Saturday, November 24, 2018

I Stayed in an Earthship: Eco Living in the High Desert

I Stayed in an Earthship: Eco Living in the High Desert

I've been intrigued with alternative building methods ever since seeing the first container home featured in Dwell magazine.

Combine that with seven years of living near the Port of Los Angeles, where I used to drive over the bridge and watch containers stack up like blocks in the harbor, and you could say my quiet intrigue eventually turned into an obsession with all sorts of sustainable building designs, from domes and straw bale homes to cob and earthbag construction.

I love reading about new materials like hempcrete, studying the mechanics of passive solar design, learning how to incorporate permaculture principles into my garden, and generally trying to live in harmony with our ecosystem.

Will and I have daydreamed about building our own eco home "some day," but in the meantime, we've settled for visiting some of the more unconventional structures so we can learn from their experiments and live vicariously in them. (Remember way back when we toured Arcosanti in Arizona?)

That was how we found — and decided to stay in — an Earthship one weekend while road-tripping through New Mexico.

Entrance to the eco-friendly Waybee Earthship

A passive solar Earthship home in the Greater World Earthship Community in Taos

We'd heard about Earthships long before we actually saw them in person. At some point, Will had stumbled across them on his playlist of off-grid living channels on YouTube. He became fascinated with the idea of upcycling castoffs (like old tires and aluminum cans) into a potentially net-zero energy house.

Adobe mud wall made from recycled glass bottles and aluminum cans

Aluminum cans laid in adobe mud to give structure to walls

Upcycled wall made from tires, cans, and bottles plastered with adobe mud

The Waybee Earthship in Taos, New Mexico

The fact that most Earthships look like a replica of Atlantis makes...

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