EarthShip A Living Vessel

Sailing The Seas of Tomorrow

Spirit of MAAT - Earthship

Earthship: 1. passive solar home made of natural and recycled materials 2. thermal mass construction for temperature stabilization. 3. renewable energy and integrated water systems; an off-grid home with few or no utility bills.

Diane: I want to begin by asking what caused you to think about using waste products such as tires and cans for building materials?

Michael: The idea started almost thirty years ago after I watched a television special with Charles Kurault and Walter Cronkite. This was back in the times when soda and beer cans were made of steel rather than aluminum as they are today. The special showed the tremendous amount of cans and bottles that were littering our national parks and streets. Charles predicted a major garbage problem in the future. That was thirty years ago, before the word "recycle" became part of our everyday vocabulary.

In the same segment, Walter Cronkite talked about the clear-cutting of timber that was occurring in the Northwest, and predicted a serious rise in the cost of wood and housing.

I had just graduated from architectural school, and within two weeks of seeing this on television I was building blocks out of cans. Shortly after that, several buildings were created.

Some years later, when the energy crunch hit, people were trying to figure out how to store temperature in buildings by using thermal mass. Several of us were already building with garbage, so we decided to see if there was any solution to the current situation by finding some type of garbage that we could utilize to fit the problem.

We looked at tires, and found that if we beat earth into them we created thermal mass. We then added tires and solar electric to our experiments with building.

Then, the news started talking about water shortages, and rivers and streams being polluted. So we began catching water on the roof of our structures rather than drilling into the aquifers. We also began treating our sewage in contained systems, reusing the water we caught from the sky, and didn't let anything go into the aquifers, rivers and streams that would pollute them.

So what I'm saying is that thirty years ago we listened to the news and that's where it all began. Continuing to listen to the news has made what we do evolve. And any time we hear of problems, we try to incorporate solutions into our building concepts.

At this point we've been working long enough to have a fully sustainable home built from recycled materials. We call it an "Earthship."

Diane: Are there any other materials you use for building besides tires, bottles, and cans?

Michael: Yes. We've just started grinding up plastic, since we have a tremendous number of plastic jugs and bottles in our garbage.

Our sewage systems actually have to have an aggregate of gravel or pumice to make them effective. So now we've started mixing in ground-up plastics — kind of like "hamburger helper." We buy less gravel and get rid of our plastic, and it works just fine.

In our 650-acre community in northern New Mexico, we can actually get rid of all our garbage and not have to put anything into the municipal waste dump except for disposable diapers and a few other weird things. And its very successful.

Diane: Why use tires?

Michael: Well, you can certainly achieve thermal mass in a building using stone, concrete, or several other materials. But we've found tires to be the one material that is actually the best. And tires are globally available, indigenous to the entire planet. But it's not the tires in and of themselves. They are most effective when beaten with earth.

Diane: What do you mean "beaten with earth?"

Michael: Filled with earth and compacted

Diane: In terms of a waste product, aren't old tires considered one of the world's greatest garbage problems?

Michael: Exactly. By using tires to build homes you are addressing this problem.

Tires are very low tech. They take no machinery to remanufacture. You just gather them up, beat them full of earth, and use them for bricks.

If you're looking to make changes in our building criteria, nothing hits as many environmental issues as tires, and they are structurally as good as, if not better than, most materials.

I look at it this way. The planet produces trees. We like trees and need them to create oxygen. But we are using far too many of them. This planet also produces tires, and we don't have a use for them, and we don't know what to do with them. So why not stop building with trees and start building with tires?

Diane: Could we liken it to a cave where the temperature remains constant?

Michael: Deep in the earth it's always a constant temperature. A cave will most generally stay about 58 degrees, and that's because of mass. Now, this is not comfortable for a human, but you won't freeze to death, and your pipes won't freeze. So with no sun, mass will keep you alive. Add sun, which we all have some of, and you have comfort.

