In his 1989 book, A Coming of Wizards, Michael Reynolds says four mystical beings, “wizards,” have guided his work. He says they taught him to “denormalize” his thinking and “surrender” to his own “energy band.”

The results of his mystical inspiration are revolutionary, inspirational and practical successes in the real world.

Mike is the inventor of the Earthship, a home design that uses recycled materials and nature’s original machinery to create snug, self-sufficient solar houses. When I met him in 1982 he’d already been building Earthships for the better part of a decade. They were scattered around northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. They weren’t like any other houses in the world.

Mike had spontaneously, maybe instinctively, set out to solve a bunch of human dilemmas at the same time.

If energy is precious and the consumption of energy causes environmental damage, then houses should be more efficient. So he half-buried his houses in south-facing hillsides and created their south walls entirely from high-quality insulated glass so they would capture the maximum heating energy from the sun. He built durable, moisture-proof roofs, buried them in soil and planted native plants. He invented a unique ventilation system that pulls cool air from outside and pushes overheated air out through skylights during warm weather.

The Earthships needed to store solar energy when the sun was shining to be used at night and during bad weather. Mike designed massive interior walls three or four feet thick and put them in the south-facing windows. He poured thick floors made of concrete or adobe that soaked up the sunshine all day long, then radiated warmth at night.

Old tires, bottles and tin cans overflow our landfills, so Mike decided to use them as building materials. The massive interior walls of his Earthships are made from old tires. Other walls use cans and bottles like bricks, mortared with concrete or adobe. The “bottle walls” are left unstuccoed so that light shines into his whimsical rooms through a mosaic of multicolored prisms.

To stay off costly, inefficient and unsustainable utility grids, Mike outfitted his houses with photovoltaic solar electricity, wind turbines and water-collection systems. He filtered and reused the water from the sinks and bathtubs in the toilets. From the toilets, wastewater went to the gardens.

Because creating an Earthship — or any innovative home designed specifically for the homesite — is a labor-intensive process, Mike kept the mechanics simple. Anyone can quickly learn to build a wall from concrete and tin cans or bottles. He invented a method of packing sand inside stacks of used tires that creates massive, stable interior walls. You can master the process in a few hours. Once they’re stuccoed they have a beautiful natural shape and they store a lot of solar energy.

Built-in planters grow food, year-round, inside the Earthships. One owner picks bananas in the middle of winter at 7,000 feet elevation in the Rocky Mountains from a tree that sits in the window of an Earthship. Some of them include indoor goldfish ponds.

Mike built several Earthships himself, but soon he was coaching an army of Earthship builders, many of them do-it-yourselfers who couldn’t afford to hire a contractor or a crew, or who just wanted to play a personal role in the creation of their own homes. Naturally, the Earthships came in every shape and size imaginable from little one-room “beer-can bungalows” to the late actor Dennis Weaver’s multi-million-dollar Earthship estate in Ridgeway, Colorado. Reportedly, construction of the 8,500-square-foot home utilized 3,000 old tires and more than 350,000 discarded aluminum cans.

There have been Earthship subdivisions and complexes of Earthship condominiums. Now they’ve been built in Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, India, Japan, South America, Europe and Africa. Mike is the subject of a documentary film, “Garbage Warrior,” and has been on every major television network.

Not every Earthship is beautiful, at least not to passers-by. But look in the eyes of the Earthship owner and you’ll see the unmistakable glow of affection when they talk about their homes, especially if they built the house themselves. To their owners, even the funkiest Earthships are lovable. And some of them are architectural wonders.

The early prototypes were experimental. Some of them seemed to soak up the cold right out of the earth, and no woodstove would heat them. Others broiled their occupants, summer and winter. Sometimes Mike went back and fixed them with a new idea or two. Sometimes the homeowners sorted the solutions out for themselves.

Still, today, nearly 40 years after their invention, they are the cutting edge of sustainable architecture.

I’ve ridden up and down dirt roads with Mike, looking at Earthships and listening to him talk about them. He never talked much about the past. Although he was a licensed architect, the history of architecture wasn’t interesting to him and he didn’t operate in any established architectural tradition. He didn’t even seem to be very interested in the history of the Earthship, his own creation. Mike talked mostly about the future, a future in which the Earthship philosophy would be a major force in the world. The Earthship was, after all, invented for the future.

