We’ve just finished watching the DVD titled Garbage Warrior about Mike Reynolds an eco-architect. Unexpectedly I found myself quite teary at the end. I was expecting to watch something that would be informative and intellectually stimulating about how to use waste to make houses and how to make houses that were totally sustainable.
It was that all that, but as well I found myself moved to tears when the story shifted to the post-Tsunami Andaman Islands. Reynolds had had his architect licence revoked in the US due to his unconventional buildings. But in the Andamans his low cost, earth centric, sustainable housing was just what was needed.
Now of course the edit of any DVD is aimed at maximum impact, and I have no doubt that a lot of not-so-nice story was left out that did not suit the theme of “warrior man against machine” that underpinned the story. But nevertheless what an amazing story it is.
Here at Yuendumu our streets are a rich source of plastic bottles and aluminium drink cans. The wind blows constantly, along with willy willys, and picks up all such materials and deposits them against fence lines and in people’s yards. The amount of energy that has gone into making the containers and transporting them to Yuendumu is breathtaking. There is no recycling – its just too hard to get the recycled stuff back down to Alice, so it just ends up as landfill or street rubbish.
So the question is – if I care about this waste, how do I change my thinking to start recycling these materials right on site and into structures? We need for example proper fences, not just our bits and pieces of wire strung together. We could make a fence out of aluminium cans using Reynold’s ideas for this. But it’s hard – we have specialised our skills and knowledge so much in a westernised society that whatever needs to be done with a house (other than housework) we need to bring in an outsider to do the work. I suppose it has created an interdependent society enabling jobs and an education/training system aimed at fitting people for jobs that has helped spread wealth around.
But out here in the desert where tradespeople are in short supply, if available at all, then the limits of such a system are quickly reached. I am immensely grateful for the engineering and technical skills that Trevor brings to our everyday life, but mostly I am grateful for the attitude of independence that he carries with it.
Consider for example what it must have been like prior to settlement of Aboriginal people in Yuendumu. If a spear broke no-one would think about going to another place and finding someone who could fix it. You had to have the skills yourself to fix the tools that you needed to survive. Yuendumu still needs that “way of being” but the westernised constructs of living in a town overarch the settlement and so things fall apart without people having the skills to fix them. And worse the workmanship by outsiders is often shoddy, and people here don’t have the knowledge to pull up tradesman on the work that has been done, and/or local people are not employed on the jobs to bring their local knowledge onto the job. For example a great deal of money was put not so long ago into building a community centre in one of the Tanami communities. Timber was used for vital parts of the building. The building is now falling down because termites have eaten into it. Sheer stupidity.
I think my teariness was over all that has been lost as people in towns and cities have been removed more and more from the technologies of basic shelter and food supplies. Whilst I love the city, and all of the amazing technologies that have come from the growth of the city, at the core something has been lost. The Garbage Warrior DVD touched that loss as well as showing a way forward to use the detritus of the city for the building of beautiful structures.
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