up with a solar array, and unlike bigger windmills, it doesn’t have to be shut down in heavy winds or rotated to take advantage of the wind direction. Unless it screeches like a howler monkey, the cost may be the biggest downside.

The company is called Bluenergy, it’s worth a look. The costs appear to be competitive with other small-scale “get off the grid” kinds of setups, but their cost estimates seem a bit high. Whatever.

Mahindra to bring real mini trucks back to the US

rpm — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:33:42 +0000

A blog that I like called Kicking Tires had a post about a real compact pickup that an Indian company called Mahindra is trying to build in the US and sell here. It’s kinda on that ugly tip, if you know what I mean, but it’s as close to that ’80s mini-truckin’ ideal that I’ve seen in ages. The first model is supposed to have an economical 4 cylinder engine that gets about 35mpg on the highway, and a diesel hybrid with unknown specs is due out after that. It’s small, but if it’s halfway tough, I could use it on my little ranch pretty easily, don’t have to worry much about street cred when you’re hauling alfalfa.

When I was a teen, the mini truck lowrider thing was big, and I had dreams of a little Toyota (with Toy on the tailgate?) lowrider, or maybe a Nissan Hardbody with a whopping 134 horsepower engine. They were actually fun and could even be used as trucks until they were dropped super low, and if I remember right, they got close to 30mpg with a manual. The Americans and the Japanese have moved away from real mini trucks, a Tacoma or Frontier from today are definitely a notch up, and while the Colorado from Chevy is about as close as anyone makes these days, they’re still a bit too big for their engines according to reviews, and I’ve read things like “don’t place too much weight across the top of the bed, like in a toolbox, because it collapses the bed.” Anything on the internet can be taken with a grain of salt, but it’s definitely affected how I look at them. I remember when I could have bought a brand new Isuzu pickup in 88 or 89 for like $7,500. No A/C, no power windows, maybe a radio, and it’s pretty hard to find something like that these days. (They’re theoretically available from all the expected manufacturers, but just try to find a stripped Tacoma on a lot somewhere.)

This Mahindra, which is expected to be manufactured in Ohio to avoid the dreaded Chicken Tax, is not an automatic buy for me, it would be an expected $22,000 for a small, not-luxurious work vehicle, manufactured in the US by an unknown (to me) manufacturer, etc. But I’m interested. And a diesel hybrid could get 60 or 70 mpg in a small vehicle like this, that would be hard to overlook when I’m comparison shopping. General Motors continues to say that hybrids are too expensive to manufacture and that the public isn’t interested; granted, people buy pickups and Suburbans even with rapidly rising prices. But Toyota can’t keep the Prius in stock. It could be a Japanese thing, like Sony did with the Playstation III and Nintindo did with the WII at Christmas – just hint that there might not be enough to go around, and watch people pound your door down.

The big manufacturers aren’t really listening to their customers; if you told the local coffee shop that they should start to sell Red Bull, they’d say, “No, people don’t want Red Bull, they only ask for coffee when they come in here, so that proves there’s no demand for Red Bull.” People buying what you happen to sell doesn’t mean that you’ve perfectly met their needs. There’s something to be said for sticking to what you know, and more companies ought to, actually, but fuel-efficient cars and trucks can be sold, right here, right now. Car companies are like the record industry these days – they don’t want a broad product range that addresses many different customers’ needs, they want to repackage two or three vehicles into 10 different cars and hope for one breakout, superstar success. A moderate seller isn’t worth keeping on the roster.

That leaves the niches wide open. A small, independent company will not come up with the next Civic. But they could come up with the next Jeep, something that started out very simple and purpose-built. And a smaller, independent company will definitely come up with the next EV1. I don’t blame the big guys for being profit focused, but whenever I hear things that hint that “market forces” steer them just fine, I have to laugh. If Dodge sells big pickups, big SUVs, big Jeeps, and big minivans, that’s what people will buy from them. If that’s not what I want, and that’s all that they have, I can’t exactly help them steer their product lines to meet my needs. “Hi, consumer! We’re here to give you anything you want! Huge? Poorly built? How about an extended warranty? Can we tempt you with something gas guzzling? Empty promises of reliability? Whatever you want, anything!” The big guys may be right – maybe not a single person in the US wants an electric car, for example. The best proof they have is that nobody’s buying them right now, though, so it’s a little silly. Know why more people don’t buy beer at McDonalds in the US? THEY DON’T SELL IT.

That being said, I don’t envy the big automakers. If they take a chance on something different, smaller for example, the media complains “it’s too small.” If they make it bigger, the reviews all say, “it’s OK, but it’s too bad it had to get so much bigger.” I remember when every Saab review ended with a complaint about the weird-looking hatchback and the position of the ignition switch. So Saab did some cars without the weird-looking hatchbacks, and suddenly all the reviews said, “It’s an OK car, but I sure miss that quirky Saab look that came with the hatchback – boy was that practical.” Can’t win. That partly comes from the superstar mentality; every car and truck from the big automakers needs to be loved in every way by everyone everywhere. A little company could thrive on selling 2,000 vehicles, even less, and maybe we’ll see some competition. Between 1900 and 1908, there were almost 500 car manufacturers – how cool would it be if we had smaller, regional companies that made vehicles that their local customers wanted? Alaskans probably need different cars than New Yorkers. Someone in Nebraska could have a vehicle that suited them and so could someone who lived in Gulf Coast Florida or Baja California.

