Earthships - America's Off-Grid Desert Community

located in new mexico's high desert is the complete rethinking of a house these off-grid buildings are designed to harness heat in the winter and deter it in the summer their roofs are built to utilize every drop of rain water and designed to grow their own food using old tires bottles and beer cans these homes are made out of garbage built into the earth and completely autonomous like a ship they're called earthships amazingly those who live in these odd looking structures still enjoy almost all of the luxuries of a traditional house nowhere else in america can you legally experiment with housing like this according to new mexico state law how did this movement get started where is it going and how can you actually be a part of it our first stop was at the most recent earthship construction site where we met mike reynolds who is proudly responsible for all of this in his eyes he's found an answer this does not look like a typical work site yeah well this this is our main structural material is tires [Music] we have to register every build site as a waste dump really that's that's how ridiculous it is so this is a waste jump this is a waste dump it is still harder to get a permit for a sustainable absolutely off the grid building than it is for a framed cracker box you know i wrote a law called the new mexico sustainable testing sites act it's true he did but if we're going to go down that hole we're going to need a little history [Music] as suburbia flourished and america blossomed mike recognized what was coming and there is no one factor more representative of the economic well-being of the american citizen than the home in which he lives new mexico is the state where they tested the atomic bomb and they blew apart 10 000 acres and made it unusable for 200 000 years and they test airplanes and people die they test drugs and people get sick why can't we test housing why can't we test sustainable housing most of mike's life had been lived against the grain so when he saw the vietnam war he sought something else i came out here to new mexico straight from architectural school to race motocross to get injured so i wouldn't have to go to vietnam there's all these 50 people lined up and they all want to win and i want to win but i got one thing over them i want to get injured and none of them want to get injured so that made me dangerous anyway i got my degree in architecture so i bought a no barn made out of railroad ties and i started adding on to it and i was doing it for myself stockholm sweden june 12 1972. it is clear that the environmental crisis which is confronting the world will profoundly alter the future destiny of our planet and the more cities man built more problems there were housing transportation congestion pollution two weeks after hearing that within two weeks i was making a house out of beer cans and and oh man i got so much i got you know just practically hate from the architectural community building you know disgrace i was called and everything like that [Music] in the same year of 1975 the world population reached 4 billion and the term global warming was recognized tied up in the whole conversation was garbage we got away with building a beer can building here and then then we got into bottles and we got into tires and we got into thermal mass and we got into water catchment and as the world got more and more in jeopardy on all things that we need we just incorporated them into the buildings so now we're building what we call an earthship it's a vessel that addresses six things that humanity must have that's comfortable shelter electricity water treating and containing and treating your own sewage food and dealing with your own garbage as mike's movement started growing the government started to take notice and began to stunt his growth citing codes and malpractice the new mexico government aimed to strike him down i gave up stuff that i loved to be an architect and then my license got taken away after mike visited his hometown oliver hodge a documentarian decided to follow mike's story and create the film garbage warrior the film follows mike's journey where he fought for no codes no limits a place to fail and rebuild in hopes of landing on a solution to the world's housing crisis but to many his proposals were laughable they just didn't know what to think of it but some old guy got up and he said everything's about pickup trucks in new mexico and he said well imagine driving your pickup truck through a framed building you'd go in one side and out the other and break out your windshield he said imagine driving your pickup truck through a wall like this you'd die everybody laughed and they said okay go ahead and do it mike was fighting for a few square miles the homes he was working on were completely elective no one was being forced to be a part of the process and after many times reluctantly suiting up and enticing government offices mike had a glimmer of hope and it took four years but governor bill richardson ended up signing it and it's all that's amazing with an official green light mike 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 could figure something out in 50 years so i mean it's fun to figure out how to make these better and better each year the part that's not fun is and it still goes on is you know code approval and regulations and some people being prejudiced still about garbage these buildings if we build them right they stay at 70 degrees fahrenheit i don't care if it's 20 below zero or 105. [Music] we use beer cans to pack out with cement the tire work to get it to