Earthships - America's Off-Grid Desert Community

Located in the high

desert

of New Mexico, it is a complete rethink of a home. These off-

grid

buildings are designed to harness heat in the winter and deter heat in the summer. Their roofs are built to utilize every drop of rainwater and are designed to grow their own food. Using old tires, bottles and beer cans, these houses are made from trash built on the land and are completely self-contained like a boat. They are called land ships. Surprisingly, those who live in these strange-looking structures still enjoy almost all the luxuries of a traditional house nowhere. Elsewhere in the United States, can you legally experiment with housing like this under New Mexico state law?

How did this movement start? Where is it going and how can you really be a part of it? Our first stop was at Earthship's most recent construction site where I met Mike Reynolds, who is proudly responsible for all of this. In his opinion, he found an answer. This doesn't look like a typical job site. Yes, well, this is our main structural material: tires. We have to register every construction site as a waste dump. This is how ridiculous it is so this is a waste dump this is a waste dump it's even harder to get a permit for an absolutely off-

grid

sustainable building than for a framed cookie box you know I wrote a law called new The sites Mexico's sustainable tests act, it's true that it did, but if we're going to fall into that hole, we're going to need a little history as the suburbs flourished and America flourished.

Mike recognized what was coming and there is no factor more representative of the situation. economic well-being of the American citizen that the home in which New Mexico lives is the state where they tested the atomic bomb and blew up 10,000 acres and left them unusable for 200,000 years and tested airplanes and people die in the tests Drugs and people They get sick. Why can't we test housing? Why can't we try sustainable housing? Most of Mike's life had been lived against the grain, so when he saw the Vietnam War he looked for something more. I came here to New Mexico straight from architecture school to run motocross and get injured so I don't have to go to Vietnam there are 50 people lined up and they all want to win and I want to win but I have one thing about them I want to get injured and none of them Many of them want to get injured so That made me dangerous anyway.

I got my degree in architecture so I bought a barn made out of railroad ties and I started adding things to it and I was doing it myself, Stockholm, Sweden, June 12, 1972. It's clear that the environmental crisis facing the world It will profoundly alter the future destiny of our planet and the more cities man builds the more problems there will be housing congestion transportation pollution two weeks after hearing that within two weeks I was making a house out of beer cans and oh man I have so many things I have, you know, practically hatred from the building of the architectural

community

, you know, disgrace, they called me and all that in the same year of 1975, the world population reached 4 billion and the term global warming was recognized.

There was garbage involved in the whole conversation, we got away with building a beer can here and then we got into bottles and we got into tires and we got into thermal mass and we got into water harvesting and as the world became More and more endangered all the things that we need, we just incorporate them into buildings, so now we are building what we call an earth ship. It is a ship that addresses six things that humanity must have. It is a comfortable refuge. Electricity. Water. Treat and contain and treat your own wastewater. food and dealing with your own garbage as mike's movement started to grow the government started to take notice and started to slow his growth citing codes and bad practices the new mexico government tried to tear him down i left things i loved to be architect and then had my license taken away after Mike visited his hometown.

Oliver Hodge, a documentary filmmaker, decided to follow Mike's story and create the film "Trash Warrior." The film follows Mike's journey, where he fought to have no codes, no limits, a place to fail and rebuild in the hope of landing on a solution to the global real estate crisis, but for many his proposals were ridiculous, they simply did not know what think about it, but some old guy stood up and said it's all about trucks in New Mexico and said, well, imagine driving your truck through a framed building, you'd go in one side and out the other and you'd break your windshield, he said , imagine driving your truck through a wall like this, you would die, everyone laughed and said, okay, go ahead and do it, which Mike was struggling with.

In a few square miles, the houses he was working on were completely elective, no one was being forced to be part of the process and after many times reluctantly dressing up and trying out government offices, Mike had a glimmer of hope and it took him four years , but Governor Bill Richardson ended up signing it and it's amazing, with an official green light microphone and his team went full steam ahead, yeah, and you've got it figured out here, well, we've been doing it for 50 years, a chimpanzee might discover something in 50 years, so I mean it's fun to figure out how to make them better and better every year.