You don’t see many references to Mike Reynolds’ visiting wizards on any of the thousands of Web pages about Earthships these days. But I keep my copy of A Coming of Wizards near at hand as a reminder that sometimes we need to “denormalize” how we think about things.

I came home one day to find five sheep dead, piled in a corner of their shed. It took me a couple of hours to dig a hole big enough to hold the carcasses. Two days later I found six more in the same spot. Five were dead, one moved when I touched her. I pulled her out of the pile and she staggered away to recover.

This was my worst moment in farming.

I stayed home for a day to watch for the cause of the carnage. I was pretty sure I knew the culprits. Sure enough, mid-morning, about an hour after I would normally have left for work, our three border collies crawled under a fence, rounded up the sheep and brought them into the pen, crowding them into a corner of the shed. We discourage the dogs from working sheep by themselves, but a certain amount of self-study is good for a sheepdog. They teach themselves by practicing. In moderation, it is a productive exercise.

If a border collie is not fascinated by livestock, they don’t make good stock dogs. They learn to move the herds and flocks because they love to move them.

The two older dogs mostly stayed back, moving this way and that to watch the way the clump of sheep moved in response to them. The youngest dog, Chico, was a pup, about five months old, and he was much more aggressive than his parents. He darted into the flock and nipped the sheep. He barked and ran at them. I went out and called the dogs off. Then I brought Chico inside and started looking for someone who wanted a free border collie.

Sheep dread physical contact with a predator. To the sheep, almost nothing is more upsetting. As Chico goaded and harassed the ewes, they would have packed themselves more and more tightly into the corner of the shed until they knocked each other down and climbed over the fallen. Eventually those on the bottom died of suffocation or panic.

We were pretty sure the dead sheep were the victims of dogs because so many were killed and none of them had been eaten. Coyotes kill one animal at a time and eat them immediately. Coyotes are all business. And they almost never hunt in the daytime. We guessed our dogs were to blame because the sheep had no wounds. Border collies are bred to herd sheep without touching them.

Mop had been our primary sheepdog and a fine farming partner for four years. Pitch, her mate, had been around for about two years and was a dependable ally as well. Chico was their pup. The other four pups from the litter had been sold and we were thinking about keeping him.

Was it Chico’s aggressive personality that caused the deaths of all those sheep? Was it the chemistry of three dogs together, a dog-pack chemistry, that tipped the balance?

We don’t know. But when Chico went away to live with a new family — a family without livestock — our problem was solved.

That was the worst catastrophe we've seen on our farm. However, there have been others. A visiting dog — a friendly dog — killed about 30 chickens one day. A neighbor’s pit bull terriers killed a mother and two baby goats one evening just after sunset. They maimed and nearly killed a third goat, “Mr. Big,” an ancient angora wether who somehow recovered.

I failed to notice a heifer calving in a distant pasture once. The calf died in the birth canal and the mother became septic. She died soon after in the veterinarian’s corral.

The chickens died because we left the visiting dog unattended. The goats were killed because I had separated them, temporarily, from the mule who normally watched out for them. We keep mules and donkeys with our goats and sheep because they naturally become members of the flocks and, by instinct, protect them from predators.

The heifer and her calf died because I accidentally let her breed too young and then wasn’t attentive enough when she went into labor.

And there have been other fatalities over the years. Chickens and turkeys, mostly. Poultry has a genius for suicide-by-predator. Or, rather, every predator on Earth recognizes poultry as the easiest, most delicious meal on the farm.  Every dog has to be trained to ignore the chickens and turkeys. In fact, our dogs had to be trained to ignore the chickens and then, when we expanded into turkeys, they had to be taught that turkeys were also not on the canine menu, all over again. Hope springs eternal. On the other hand, the dogs help keep the raccoons, possums and skunks out of the chicken house. The cat had to be taught not to eat the baby chickens. Once we had assisted the hens in teaching him that lesson, he provided another line of defense against the possums and skunks.

