I live in New Mexico, and I have been to the “Greater Earth Community” of Earthships there.
I have a bit of a bone to pick with Earthships, partly because of their stupid name, but mostly because they are incredibly labour-intensive (and therefore expensive) to construct, and they use non-sustainable materials such as synthetic insulation and automobile tyres. I was thinking more along the lines of hay bale construction, or natural adobe. Even a sustainably-produced advanced polymer would be interesting, but as for using waste products other than steel, I’m not too into that. Furthermore, I’ve read that they have leakage problems since, being large mounds of dirt set into an artificial or natural hillside, they are essentially built underground.
There are really only 4 problems to solve in order to successfully live off the grid. One of them is getting the thermal performance of your home up to the level of your satisfaction with little or no requirement for energy input for heating. The shape and orientation of the house and the light of the sun should be enough, and this Earthships do very well, but it should be possible with a combination of hay bales, for insulation, and interior wood and natural stone, for thermal mass, to accomplish at least comparable performance.
The other three problems are Food, Water, and Energy. Food is probably the most difficult of these, since nutrition isn’t that well understood in the first place. How much variety is enough? What must you grow? What animals must you raise? How can you provide for your sustenance with as little expenditure of time as possible? There are many products on the market for collecting water from the air, and there are very very very low-tech ways to gather plenty of rain water for washing, crops, and animals. The main problem here is purifying the water for drinking. This is why atmospheric condensers are a good idea, but they are expensive, high-tech (or so they want you to believe), and they wouldn’t fit in well with the overall aesthetic of a low-tech, hand built house. Heating that water is just another part of the energy problem. But how should we gather energy? Solar, wind, manually spinning a generator designed for that purpose? And how much is necessary (for lighting, heating water, and running a computer system with satellite internet connection)? How do we store it?
Anyway, there’s a lot that would go into it, and most of it could be thought out ahead of time. What I mean by asking here is to get some stories from people who have actually tried it, so they can reveal all the things that don’t occur to someone before hand, all the little problems that arise that we can’t predict until they happen, and what the experience of isolation and power of being completely independent is like. Is it worth it?
What makes a good place for a human being, and how can we create it with zero impact on our limited resource base?
Composing members:
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Composing members:
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