The part that's not fun is and continues to, you know, code approval and regulations, and some people are still prejudiced about trashing these buildings if we build. They're right, they stay at 70 degrees Fahrenheit, I don't care if it's 20 below zero or 105. We use beer cans to pack with cement, the tires work to take them to the next level, so we start throwing mud or, you know, adobe mud there and it ends up being a mud plastered wall, this is great, because the first thing we had in this place was that box with those things in it and we plugged in our cement mixer, we plugged in our saws and we built a house we brought our power to the house there is what will take care of the people who shine from the sky I don't think that if someone didn't know what they were, they would land in that is a house no, no, probably not because house for me the house is a part of you know what I mean I don't want it to be a house where that mound of dirt over there will take care of you I need to go talk to that guy who just pulled up behind that building uh because he doesn't know what he's doing right now so I'm going to do that right, okay, Galen, I'm sorry, go ahead, but you don't want this because he's just going to collapse anyway, you have to give him this. a slope from here to here I got it good, good job, so where do we go?

We're just two miles away to Phoenix. It is at the north end of the

community

. The community is approximately two miles long as you drive past this location. so different from the rest of society I feel like we're in a completely different world it's like a lot of where I really want to go isn't about two good shoes save the planet love your neighbor or anything like that stuff, it's logical, it's logical, this is the one I told you. I spent one night here. Oh yeah, okay, it was meant to show people that you can live in a high-end way and still be absolutely sustainable.

This building is absolutely off the grid, it looks like an amusement park, it's like you don't have to be outside, no, there's no rush, there's my tangerines, you weren't kidding me about the whole jungle thing, the bathroom sewage they are going to stop. septic tanks at each end and then you'll have a septic tank as a drain field, the drain field comes back down here in a rubber lined cell. This is all growing from the boat, so I'll quickly walk you through it first. this is the living room a waterfall waterfall fireplace fireplace yeah so I just left I just did whatever you did until the end people think you have to be in a tipi in the mountains to be sustainable and I wanted to show them look this is pretty luxurious you can be sustainable and be luxurious the closets the floor looks like everything is intentional but this shows people what can be done this literal pile of trash is worth 1.5 million dollars to find out what it's like to live in one From these ships we visited this dog and his guardian Judy, what don't you have?

You know you have a lot of things here that a lot of people can't say they can control. I can control my entire environment. I have six solar panels that always supply me with enough electricity, except on very cloudy days, but I have a windmill, so if it is cloudy it is windy, the roof is tilted so that the rainwater goes down into the cisterns. I have three tankers of 1500 gallons each. get purified water which is rainwater and you know everyone else is drinking microplastics so I mean in total how many earth ships are there oh I don't know there's here there's 60 I mean not only can we live here , but it also serves as a demonstration that you can build your house with old tires and you need a few things besides old tires and bottle cans.

Do we want to enter? Let's look at the humble land ship you have. luck, so no, it's not that humble, so here are two skylights, these are the ones that stink, these ones don't stink, they're amazing, they stink that hot air, go on, but I'm sure there's a community that unites them. I've brought a community together through that, there used to be, there used to be, and then some people got disillusioned and thought Michael should pay more for the roads and he should do this and that, so there was a split. but still there's a small core group that I'm associated with, yeah, so what happened?

The ugliness of the United States reached the big world. Judy is referring to the large global travel community here in Taos, which along with Judy's house seems to be full of personality as she continued to tend to her ship, we travel down the road to a more complete type of earth ship and this is the ultimate airship global model. The global model is actually called the global model because you can build it anywhere in the world. Unique, each built for the specific climates they inhabit, however, Mike Reynolds and his team designed a model that can work anywhere on Earth.

This is real chess and Debra helped build it. I mean, this is as good as it gets in terms of growing food. you have these huge bananas here you have rosemary you have inca berries you have fig trees so really this is a kind of experiment on how much you can do in terms of growing your own food the greenhouse also serves another purpose temperature regulation between the living room and the outside It is located in the greenhouse, which acts as a climate buffer. Each Earthship faces a few degrees from true south to deter the sun in the summer and fully harness its power in the winter, in addition to that surrounding the remaining three.