the next level so we start throwing mud or you know adobe mud on there and it ends up being a mud plastered wall this is pretty cool like the first thing that we had on this site was that box with that stuff in it and we plugged in our cement mixer and we plugged in our saws and we built a house we brought our power to the house there's the thing that'll take care of people shining down from the sky i don't think if someone didn't know what these are they would land on that's a house no no probably not because a house to me the house is a piece of you know what i mean it i don't want it to be a house that that mound of dirt over there will take care of you i need to go talk to that guy that's just pulled up behind that building uh because he doesn't know what he's doing right now so right on i'm gonna go do that right okay galen sorry just keep going just [Applause] you don't want this because this will just cave in anyway you got to give this a slope from here to here got it okay good job so where where are we going we're going just two miles away to the phoenix it's at the north end of the community the community is about two miles long when you come through this place it's so different than the rest of society i feel like we're in an entirely different world it's like that much of where i really want to go to me it's not out of goody two shoes save the planet love thy neighbor or any of that kind of stuff it is logic it is only logical this is the one i told you i've 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 of every grid it kind of looks like like an amusement park it sort of is you don't have to be out [Music] no there's no rush there's my tangerines you weren't kidding about the whole jungle thing the sewage of the toilet go out to septic tanks at either end and then you'll have a septic tank as a drain field the drain field comes right back in under here in a rubber lined cell this is all growing from ship and so i'll just take you a quick through first this is the living room a waterfall waterfall fireplace fireplace yeah so i just went off i just did whatever you went all the way off [Music] people think that you have to be in a tepee 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 cupboards the floor it seems like everything is intentional but this this shows people what can be done [Music] this pile of literal garbage is worth 1.5 million dollars to find out what it's like living in one of these vessels 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 whole environment i've got six solar panels which supply me with enough electricity always except for really cloudy days but then i have a windmill so for if it's cloudy it's windy the roof is slanted so that the rainwater goes down into the cisterns i have three cisterns of 1500 gallons each you know i'm getting purified water that's rainwater and you know everyone else is drinking micro plastics so i mean in total how many earth ships are there oh that i don't know there are here there are 60 i mean not only do we get to live here but we also serve as a demonstration that you can build your house out of old tires and you need a few things besides old tires and cans of bottles do we want to go in let's see the humble earth ship you have going hot tub got a hot tub that's lucky so not that not that humble so here are uh two skylights these are what suck these are these don't suck they they're awesome they suck that hot air go on but i'm sure there's a community that that's tied you together you've tied a community together through that is there used to be there used to be and then some people got disenchanted and thought that uh michael should pay for more of the roads and he should do this and he should do that so there became a split but still there is a little core group that i'm associated with yes so what happened the ugliness of america came to the great greater world judy is referring to the greater world urship community here in taos which along with judy's home seems to be full of personality as she continued tending to her ship we traveled just down the road to a more comprehensive type of earthship and this is the latest global model airship the global model is really called the global model because you can build it anywhere in the world earthships are all unique each built for the specific climates that they inhabit however mike reynolds and his team designed a model that can function anywhere on earth this is true chess and debra helped build it i mean this is pretty much as good as it gets in terms of growing food you have these huge banana trees in here you get rosemary you've got inca berries you got fig trees so really this is kind of an experiment with how much can you actually do in terms of growing your own food the greenhouse also serves another purpose temperature regulation between the living area and the outside lies the greenhouse which acts as a climate buffer every earthship faces a few degrees off of true south to deter the sun in the summer and fully harness its power in the winter on top of that surrounding the remaining three sides of the building are tire-packed walls that absorb the heat in the day and transfer it inside at night you know you have all this dirt all this earth that's like a battery and you can heat that up and cool it as you want you know for your own comfort and so by heating up your greenhouse then that is charging up the rest of the house and those earth walls and then at night or in winter that kind of comes back into your living area and makes it comfortable for you it's all on solar so in here you have three bathrooms running