Greater World Earthship Community, Taos

Earthships!! Have you heard of them? Seen them on TV? An Earthship is a passive solar home made of recycled materials - mostly tires, glass bottles and soda cans. Michael Reynolds and his Earthship Biotecture of Taos want to help you build your own earthship, mortgage-free, and design it to be completely off-grid. Michael says that if you live in an area that gets at least 9 or 10 inches of rain a year, and some sunshine, you don't need to be hooked up to those pesky utility companies or reliant on fossil fuels.


We're staying in one! The first photo is inside the front door - there's always a big planting bed next to the south-facing window wall. The second photo was taken from the roof at sunrise. It's cozy and nice inside. It's a studio, so quite small, but as our first stay out of the van in 41 days, it seems extraordinarily spacious. Windows on the south-facing wall let the heat in, and it's partially underground, which provides natural temperature regulation. Thick, dense walls provide thermal mass that naturally regulates the interior temperature during both cold and hot outside temperatures. It works.

I won't try to explain the other systems in this and/or other earthships...the water and sewage...but it is very possible to be entirely self-sustaining. I'm pretty sure, however, that the New Mexico sun will power a lot more laptop time than Seattle's.