TAOS, N.M. — Mike Reynolds never worried too much as the world inched closer to doomsday. In spring 2020, motorists lined up outside grocery stores waiting for food as the coronavirus pandemic first wrapped its tentacles around the global supply chain. Next came an unprecedented surge of extreme weather as wildfires devastated the American West, hurricanes lashed tropical coastlines, and a deadly winter storm brought the Texas power grid to its knees.
“I was watching that on TV and then walking down the hallway of my building, picking bananas and spinach and kale and tomatoes and eating them. Barefoot, because my building was warm without fuel,” Reynolds said. “My Earthship took care of me.”
Earthships are off-grid, self-reliant houses built from tires, dirt and garbage that have long been an offbeat curiosity for travelers passing by the ski town of Taos, but suddenly look like a haven for climate doomers. Residents of the 630-acre flagship Earthship community treat their own waste, collect their own water, grow their own food, and regulate their own temperature by relying on the sun, rain and earth.
Reynolds, 76, has been building these structures — called “vessels” — since the early 1970s when, after graduating from architecture school at the University of Cincinnati, he took up off-road motorcycle racing on the high desert plateau around Taos to try to injure himself to avoid being drafted to Vietnam. He never left.
“They were talking about a freak on the mesa in New Mexico building buildings out of garbage. That was scandalous,” Reynolds said. But he gained more followers as people became more conscious of climate change, and 2020 brought a surge of interest in new construction.
Those interested range from dreamers such as Linda May, who was depicted in the film Nomadland and whose ultimate goal was to build an Earthship, to young people anxious about a worsening climate, a housing shortage, and eternally escalating electricity and heating costs.
“It’s hard for me to even think of going back to a conventional house,” said Freya Dobson, 24, who is from New York. “This is a real solution for living.”
Earthships operate using six green-building principles governing heating and cooling, solar electricity, water collection, sewage treatment, food production, and the use of natural and recycled materials. This meant that when Earthships emerged in the 1970s, they “addressed something nobody else did: What do we do with garbage?” said Rachel Preston Prinz, a green designer in Santa Fe, N.M., who wrote the book Hacking the Earthship.
About 40% of a typical Earthship is built with natural or recycled materials, most notably foundations and walls made up of hundreds of used tires packed with dirt. These work with dual layers of floor-to-ceiling passive solar windows, which collect sun during winter and reject it in the summer to keep structures at a comfortable room temperature, no matter the weather outside.
“It’s incredibly beautiful,” said Britt Shacham Bernstein, 25, shortly after visiting an Earthship for the first time. “There’s a whole ecosystem in here, and you’re a part of the ecosystem.”
Earthships originally spawned from the arid climate of Taos, maximizing abundant sunlight while squeezing whatever they can from about eight inches of annual rainfall. Each Earthship shares a set of core organs such as a water organization module, which filters and separates water as it moves throughout the house. In the Earthship ecosystem, water is first used for drinking, showering and hand washing before moving to interior plants, such as fig and banana trees, along with hanging gardens of herbs and flowers.
The resulting “black water” is used in the toilet before being flushed into a septic tank, where it fertilizes ornamental outdoor plants and can then be safely released into the groundwater supply.
Another module controls solar power, which is used primarily for lights and appliances. Earthships use about one-sixth as much power as a conventional house.
A typical Earthship can produce 25% to 50% of the food its residents need, depending on a multitude of factors including diet, climate and how much time is spent on garden maintenance, said Phil Basehart, a construction team leader. If you follow a plant-based diet, you may never have to visit a grocery store again.
Said Trent Wolbe, a sustainability lead for events and experiences at Google and a fellow owner who completed an Earthship Academy in 2012: “They’re super inspiring from a sustainability point of view. If you’re a builder, or someone who is interested in doing off-grid systems and expanding where people can live reliably, then all signs point to Earthships.”
But there are also stories of failed builds and abandoned projects, sometimes after tens of thousands of dollars have been spent, and Reynolds has faced lawsuits from unsatisfied buyers. Earthships are experimental, evolving and imperfect structures, and most American families cannot afford expensive growing pains.
Enthusiasts warn against buying or building an Earthship before participating in an Earthship Academy, in which students pay about $1,000 to spend a month helping with a build and taking classes on construction and maintenance. An Earthship is “not plug and play,” said Dobson, who graduated in October from the academy in Taos, and homeowners can be “dependent on people in the Earthship community” to help them solve problems. They are also hard to build, and many prospective owners hire the for-profit Earthship Biotecture as contractors.
"You're packing 400 pounds of dirt into a tire," Dobson said. "That's one of the hardest things I've ever done."
Earthship Biotecture’s Global Model, the most popular build, was designed to work in the vast majority of climates with minor adaptations, and a study on Earthships built in London, Paris and Spain showed it is largely successful at providing thermal comfort without heating or cooling. But the intimate relationship between house and earth requires complex construction considerations that go much smoother with the touch of their eccentric founder.
“Maybe he’s a visionary, maybe he’s crazy,” Prinz said. “But if you’re not working with Mike, I feel like I’m losing some of that.”
Reynolds has tried to build multifamily and commercial structures for years but has run into permit problems, forcing his team to experiment with new projects in places with loose building codes. His team has built a typhoon shelter in the Philippines, disaster relief homes in Puerto Rico, and an in-progress school in southern Haiti, which was devastated by an earthquake this past summer.
The projects are mostly funded by volunteers who pay to work on the builds and learn about Earthships, just as they do at the academies in New Mexico.
Reynolds knows humanity needs time to be swayed. He compares people to a banana plant in his Earthship that, as the months pass, gradually bends to reach the sunlight.
“It’s got to be down to, the Titanic’s got to be sinking, and this is the life raft,” he said. “But selling them on the life raft while they can go dine and dance in the hall with the rich people in the top level, it’s a hard sell.”