and you know this is a huge building and it runs all in solar and solar hot water people here survive on just seven inches of annual rainfall seven inches for drinking cooking showering the bathroom even watering the plants so you'll always see in older ships that the showers are a little bit elevated because it's just gravity feeds down so you're using the same water four times you're getting the rain water you're filtering it to shower with then that shower water that's one the shower water waters your plants in the planter bed so you're growing food with that that's two third time is you flush a toilet with that same water and then that same water goes outside and waters pants that are outside so you're using the same water four times if you're in your flat or your home or wherever it is and you you know you open up the tab it's like where's that water coming from and if you switch on the light where is that light coming from you know and the vegetables that you eat where are those coming from and where does your poop go when you flush the toilet you know to me like every day that i can spend doing this and somehow showcasing it or teaching other people about it or sharing that information is huge so yeah after learning more about how earth ships function it was time for us to check into ours another model named the encounter [Music] oh this must be the ac units that they talked about when you open this it's like a vent yeah you can hear the air coming through that's so cool by opening certain vents a vacuum is created that can draw cold air through the insulated mass of tires and earth which can cool the house by up to 40 degrees all while using no electricity when you stay in an earthship you can manipulate the environment to see how it works first hand as we moved in for the next few days we were amazed at how normal everything felt after spending the night in our encounter we headed over to the construction site for the latest model unity mike calls it a festival of labor yeah so which is kind of what it is actually it is some kind of festival and it's pretty laborious this is phil one of the first to join mike in his journey being here from the start he has seen earthships grow along with the community of those who dwell in them you know the people are just on the stranglehold by corporations which give them everything they need not give them sell them everything they need government which has the ultimate control of all those things and then seeing that you don't have to be that you can be self-reliant that's my motivation should we grab some tires yeah all right let's just take a couple of them then we're going to want some cardboard to put in the bottom it's like it's like [Music] most of it built out of beer do you remember your first tire pounding all your effort is gonna be trying to get the dirt up under the sidewall trying to get it as solid as possible in there so we're going to do this a lot of times [Music] have there been any just complete failures i mean yes well i mean i guess you learn from that right oh yeah in our culture failure is kind of a you know if you fail at school it's like a bad thing right yeah there's so much stigma around that yeah and so it's fairly it's refreshing to be with people that see failure as actually success you know is that like part of the foundation here oh absolutely yeah so an interesting element that i keep hearing is a client and company and and like it is a business right but it's like different i get asked all the time is this a cult i don't know you think it is uh no it's a it's a business i mean it's it's not like a uh you know booming successful business financially but we're always like i mean we're always sort of like treading water and keeping the head above just enough to move on to the next evolution see how this one's getting kind of puffed up almost looks like it's starting to look like it's full of air yeah that's kind of kind of the idea hear that is that when you know you're done that means it's getting close yeah but the compaction's important you know because we don't want the building to like yeah so we do want them it's what it's all about okay okay okay okay we'll keep going chris you want to go i just need to have some alone time with this tire i spent my alone time with my tire phil told the crew about what earthshippers do outside of the u.s earthship biotecture has traveled across a globe in hopes of providing sustainable and safe housing for communities in need we nosed around down there a little bit there's lots of tents there's some container things but really there's nothing for the people yet this is a permanent structure that will take care of people that takes very few skills and those are easy to acquire the local people can replicate these [Music] the crews tend to build airships and disaster zones building practices are more welcome than scrutinized and there is often an abundance of their most prominent building material garbage so in addition to these things being made out of tires and cans and bottles they are also just consuming the garbage of the community for installation yeah all right you got it got it yes so why did we do this this is like the bearing walls of the house all our all our roof sits on tire wells i mean you're reusing a piece of trash essentially yes what are the other benefits for the structure and for these homes it's the thermal mass so the tire wall is what takes on and regulates temperature inside the building so when you walk in your place and it's warm it's because those tires are holding all that heat this guy right here this thing right here a