The sides of the building are walls filled with tires that absorb heat during the day and transfer it inside at night. You know you have all this dirt, all this dirt that is like a battery and you can heat it and cool it however you want. for your own comfort and therefore by heating your conservatory that loads the rest of the house and those walls with dirt and then at night or in winter that comes back into your living room and makes it comfortable for you , everything is on. solar energy, so here you have three bathrooms running and you know this is a huge building and it's all run on solar energy and solar hot water.

People here survive on just seven inches of annual rain seven inches for drinking, cooking, showering in the bathroom, even watering plants. You'll always see on older boats that the showers are a little bit raised because it's just gravity feeding down, so you're using the same water four times, you get the rainwater, you filter it for a shower, and then that shower. The water from the shower waters your plants in the pot, so you're growing food with that, meaning two thirds of the time, you flush a toilet with that same water and then that same water comes out and waters the pants that are outside, so you.

You're using the same water four times if you're in your apartment or your house or wherever and you know you open the tab and it's like where does that water come from? and if you turn on the light, where does that light come from? you know, and the vegetables that you eat, where they come from and where your poop goes when you flush the toilet, you know, every day that I can spend doing this and somehow show it or show it to other people or share it. the information is huge so yeah after learning more about how earth ships work it was time for us to check out ours another model called encounter oh these must be the air conditioning units they talked about when you open this , it's like a vent, yes, you can hear.

The incoming air is so cold that opening certain vents creates a vacuum that can draw cold air through the insulated mass of tires and dirt, which can cool the house up to 40 degrees without using electricity.when you stay on an earth ship. we can manipulate the environment to see how it works firsthand as we move around over the next few days. We were surprised at how normal everything felt after spending the night at our meeting. We headed to the construction site to get the latest model. Mike calls it Unity. a work festival, yeah, so it's kind of like it's actually kind of a festival and it's quite laborious.

This is Phil, one of the first to join Mike on his journey, being here from the beginning, he has seen the

earthships

grow along with the community of those who inhabit them, you know, the people are simply under the control of the corporations that give them everything they need, they don't give them, they sell them everything they need, the government that has the final control of all those things and then you see that you don't have to want that you can be self-sufficient, that is my motivation, If we take some tires, yeah, okay, let's take a couple of them, then we're going to want some cardboard to put on the bottom, it's like most of it was made of beer, do you remember your first tire hit?

All your effort will be trying to get the dirt under the side wall trying to get it as solid as possible there, so we're going to do this a lot, has there ever been? complete failures, I mean, yeah, well, I guess you learn from that, right, oh yeah, in our culture, failure is kind of, you know, if you fail in school it's a bad thing, right, yeah, there are a lot of stigma around that, yes, and fair enough. It's comforting to be with people who see failure as actually success, you know, it's part of the foundation here, oh absolutely yes, an interesting element that I keep hearing is a customer and a company and it's a business, but it's different.

I get asked all the time if this is a cult. I don't know, do you think it is? No, it's a business. I mean, it's not like a financially booming successful business, but we're always like, I mean, us. We are always like treading water and keeping our head up long enough to move on to the next evolution. Look how this one is swelling up, it almost looks like it's starting to look like it's full of air. Yes, that's the idea. Listen that's when you know you're done that means it's getting close, yeah, but compaction is important, you know, because we don't want the building to like it, yeah, so we want them, that's what it's all about, okay. , it's okay, it's okay.

You will continue Chris, you want to go. I just need to spend some time alone with this tire. I spent my time alone with my tire. Phil told the crew what Earthshippers do outside of the US. Earthship biotechnology has traveled around the world in hopes of providing safe, sustainable housing for communities in need. campaign, there are some containers, but there is really nothing for the people, but this is a permanent structure that will take care of people and requires very few skills and those are easy to acquire, local people can replicate them, crews tend to building aircraft and disaster zones, construction practices are more welcome than examined and there is often a large amount of garbage, their most prominent construction material, so in addition to these things, they are made of tires. and cans and bottles, they are also consuming the community's garbage for the facility, yeah, okay, you got it, yeah, so why did we do this?