Each and every time one of my mistakes has caused a creature to die, I’ve considered selling all the animals and pulling out the fences. I care about each of the animals personally. I can’t help it.

I’m not emotionally detached when it comes to the livestock. I name nearly every animal. Some people — even in my own family — consider this ghoulish. After all, we’re going to eat some of them and sell most of the others to people who will eat them.

But I relish their presence. The names help me keep track of them and I enjoy socializing with them. I chat with them while I’m working around the farm. They are, in a very real sense, my companions. They might even be called friends.

Of course this makes the process of taking them to slaughter both painful and poignant. But that’s nature. All prey animals die, in nature, in the jaws of predators. And our methods are, generally, more humane than the ways other predators kill.

It is much more painful, to me, when one of my constant companions is killed as the result of my bad judgment, my lack of attentiveness or my laziness.

Our animals are raised in their natural families in a nutritious environment where they can enjoy good health, companionship, clean air, fresh water and generally as much space as they desire. When our animals accidentally get out of their fenced pastures, they usually hang around until we show up to put them back in. They have family, friends, health and a sense of home here.

Every living thing should be so lucky.

Industrial agriculture cannot spare the time or the space to provide many amenities. So the animals we raise are sparing some other creatures whose lives would mostly be crowded, lonely, chaotic and often unhealthy.

We believe that the lifestyle we provide for our livestock is humane. Their well-being is a personal concern for us, day in and day out. We really care.

And that’s what hurts.

Raising animals for food forces us to confront nature’s own tough logic.  Raising healthy creatures on a specific amount of property while allowing them to reproduce more or less naturally, we need to harvest more animals than we keep each year. If we fail to harvest enough of our annual crop of babies, pastures are soon damaged and animals become sick from malnutrition. If any of our animal-care systems fails, animals die.

So we live with this burden, day in and day out. At its worst, it can make you feel like quitting. Sometimes I feel like letting someone else raise my food for me. Maybe I could pretend that the rice, broccoli and salmon on my plate are the products of some immaculate conception in which nothing had to suffer.

But of course that would be sentimental nonsense. The salmon were captured and killed. Cultivation of crops destroyed some creature’s habitat. When we don’t consume, some other creature quickly takes advantage of the extra resources. Some campers drove across one of our empty pastures one late summer day. It was a big summer for grass and too set to cut hay, so the grass had been left alone all summer. In one round trip the car mashed three prairie voles. One car circled through a 10-acre pasture once and managed to cross paths, fatally, with three voles. The implications for how many rodents had made their home in that pasture during that summer are staggering.

Every creature that draws a breath or burns a single calorie has, to some degree or another, displaced another. That’s one level of responsibility.

When we engage in the active management of our environment as farmers or loggers, gardeners or city managers, we exercise another level of responsibility.

If we commit ourselves to truly exercising our responsibility, if we choose to be true stewards of the land, then we cannot afford sentimentality.  To be good stewards of nature, we have to respect and acknowledge nature’s laws. If we love nature we will care for it more successfully. But only if we love nature for what it is. Undoubtedly a thousand small tragedies were acted out in our lower pasture that summer we left it alone. Voles are monogamous. They take only 30 days to grow from birth to adulthood. Across our pastures tiny mommies and daddies can raise several big families in a long summer. When a coyote or a raccoon digs up a vole nest, well, you can imagine the drama. It is never accurately depicted in what we would call a “family” movie.

So nature challenges us: Can we love the world around us unsentimentally? Our enormous achievements have brought most of the planet more or less under our control. Now that we have this powerful role in the world, are we capable of accepting our responsibility?

Photo by Andrea Ridout

We Americans think of ourselves as independent and innovative. We like to ascribe our wealth and influence to our system of free enterprise and the personal liberty promised in our national Constitution. And it’s true that our systems and philosophies have been conducive to economic success. That’s undeniable. However, it’s equally undeniable that we had an enormous head start in the race to dominate the industrial revolution. We inherited a sparsely populated continent packed with natural resources. When it comes to natural resources — especially fertile agricultural land — our nation was born with a silver spoon in its mouth.