thousand more times and you got a house crazy the pounding was rough but luckily we set aside some time to explore what the locals are like over a lunch date with kathleen welcome to my humble abode gentlemen any questions about this part um are you an artist uh yes since i was two oh okay this is my studio what does this say what does that say that says i did ayahuasca and this is what happened afterwards oh my gosh all right are we having lunch now we are gentlemen we are having lunch well you made my first experience of having people um come and visit my earth ship really interesting has no one ever been no so wow huh so what are we eating mac and cheese what kind of people are attracted to the earthship you're you you call it an experience a lifestyle i think people that think think for themselves okay is that an independence thing people want to be self-sufficient they're also made out of garbage the people no no no no the the uh the houses you know they're made out of tires right and tin cans and stuff like that yeah so it helps to clean up the environment there's something about being nestled in that's very different than in other kinds of structures what's the hardest part about all of this well if i want to do the wash and it's cloudy for a couple of days or if i want to take a bath instead of shower i have to think about how much water i have and stuff like that sure so the kind of people that live here they all like living like that being conscious of everything all the water you're using all the electricity you're using people that live here like the idea that they don't have utilities can you imagine your life with no utilities why should we do without things if solar and water catchment and wind power i have a wind generator too if those things can work why aren't more people doing this it's insane kathleen and others who live in earthships are able to live surprisingly regular lifestyles far more similar to society than you might imagine not all of the earthships here are in the plains one of the first build sites is located a few miles away high up in the mountains a place more demanding you can see it right up there wow look at those other ships this was the first community that mike started back in the i want to say late 80s he bought 40 acres of land up here in valdez because no one wanted it because it's too steep and it can look like a million dollars but it's all made out of trash what are the differences between people that are down there and you guys that are up here but i've noticed a lot of the people that live up here have really moved up here to escape society yeah i'd say everyone up here is like pretty tough to you know go through the just every day life's a little more difficult when you're up on a mountain but i think it's worth it in the long run it's very peaceful up here to get to the point where residents live in their ownerships they often start out as students and complete a training program while staying at another iconic location [Music] eve behind me is our latest project it's called eve earthship village ecologies and it's going to be demonstrating a village scenario while here and taking classes students learn principles of earthship design construction methods and philosophy our students do a lot of hands-on building out in the field but in the lab we actually teach the students how to put together all the components of a nurse ship right here in the classroom we met with alex who just wrapped up his first session this is what you do here right so relocate tires so your students you know your people to come learn from the master is that how it is yeah you know um lots of things in my life just kind of showed me that if i wanted to do something outstanding here i think is the ultimate answer you know being able to take care of yourself without the need of a major you know national grid has a lot of inherent advantages in terms of efficiency self-reliance and just 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 about going off the grid as being an uncomfortable decision in life absolutely and that's kind of why earth ships are so groovy because you come here and you see something like the phoenix and you're like this is off grid another earth ship that dons a price tag similar 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 off grid like a millionaire you know there's definitely people who don't know anything about earthships there's just the weird hobbit houses in the desert you know and then there's the people who think mike reynolds is kind of a charlatan telling people how to come out here and build these wacko structures they can't permit around the globe and you know they see him as kind of a snake oil salesman but you know any great thinker i think will generate criticism like that's just kind of the name of the game yeah i mean he's challenging the system absolutely you see the system you see the system anywhere you look from here like any house that that is that one right there you know it's got a window every i don't know the codes but yeah yeah no exactly it's very regular you know what it looks like it's predictable and then you look over there and you're like what in the hell yeah what what spacecraft landed here yeah i used to pay you know thirteen hundred dollars for rent in uh lake forest park near seattle uh for a one bedroom and um now i pay 450 a year on property tax so it's just freedom you know some people are a little afraid of freedom but we're all on our own path a unique way earth shippers build community is through payday an event that happens every friday after a build week the company