This is like the load-bearing walls of the house, our entire roof sits on tire wells. it means you're reusing a piece of trash essentially yeah, what are the other benefits to the structure and to these houses? It's the thermal mass, so the tire wall is what takes and regulates the temperature inside the building, so when you walk into your place and it's warm it's because those tires retain all that heat this guy right here this thing here a thousand times more and you have a crazy house the knocks were loud but luckily we set aside some time to explore what the locals are like during a lunch date with kathleen welcome to my humble abode gentlemen any questions about this part um are you an artist? uh, yeah, since I was two years old, oh, okay, this is my study, what does this say, what does that say, what does it say that I took ayahuasca and this is what happened next, oh?

Oh my gosh, okay, are we having lunch now? We are gentlemen, we are having lunch. Well, you made my first experience with people coming to visit my Earthship really interesting. Nobody has ever been. No, wow, what are we eating mac and? cheese, what kind of people are attracted to the earthship, you are, you, you call it an experience, a lifestyle, I think people who think think for themselves, okay, it's a matter of independence, the People want to be self-sufficient, they are also made of garbage. people no, no, no, houses, you know, are made of tires, cans and things like that, yes, so it helps clean up the environment.

There is something about being curled up in a place that is very different from other types. of structures what is the hardest part of all this well if I want to wash and it's cloudy for a couple of days or if I want to bathe instead of shower I have to think about how much water I have and things like That's right, the type of people who live Here they like to live like this being aware of everything, the water you are using, all the electricity you are using. People who live here like the idea that they don't have utilities, can you?

Imagine your life without utilities, why should we do without things if solar energy, water harvesting and wind energy I also have a wind generator if those things can work. Why aren't more people doing this? It's crazy, Kathleen and others who live on earth ships can do it. live surprisingly regular lifestyles, much more similar to society than you imagine, not all the

earthships

here are on the plains, one of the first construction sites is located a few miles away, high in the mountains. mountains, a more demanding place, you can see it well. up there, look at those other boats, this was the first community that Mike started back in the '80s, I mean, he bought 40 acres of land here in Valdez because no one wanted it because it's too steep and it may seem like a million dollars but everything It is made of garbage.

What are the differences between the people who are down there and you who are up here? But I've noticed that a lot of the people who live up here have actually moved here to escape society, yes. I would say that everyone up here is pretty tough, you know, going through that, but every day life is a little bit harder when you're on a mountain, but I think it's worth it in the long run, it's very calming to get up here. Where residents live in their properties, they often start out as students and complete a training program while staying at another iconic location.

Eve Behind Me is our latest project, it's called eve Earthship Village Ecology and will demonstrate a village scenario while here and By taking classes, students learn the principles of earthship design, construction methods and philosophy. Our students do a lot of hands-on construction in the field, but in the lab we actually teach students how to assemble all the components of a mothership right here in the classroom. We meet with Alex, who just finished his first session. This is what you do here, so relocate the tires so that your students meet your people who come to learn from the teacher.

That's right, yes, you know many things in my life. It just showed me that if I wanted to do something outstanding here, I think it's the ultimate answer. You know, being able to take care of yourself without the need for a major national network, you know, has a lot of inherent advantages in terms of efficiency. -Trust and, you know, putting it back in the hands of the people. I think a lot of people in America and the rest of the world would think that going off the grid is an absolutely uncomfortable decision in life and that's why the Earth.

The ships are so cool because you come here and see something like the phoenix and you think this is off the grid. Another land ship that has a similar price to the phoenix is ​​the Dobson house. The only thing this place doesn't have is Well, phone service other than that, you can live here completely unplugged like a millionaire. You know, there are definitely people who don't know anything about landships, there's just the weird hobbit houses in the

desert

, you know? and then there are people who think that Mike Reynolds is some kind of charlatan who tells people how to come here and build these crazy structures that they can't allow in the whole world and you know they see him as some kind of oil salesman snake, but I think any great thinker will generate criticism like that.

It's just the name of the game, yeah, I mean it's challenging the system, you absolutely see the system, you see the system everywhere you look from here, like any house, that's that one over there, you know it has a window every time. that you don't You know the codes, but yeah, no, exactly, it's very regular, you know what it looks like, it's predictable and then you look over there and you think: what the hell, yeah, what spaceship landed here? Yeah, I used to pay, you know, thirteen hundred dollars. It is rented in Lake Forest Park near Seattle for one room and now I pay 450 a year in property taxes so it's just freedom.