Most geographers today seem to agree that at least 40 million people lived in the Americas when Columbus landed here in 1492.[1] One century later 90 percent of those native people were gone mainly due to diseases introduced by Europeans. Africans, Europeans and Asians had been traveling, trading and procreating together since humanity evolved. When a new cold virus emerged in northern Europe in 1200 A.D., people were probably sneezing in Beijing within a few years. The populations of Old World nations developed natural resistance to each other’s diseases. Disease was always present, of course, and sometimes its effects were catastrophic. The “black death” is estimated to have killed about half of Europe’s population around the beginning of the 15th Century.[2] But the scale of population loss in the Western hemisphere was unique in recorded history.

European immigrants found here a fertile land mostly free for the taking. We have mythologized the settlers and dramatized their conflicts with Native Americans. But imagine what the conquest of the Americas would have been like if there were 10 times as many native peoples.

It would have been very different, to say the least, and European settlement as we understand it might not have occurred at all. The Americas might more resemble northern Asia now, where the ruling Russians and Chinese remain minorities. If there were still 40 million or 50 million native people in the Americas in 1776, competing with the 25 million Europeans who lived here then[3], how different would our history be? And what about our present?

We are taught in the United States that our free-enterprise system is the primary cause for our prosperity. We extrapolate, popularly, that free enterprise is the key to future success. But what if our historic prosperity is mainly due to the fact that we brought the Industrial Revolution to a depopulated continent where we could make maximum use of our new tools to develop its resources? Our free-enterprise philosophies did a great job of facilitating the development of the North American continent and many, many people benefited. It worked super in the development of all that natural abundance. But how well would it work in a world of severely constrained resources?

If our basic assumption that North American prosperity is attributable to our political and economic systems is more myth than reality, then do we have the political and economic systems we need to prosper in a future that will, inevitably, be very different from our past?

Photo by Bryan Welch

[1] Denevan, W. M. The native population of the Americas in 1492, 2nd ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 1992 [1976].

[2] S. Barry and N. Gualde, "The Biggest Epidemics of History: (La plus grande épidémie de l'histoire)" L'Histoire.2006. pp. 45–6, say "between one-third and two-thirds"; R. Gottfried, "Black Death" in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 2, (1983). pp. 257–67, says "between 25 and 45 percent".

[3] The World at Six Billion, United Nations Population Division.

Until fairly recently, the people we depended on lived nearby. Most human beings never traveled more than a few miles from their home. We lived and died in the same small group of people, typically, with one set of traditions and one language.

Among aboriginal societies it’s very common for the name of a tribe to be the equivalent of “the human beings” or “the people” in that tribe’s language. Out of almost 100 tribes listed on the native-languages.org website,[1] more than 30 define the name of their tribe in more or less that way — “the people,” “the original people,” “the best people,” (the “best people,” the Illiniwek from which the state of Illinois takes its name, now call themselves the Peoria, which means “backpack people”), or “the true people.”

Until recently we could afford the luxury of seeing our personal tribes as God’s chosen people. The Judeo-Christian Bible is, of course, full of these declarations. We consistently and systematically considered our local, tribal interests superior to the needs and interests of other people who spoke a different language and wore a different style of footwear.

To a surprising degree, our modern wars have been tribal wars. The Nazi movement, which catalyzed World War II, was explicitly a tribal movement designed to distinguish the Aryan race from other Europeans. Predictably, the people trying to distinguish themselves defined the “Aryans” as the original speakers of Indo-European languages and therefore, in their opinion, the “original people” of Europe.[2] The First World War’s proximate cause was the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, monarch of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, by Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian student inspired by the annexation of Bosnia by the Austro-Hungarians. A lot of Serbs lived in Bosnia-Herzegovina at the time. Princip evidently believed he was defending his ethnic heritage. The ethnic divisions of the Balkan States, including Bosnia Herzegovina, are cultural fault lines along which violence has often erupted. Like World War II, the First World War germinated in a tribal mindset.