brings beer and the earth pounders unwind i mean is that the ultimate goal for you like come here and build a home i would love to live in a nursery but i'm not as like society as a lot of this place is you know the airships are kind of forced to stay out here on the outsource because of regulation and stuff like that so that definitely fits in line with people that are trying to get away from people and not see everyone a lot and just live by themselves but i think that community is important to and even if ursa bio texture doesn't acknowledge that that's important it's still that community still exists here well like i said it kind of attracts this independent spirit right who doesn't necessarily even want community where i'm from if you want a fixer-upper it's about 500 000 in seattle and you know that is a monumental cost that you're going to spend most of your life you know paying off and if you're able to get your friends together and build yourself shelter that's very comfortable and awesome like you know it's it's just a better life getting out of that stress cycle i never held a hammer in my hand like i had no idea about construction or anything you know and then um yeah and it just it just makes sense you know and now it's family i mean mike is it's more than my boss he's my friend but what we haven't touched on yet is possibly the toughest challenge of mike's life i mean is there anything that is challenging for you at this point i mean i'm sure there's things that like about 14 months ago i was diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer and that was a little bit challenging at first the doctors told me hey this is life threatening dude you better pick out a casket it's basically what they said stage four and uh they wanted to cut my balls off cut my prostate out cut my lymphs out because it traveled to my limbs and give me radiation and chemo and then have me buy a bottle of pills every month that costs uh seventeen thousand dollars a bottle and so i don't do any of that i eat way different i eat vegetables that i can grow in my airship not only is energy off the charts in water and the dogma of utility infrastructure but the way we eat and feed ourselves with fast food and processed meats full of hormones dairy cows are so full of hormones it's you know wonder that everybody here doesn't have tips i mean it's just it's insane what they're doing and it fit right into this so my solution of earthships is helping me with cancer and i you know i may be be full of crap but i think i'm going to be alive another 30 years to go through what you've gone through to get a place like this up and running all of these places up and running it's amazing that takes so much grit you know from being completely shut out of essentially this community and then like constructing your own laws to make it work and then to continue on for 50 years that's something that a lot of people won't do i i'm driven now more than ever because i i you know it impressed me to see people waiting in cars for food and showing videos of frozen pipes running water down the stairways and people in cars trying to stay warm in the country that i live in you know i've seen that in third world countries stuff like that but for this country to be reduced to a third world country means that somebody needs to come up with a yellow brick road to a better life and i think that's what this is and see that's that's a shitload of garbage right there the privacy wall and it's not done yet but uh we just and and the ones we're doing in the trophy it's pretty hard to resist being inspired while listening to mike speak so to contribute ourselves we put in some hard labor to provide some earthship materials those materials beer cans just seeing what a home can be changes my perspective on like what i've perceived it to be in my whole life honestly it reminds me of a when i was like 10 years old making a tree fort in my backyard like no rules build what you want throwing away all conventional architecture like i didn't know anything i was 10 years old not that these people are 10 years old but you know what i mean with what you're saying it's like when you don't have any restrictions you've literally just made what worked the thing that blew my mind the most about the whole thing we would pretty much be living like normal like we would plug all of our stuff in plug our phone in plug our camera batteries in use the faucet flush the toilet use the shower and it's all happening in your little pod you're not connected to anything i know for these people it's their life like you you can't feel that unless you actually like experience it i don't think yeah what are we doing uh hey man good earthship experience be sure to subscribe and turn your notifications on so we can explore something new together are we gonna just leave we're just gonna leave like that what do we do just chuck these cans on the ground yeah okay let's go it kind of makes sense it's like what they filled with

Channel: Off the Cuff

Views: 1,602,020

Rating: 4.9147677 out of 5

Keywords: Earthship, Earthship homes, Off grid, Off the grid, Garbage Warrior, Off grid living, America

Id: wgUkjbMhF18

Length: 33min 40sec (2020 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 02 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/JamesThePaladin]

I wanna live in one of these so bad. I remember looking at blueprints for them like 6 years ago lol

[u/PaleontologistKey229]

I think it’s very inspiring! Wish I had the ability to try something that drastic, but I just don’t.

[u/fzj80335]

Yeah and those people are wierd as fuck.