“I’m trying to save my ass,” Mike Reynolds says in the opening moments of Garbage Warrior, a superb chronicle of his 30-year quest to bring sustainable housing construction into the mainstream, or at least closer in from the fringes. “That’s a powerful force.” Reynolds, a wunderkind architect and engineer who builds self-reliant “earthships” from the oddly indestructible detritus of an industrial civilization – old tires and plastic bottles are among his most useful materials – believes that life as we know it will disappear within decades as cities (“dangerous areas of chaos that can’t support themselves any longer”) crumble and their former occupants spill outward, either to learn to sustain themselves or to perish. But he’s doing what he can to push us towards the former outcome.

The early sections of Oliver Hodge’s engrossing film – which made its U.S. debut at SILVERDOCS last night -- focus on Reynolds’ remarkable achievements in the Taos, NM community where he has refined, through trial and error, his techniques of building homes (including his own) that offer their inhabitants warmth through winters where the mercury can sink to 30 below zero, relief from the heat in the summer, clean water, and sewage services, all entirely off-grid.

It helps that Reynolds is a charismatic and persuasive subject. Get him going on the subject of global warming, or how insane it is that New Mexico -- the state where we tested the atomic bomb -- doesn’t want to designate land an architectural test site where he can experiment with new techniques without fear of being sued if they don’t work, and his eloquence is almost enough to erase those early shots of him doing leg lifts and pushups in his bathrobe from your memory.

The film takes on a sense of urgency as it recounts the lawsuits and the bureaucratic hurdles that nearly ruined Reynolds in the late 90s, and his subsequent three-year battle to get his architectural test-site bill through the New Mexico legislature. When Reynolds brings his crew to the Andaman Islands to rebuild after the December 2004 tsunamis that are believed to have killed more than 200,000 people, and then to Matamoros, Mexico after Hurricane Rita, we’re heartened by the sight of him bringing his hard-won skills to a place where they can save lives today. But it isn’t long before you remember that Reynolds believes that much of the first world will look like this in our lifetimes, too. “The American dream now is just, how do we survive?” he asks, and when he expresses his impatience with the legal process, even going so far as to dismiss it as a relic that coming crises will render moot, it’s hard not to think of a certain President with whom Reynolds would seem to have little else in common. But in his unflinching can-doism, his ingenuity, and his generosity, Reynolds embodies all of the best qualities to which the adjective “American” has ever been affixed.

Garbage Warrior will screen again Friday night at 8:30 for PASSHOLDERS ONLY. Reynolds’ company, earthship biotecture, is on the web here.