You know, some people are a little afraid of freedom, but we are all on our own path. The way Earth Pounders build a community is through payday, an event that happens every Friday after a week of construction, the company brings beer and the Earth Pounders relax, I mean, it's just that the ultimate goal for you, like come here and build a house, I would love to live in a nursery, but I'm not as social as a lot of this place, you know, the aircraft are forced to stay here outsourced because of regulations and things Well, so it definitely fits with people who are trying to get away from people and not see everyone much and just live alone, but I think community is important and even if Ursa Bio Texture doesn't recognize that that's important, that community still exists here, like I said.

It appeals to this independent spirit that doesn't even necessarily want the community where I'm from. If you want a fixer-upper, it's around 500,000 in Seattle and you know that's a monumental cost that you're going to spend most of your life on. You know, it's worth it and if you can get your friends together and build yourself a shelter that's super comfortable and amazing, you know, it's just a better life to get out of that cycle of stress. I never held a hammer in my hand like I had. I have no idea about construction or anything you know and then um, yeah, and it just makes sense, you know, and now it's family, I mean, Mike is more than my boss, he's my friend, but what we haven't touched on yet is possibly the most difficult.

Mike's life challenge, I mean, is there anything that's a challenge for you right now? I mean, I'm sure there are things that about 14 months ago I was diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer and that was a little challenging at first for the doctors. He told me, hey, this is a threat to my life, man, you better pick a coffin, that's basically what they said in stage four and they wanted to cut off my balls, cut off my prostate, cut off my lymph because it traveled to my extremities and give me radiation and chemotherapy. and then make me buy a bottle of pills every month that costs seventeen thousand dollars a bottle, so I don't do any of that, I eat very differently, I eat vegetables that I can grow on my airship, not only the energy is off the charts. in the water and utility infrastructure dogma, but the way we eat and we feed ourselves with fast food and processed meats full of hormones, dairy cows are so full of hormones it's surprising everyone here doesn't have advice, I mean, it's crazy. what they're doing and it fits perfectly into this so my earthship solution is helping me with cancer and you know I may be full of nonsense but I think I'll be alive another 30 years to go through what you I've been through it all what it takes to get a place like this up and running, all these places up and running, it's amazing that it takes so much determination, you know, being completely excluded essentially from this community and then building your own laws to make it work and then continuing for 50 years, that's something a lot of people wouldn't do.

Now I'm more driven than ever because you know I was shocked to see people waiting in cars for food and showing videos of frozen pipes running water. Down stairs and people in cars trying to stay warm in the country I live in. You know, I've seen things like this in third world countries, but for this country to be reduced to a third world country means that someone needs to come. up with a yellow brick road to a better life and I think that's what it is and I see there's a lot of crap right there, the privacy wall and it's not finished yet, but just and and the ones that we're doing in thetrophy It's pretty hard to resist feeling inspired while listening to Mike speak, so to contribute ourselves, we worked hard to provide some earth materials, those materials, beer cans, just seeing what a home can be like changes my perspective on how I've made it. perceived. being in my entire life, honestly, reminds me of when I was like 10 years old making a tree fort in my backyard like there were no rules, build whatever you want, throwing out all the conventional architecture like I didn't know anything.

I was 10 years old, no. that these people are 10 years old, but you know what I mean when you say, it's like when you have no restrictions, literally, you've just done what worked was the thing that surprised me the most of everything we did. It would be more or less a normal life, like we have to plug in all our things, plug in our phone, plug in our camera batteries, use the faucet, turn on the toilet, use the shower and everything happens in your little capsule, you are not connected to nothing. I know for these people it's their life, like you, you can't feel that unless you really like to experience it.

I don't think so, yeah, what are we doing? Hey man, good experience on Earthship. Make sure you subscribe and turn on notifications so we can explore. something new together we're going to leave we're going to leave so what do we do we just throw these cans on the ground yeah okay let's go it makes sense it's like what they filled with