Architect Michael Reynolds spends thirty years building homes out of tires, bottles, and cans in the New Mexico desert, structures he calls Earthships that generate their own power, catch their own water, and grow their own food with no hookup to any utility. The film follows Reynolds as he fights the state's building and land-use codes, which treat his experimental houses as illegal, and tracks the political battle that eventually pushes New Mexico's legislature to pass a bill letting him build and test freely on his own testing site. Cameras follow him to tsunami-hit villages in the Andaman Islands, where he trains local workers to build emergency Earthship shelters from the wreckage around them. Interviews with Reynolds, his crew, and the officials he clashes with lay out both the practical mechanics of off-grid construction and the bureaucratic obstacles facing anyone who tries to build outside conventional codes. It is as much a portrait of one stubborn inventor as it is a case study in what it takes to change a regulatory system from the outside.