If I was smarter, richer, better educated, more skillful, and more motivated (a totally different person, basically) I’d have to seriously consider taking a stab at it myself. It’s hard to believe that all entrepreneurial activity should be strictly in the realm of MySpace clones and internet advertising.

Very economical vehicles available right now. Well, next year. Or the year after maybe.

rpm — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:15:29 +0000

I keep wanting to upgrade or sidegrade my busted Dodge pickup, and let me tell you, it’s not a great time for someone who thinks like me to buy a car. It’s really hard to find a family vehicle of any shape or size that gets even 30mpg on the highway; I haven’t actually kept a tally, but there probably aren’t even 10 vehicles on the market these days that can do it. When I was 17 years old, 30 or 35mpg was considered decent highway mileage, and the Chevy Sprint was getting close to 50 on the highway even then. So today, a very economical car (if you believe Kia and Toyota commercials) gets, well, 30mpg. 2 decades later, no improvement at all. My pickup has been averaging 15mpg, and there are still people out there who consider that pretty damned good for a truck. And to get close to 1988 Chevy Sprint mileage, you’ve got to cough up thousands of extra dollars for a hybrid and take on the added complexity of maintaining 2 separate drivetrains and whatever long-term liability the batteries impose. To be fair, there hasn’t been much drama about Prius or Civic Hybrid reliability, and to be even more fair, when the new diesel VWs come out this year, they’re rumored to get well into the 50s with just a normal diesel powertrain. But as fast as everything else in the world in every other area of technology is changing, fuel economy remains basically static in the US.

It’s pretty hard to believe; supposedly here in this opportunistic and capitalist environment, not a single entrepreneur has pounced on that fear that many Americans have had since 2001 and created even a niche product for us conspiracy enthusiasts. Lots of people figured that any tampering we do in the middle East, right or wrong, will somehow wreak havoc with gas prices, and here we are 7 years later, and the Prius is the best anyone can do? I mean the Prius is OK, but hybrids seem needlessly complex, and the supply-and-demand games Toyota plays with them means that you’re not only paying a premium for the technology and complexity, but in many markets you’ll even have to pay a premium over MSRP to get one.

This might be changing. I read a couple cool articles lately that sound really hopeful. I like the Tesla Motors concept and everything, but a $90,000 car is probably not going to solve our fuel dependencies overnight, if real people can’t buy it and use it like a real car, it’s not going to be anything more than an expensive badge for conspicuous non-consumption like the EV1 used to be.

One of the companies is Aptera. They have a Jetsons-looking 2.5 seater that will be available this year in California as either a plug-in electric or a plug-in hybrid. It’s a little knotty to calculate the gas efficiency of a car that can run in all-electric mode, but their best guess is in the 120mpg range. The vehicle itself is a 2 seater with a smaller rear shelf that could hold a baby seat or a toddler, and the trunk seems pretty capacious from the pictures. (2 bags of golf clubs or even a single 7-foot surfboard is a pretty impressive point of reference.) The car will start in the mid $20s and top out at an estimated $30k. Not dirt-cheap, but not a terrible price of entry for something that looks totally new. (No other commercially available electric vehicles yet; until one really hits the streets, the title’s up for grabs.) And the anti-Prius argument that “you can’t hardly drive enough to make up for the added expense” is a little harder to prove here.

To just complain for a second, this also embodies a couple peeves of mine. First, why would anyone be anti-fuel efficiency? I don’t mean complaining about being forced to drive a hybrid or import or small car or something – that hasn’t actually happened – I mean the hysterical, angry reaction that some people have to the very existence of an economical car. And second, people buy boat-hauling SUVs without owning boats, and they buy 4-wheel-drives without ever going anywhere but Starbucks and soccer games – that’s all fine for them and nobody can say anything because it’s their right and their destiny, but then if someone wants to put their money into extra efficiency rather than extra and unused power or features, somehow that is flawed thinking if it doesn’t generate a gigantic and instant return on their investment?

Anyway… The other one was a little far-fetched, but the people involved seem impressive and credible. It’s an air-powered car. To refill it, an compressor mashes air into a tank for a couple hours into pretty dangerous densities, and the air is then used to power an onboard generator. 1,000 mile range, 2-hour refills, and a top speed close to 100mpg all make it sound pretty usable. 6 passengers and a starting price of a little over $17k make it sound almost unreal. 0 emissions, too. The American distributor-to-be is in New Paltz, NY, but the mothership is based in France. Due in 2009, we’ll see. There have been a lot of vaporware vehicles like this, but with an engineering team with pedigrees from Bugatti and Formula 1 racing, this could be one to watch. The NY Daily News story is pretty cool.