A strong tribal identity must have been important to our survival. Durable ethnic divisions characterize human history in every part of the world. As our territories filled up and our communities grew closer together, though, we found ourselves trading with the strangers over the hill. Then our children began marrying within other communities. The next thing you know, it was hard to tell which tribe our grandchildren belonged to. Those grandchildren constituted the common interest between neighboring peoples.

As I write this my father and I are trying to heal a cultural rift in our own relationship. Day before yesterday he included me in a group e-mail to his siblings and several of my cousins. The email was a reprint of an open letter to President Obama written by a retired Proctor & Gamble sales executive named Lou Pritchett. In it, Pritchett repeatedly says to the president, “You scare me,” for a variety of reason, almost none of them directly related to actual public policy. The reasons Barack Obama scares Lou Pritchett — like my dad, a white guy in his 70s — range from the allegation that the administration wants to turn the United States into a “European-style country,” to the assertion that the president is, “culturally, not an American,” because he lived in his stepfather’s home country of Indonesia from age 6 to age 10. For better or for worse, I responded to all the recipients and suggested that my upbringing on the Mexican border and my subsequent Ivy-league education gave me a powerful sense of connection with the President, and that I resented the implication that either of us is “not an American,” culturally, ethnically, psychologically or otherwise.

After hurting my dad’s feelings and then — too late — considering his perspective, it occurred to me that Pritchett and my father were experiencing the anxiety of not recognizing their own culture. To my eyes, Barack Obama personifies the greatest virtues of our diverse, progressive country. But they cannot see him in that way. They see him as an alien presence.

President Obama’s mother married outside her tribe. The world saw the photos of the nation’s first “African American” president standing next to his grandmother, a tiny, elderly white woman from Kansas. Barack Obama’s Kenyan father was from a very different world than the one my father grew up in. Still, the president fits in today’s America, which more than ever is a “melting pot” of ethnicities and cultures. It may be hard for some Americans to see him that way, but on any city street in the nation he would blend right in, just another middle-aged African American professional in a suit. Americans, as a whole, identified with him sufficiently that they elected him. Today, he’s not only a member of the mainstream American “tribe,” he leads it.

Photo by Bryan Welch

[1] http://www.native-languages.org/original.htm. Retrieved August 15, 2009.

[2] Mish, Frederic C., Editor in Chief Webster's Tenth New Collegiate Dictionary Springfield, Massachuetts, U.S.A.:1994; Merriam-Webster. See original definition (definition No. 1) of "Aryan" in English, Page 66

The chickens are pooping all over the front porch again, and my wife is a very special woman.

Almost every week, at some point or another, Carolyn says how happy she is to live at Rancho Cappuccino, surrounded by the wildlife and the livestock, steeping in nature’s own exotic brew of life, death, struggle and ecstasy.

Sounds great, you may say, but the chickens are pooping all over the porch. The geese are pooping all over the lawn. The manure in the sheep pen is two feet deep right now and  the pasture where the cattle are grazing, well, it’s a cow pasture. Talk about your exotic brews.

The cow is a virtuosic defecator. They poop more, larger, wetter, deeper, noisier and more often than anyone else on the farm.

But all God’s children leave their mark.

The chickens leave theirs on the front porch.

My wife’s friends are revolted. Who can blame them?

But my wife is a very special woman.

We’ve tried solutions to the chicken problem. We tried fake snakes. The chickens ignored them, then killed a real snake and left it there, next to the fake snakes on the porch, to express their disdain I guess. This really happened. No kidding.

Then we created a barrier of silk flowers in little buckets. The chickens steer clear. Guests have to step over them.

Of course the chickens still do their business all over the sidewalk and the drive way and the lawn.

I’m acutely conscious that there are very few roommates who would put up with this, and almost all of them are men. If you think I’m being a sexist,  you have an invitation to come help me clean the sheep pen. Then we can talk about my prejudices.

I figure if Carolyn decided to divorce me, I could either move to town or be single for life. I try to think of some other attractive woman who would be willing to join me at the Rancho. I can’t. Even some of the best sports I know can’t hide the little grimaces that say, “How can they live like this? How can she live like this?”

So here’s to Carolyn, with all my gratitude. I’ll make sure I take my boots off every time I come inside. Promise. Unless I forget.