A New Home…
But there’s a new revolution sweeping the planet, homes that are built to last for generations, just like the good ol’ days, and that are created to be in harmony with nature, and are built for a sustainable future for the world. Warm in the winter, cool in the summer, with built in green houses
Plus, they are just flat out fabulous looking!
Enter the Earthship.
An Earthship is an incredible new type of structure that requires little more than sunlight and water to provide us with all of the comfort, food, warmth, clean water, and various amenities we need. Through this type of building, human existence is made basically equitable, in terms of self-sufficiency and environmental impact, to a plant–while being far more stable and resilient.
The design has been developed by visionary Michael Reynolds and his team, and in his words has been shaped completely by “an encounter with the natural phenomena of the world,” meaning it has been designed entirely to fulfill the practical needs of self-sufficiency. The design has also evolved largely because of its encounters with various building codes in different places around the world, and it is constantly changing and evolving. Although they have had to go to court in almost every country they have gone to build, overall their encounters with the law have indirectly led Michael and his team to perfect the design.
Built entirely of recycled materials that are locally available anywhere, construction of this house actually cleans up the earth, instead of further polluting it. Through strategic thermal insulation and heat distribution, the latest design maintains a temperature within 10 degrees of 73F, without any sort of heating system, regardless of outside conditions. It utilizes collected rainwater 4 times in the various water systems before it releases it back into the environment, making it able to sustain itself in any climate with only 7 inches of rain per year. The greenhouses that are built into the design allow enough food growth to feed a small family, in an appropriately sized home, and are fed by the “blackwater” or human toilet waste. Additionally, the option of add-on ponds and chicken houses can easily create sources of animal protein, and additional outside gardens when weather permits would promise an abundance of food.
Ultimately, if you live in one of these homes, the things you actually need from the world outside of your Earthship would be reduced to about $700 per year, or less. Although there are some very minor maintenance costs, in a survival situation you would be fine with absolutely nothing but the house itself. With the cost of building at about $205 per square foot, construction of a family-sized Earthship ends up costing about the same as construction of a conventional house more or less equivalent in living capacity. This amount is also drastically reduced if you build it yourself. Although the construction cost is about the same, with a conventional house you still have to pay for all of the resources you will be dependent on indefinitely, but with an Earthship, you have none of these obligations. Your home is like an island, or better, an organism, living on the land, needing nothing more than water and sunlight to sustain you.
Imagine living in a home that could completely provide for your every need. What kind of life would that be? You certainly wouldn’t need a normal job, you would really only have to find a way to come up with a few hundred dollars a year. One thing that would undoubtedly change is that you would have a lot more free time! Time to spend with your friends, your family, and doing things that you love. And isn’t that what life should be? And if that option is available to us for basically the cost of building a normal house, then isn’t that the obvious choice?
Earthships, and the architectural technologies which they may branch off and develop into, represent the next step in human evolution. With all of the economic turmoil and negative things going on in the world, the prospect of actually changing the current system for the better, to something that will serve our needs, seems extremely unlikely. The “powers that be” already have such a hold on the current system, that it seems the only way for humanity to better its situation is to simply evolve past this system, or to make it obsolete.
That is exactly what Earthships represent. By creating homes that take care of our needs, we make the centralized systems the world operates with today almost completely obsolete. That means we make the economic system obsolete, we make the vast majority of government obsolete, and we make most of the corporate world obsolete. Instead of fighting the system, we can simply outgrow it, we can evolve beyond it. And that is what the Earthship movement represents to me. It is the next step, the logical choice, something that seems at once obvious, and revolutionary.
When Michael Reynolds discussed the Earthships with the aboriginal people of Australia, they said that this is the closest thing that the white man has ever done to being representative of their beliefs of how people should live. The vast majority of people want to live in harmony with nature, but don’t want to give up their modern comforts. The Earthship solves that dilemma entirely.
In short, this is an idea that will change the world. So let’s start building some Earthships!
Stephanie Kelley
