Mass Appeal

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The community will be totally self-sustaining and the people who build the community will live in the community. Reynolds is particular about who will be involved. People have already offered big money for a piece of the land to develop themselves. Reynolds is not interested.

"We don't need money," he says. "Money is not the point. REACH is for the people. The people build it themselves out of what society discards, proving that money is irrelevant. What I am trying to do here is educate people about this concept, show them firsthand that it can be done and how to do it and then let them go out into the world and start these communities themselves, all over the world. There is no place that REACH can't work."

At the core of all Reynolds's efforts is a paradigm, which he sets forth as we leave the mesa, amid continuing atmospheric pyrotechnics, and head toward his own Earthship and a warm dinner. "Look at the trees. They sit there and they don't have to move. They take their water from the ground. They take their energy from the sky. Their foliage drops down and enhances the soil for their babies to grow in. Without even moving, they have their whole system worked out.

"What we're trying to do with these Earthships," concludes Reynolds, "is make a way for human life to live as intelligently as plant and animal life."

Sitting around the dinner table later that night, watching the rain course down the Earthship's sloped glass walls, it is difficult not to feel that the route to preserving this planet may actually lie in something as simple as building houses out of used tires. History will certainly attest to the human predisposition for accepting complex answers only to find the true solutions in elegant simplicity. Take the wheel, for example.

Elements of Earthships

Earthships, like the one shown here, are the result of 20 years of experimental work to develop a thermal mass house built with recycled materials. These structures have been analyzed favorably by various engineers and gas building authorities and have met and exceeded uniform building codes. They have also been financed by conventional lending institutions. Many have been built by the owners themselves with laborers who have little or no construction experience. (Other Earthships have been built by professional construction companies and the rest by Michael Reynolds himself). Though most have been built in the West, Earthships can be built anywhere.

"Earthships," like a seafaring ship, are meant to be self-contained, independent, and carry the inhabitant to a better future. They consistently cost about 25 percent less than equivalent designs built of conventional materials. Involvement by the owner can further reduce the $25 per square foot base cost (the 1,600-square-foothouse diagramed here cost $20 per square foot). When properly executed, Earthships require no backup heating or cooling due to their ability to tap into the constant temperature of the earth itself and store additional energy from the sun in winter. They can be built in almost any climate since, even without adequate sunlight, the thermal mass helps to alleviate the strain on external conventional energy sources. Most Earthships are designed to grow food inside, and some maintain their own solar electrical systems; thus, Earthships can go where utility lines do not.

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