The Earthship Community in New Mexico Changes the Way We Think of Sustainable Living
Life can be great when your home is made entirely out of garbage.
From cutting our technology usage to ditching the car for our daily commute, we’re always striving to lessen our carbon footprint with one shared goal in mind. One small community in New Mexico, however, challenges the way we think of sustainable development with the invention of ”Earthships.” According to creator Michael Reynolds, an Earthship is a passive solar home that runs on power generated from sun and wind. While eco-friendly, self-sustaining systems like the biosphere experiment of 1991 are nothing new to human thought, Earthships are entirely hand-built from literally anything they find — including old tires and beer cans – and successfully provide an efficient infrastructure that runs entirely from the sky and the Earth.
“I’m sick of [the words] ‘recycling,’ ‘sustainable,’ ‘green,’ ‘organic;’ they’re rhetoric things,” exclaims Reynolds; “I’ll use anything I can, even if it’s my mother’s down jacket! If people don’t see disasters in their horizon, you can’t convince them of that. They’re gonna have to see that on their own, and I’m just making life rafts.”
The Adaptors‘ latest video venture brings us to just outside of Taos, New Mexico, where the community’s 65 Earthships comfortably live on a plot of land with a carrying capacity of 130 Earthships. Get a glimpse inside this unique society in the video above.
