As sustainably minded folk, we tend to curse the environmental disruption that occurs when new roads are built through beautiful wilderness areas. But for a number of residents living just north of Taos, New Mexico, it was the creation of a nearby highway that actually helped pave the way for their unique community.
That's because their homes are actually built in a reclaimed gravel pit -- taking land that was cast off as worthless and turning it into usable living space. But these aren't just any living spaces, either. These Earthships are completely self-sustainable, off-grid homes.
Made with reused materials like car tires and actual earth, these homes are carefully designed to take advantage of the abundant sun to create power and natural heat, and to conserve and recycle (four times!) the scarce water resources of the New Mexico desert. The Earthships, which incorporate gardens inside the homes to help filter greywater, are truly living organisms themselves -- existing in harmony with their environment without sucking resources.
Todd and I got the chance to tour several of the Earthship homes and talk to one of the residents directly involved in the gravel-pit reclamation project. Below, our conversation with Ron Sciarillo:
For more information about the sustainable features of the Earthship homes and the community near Taos, New Mexico, check out these two videos, created by the Earthship folks themselves:
Here are a few more images from our Earthship visit:
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Comments View as Flat
redambrosia99 Posted 3:11 pm
01 Oct 2008
seriously
That is seriously cool! I want one! lol ever since I was a little girl I've wanted to live in the side of a hill (or under a tree or in a tree... Winnie-the-Pooh). Seriously, what an awesome idea/structure/plan/future.
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caniscandida Posted 1:14 am
02 Oct 2008
north-central New Mexico
The Taos region is indeed very beautiful, and these people are fortunate to have found so lovely a location for their project.
(Of course, it is not quite so ideal as it used to be. The region was fairly well-watered in historical times, at least enough to sustain a moderate population. But lately it has been drying out -- and apparently more of that is what the future holds in store.)
But even the interesting town of Taos, with Taos Pueblo and the exquisite Millicent Rogers Museum in the north, and the old Mission church of San Francisco de Asis to the south, is not culturally self-sustainable. And then there are transportation needs. That sort of thing needs to be taken into account when we assess the "sustainability" of a building.
Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.
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guade00 Posted 1:25 am
02 Oct 2008
Good for them
Ingenious use of local circumstances to create a sustainable home, but not a model of sustainability for the rest of us, unless we all want to relocate to a former gravel pit in the southwestern desert.
Life isn't just water and energy. Presumably, they'd need roads to service the area (I saw a Prius!), maintenance of those roads, health services, police and emergency, other amenities, like getting your Prius fixed when it breaks down, movie theaters, etc., some kind of organizational governing system--pretty soon, life starts looking unsustainable again.
The owner in the first video says that humans are "enhancing" the natural environment in a way that "mother nature could never do." It's largely a fantasy. There simply are not enough gravel-pits to go around, and the amount of people on this planet would simply overwhelm this concept.
Still, it is ingenious.
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