garret blogs about Earthships today. Not having heard the term before, I inquire of him “what the heck are earthships?” (The initial version of his post did not have the Wired link). He says they are popular in “the area west of [T]aos [New Mexico], where there’s a group of these things, looks like a giant garbage pit.”
I reply “This sounds incredibly strange, and not in a good way!”
Further, garret writes, in his idiosyncratic, capitalization-free style, “in a nutshell, up at taos they’ve build ‘recycled materials’ houses. the idea is, you cut “u” shaped areas back into an incline, or hillside. line the “u’s” with old car tires that have been sledgehammered full of dirt. in front of the “u’s” you build a sort of glass lean-to, to enclose all the “u’s”. each “u” is a room. most earthship folks go whole-hog on the environmentalist route, trying to recapture all their water (including blackwater). some have cisterns with algae and frogs and fish in them. but most i’ve been anywhere near pong (stink) like a sunuvabitch.”
He provides a link to Scott & Janis Derrick’s Earthship voyage. Quite an amazing, if ultimately pointless, voyage. Scott documents pretty much the whole building story. Takes awhile to read but getting the depth of the sheer lunacy of it all makes the time well-spent. I guess I don’t understand this thing at all. Environmentally friendly, mostly, sustainable, blah blah blah. Wood, last I heard, is a natural product. And the amount of labor that went into building this place is huge, much more than a normal house would need. They still used environmentally unfriendly products where necessary. And, given that there’s no garage, where do the residents park their cars?
I could understand building a house along Wright’s ‘harmony with locale’ ethic, modern, minimally intrusive, solar-powered (or wait a couple of years for commercial fuel cells). This ‘Earthship Biotecture‘ is just weird.
BillSaysThis 