Of course sun alone just goes away at night, and your house gets cold. But sun with mass, to store what the sun did during the day, makes it. And its equal/equal. You can't do solar housing without mass. Building a house like your body is built is a very good analogy.

What I'm saying is, we can change our method of relating to the earth, and rather than extracting from the earth, we can simply "encounter" the elements, the phenomena of the earth — especially the phenomena you don't have to worry about running out of, such as sunlight or rain.

It's amazing. People are piping water and damming rivers and making canals all over the place and totally manipulating surface water and aquifers, when almost all over the planet, water falls from the sky. Our Earthship community is in a very arid area, for instance, but we have enough water because we reuse it four times. We actually flush our toilet with water we took a bath in yesterday.

We take a bath in the water, it runs through our indoor system and gets all cleaned up, and then we flush our toilet with it. We cut our water usage in half right there.

One of the things I think is archaic and ridiculous is how we have pipes and wires going everywhere to deliver energy — not to mention the production of energy itself, which is devastating to the planet, through nuclear power plants and coal fired power plants.

With our method of encountering natural phenomenon on site, you do not have to deliver power, water, and sewage anywhere. You encounter it all right there.

Diane: What happens to the "black" water?

Michael: The black water ends up going outside to the same kind of system that we have inside. It is contained in a rubber lined planter that you landscape with.

For instance, Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico, are promoting what they call zero-scape landscaping, where they plant cactus, which uses very little water, and use gravel instead of lawns. Well, that's because we have a water shortage. Yet those same houses using zero-scape landscaping are dumping sewage into the Rio Grande River.

What we do with the Earthship concept is contain the sewage and use it for lush landscaping inside and out. Therefore we don't have to dump it into the river. We don't have to pipe it. We're not polluting anything. We're taking advantage of our own sewage.

Sewage has the same stigma as tires. Sewage is considered bad. But I see sewage as gold. It gives us something to use.

Diane: I was thinking of my travels to the rainforest in Ecuador. If you relieve yourself in the rainforest, it disappears within about six hours, because all the organisms of the forest utilize it.

Michael: That's the way we should live, and it's what Earthships are trying to do — to simply be like the earth is already.

I have said many times that the earth doesn't care if we destroy ourselves. It will prevail. Once we take it down where it can't support us and we die off, the earth will come back.

It's just a matter of us killing ourselves. If we're stupid enough to do that, then we'll do it. I don't look at it as a moral thing. I just wonder if we are stupid enough to kill ourselves or smart enough to encounter the earth and survive.

Diane: If someone were going to build an Earthship, where would they go to get tires? What would be the cost, and how many would they need?

Michael: It takes about a thousand tires to build a house, and most places will be thrilled for you to take them away because they have to pay to dispose of them. So if you go to a tire store and ask if you can haul away some of their tires for the next few weeks, they would be thrilled. That's the way we do it here. We get most of our tires for free.

However, Earthship construction has become popular here in New Mexico, so there have been occasions where a bunch of people were building, and we had to buy them from a place in Colorado and pay 75 cents apiece for them, delivered.

The guy was sitting on 6 million tires in his tire dump, and now he perceives himself as a millionaire because he can sell them for housing.

Diane: Do you host on-site workshops?

Michael: Yes, we have about five seminars every year where people come from as far away as New Zealand or Japan.

We have what we call a seven-day demonstration unit. We build a room in seven days that actually shows much of what we've been talking about.

We did one of these programs in Belgium a couple of years ago. We were running around in Brussels to the tire stores and grocery stores getting tires. The TV stations ended up putting the finished room on TV, and people were amazed. It was a beautiful little room sitting in this woman's back yard.

We did a program for the Lakota Sioux in South Dakota and one in Mexicali a few months ago. We've done one in Japan, and one at fourteen thousand feet in Bolivia.

Someone from the UN contacted us a few months ago and is trying to get funding to take this kind of approach to the refugee situation. The idea was for us to teach people to build their own homes, rather than just passing out blankets and food to them, as we do now.

There are lots of different applications. There's the refugee angle, which is down-and-dirty quick survival. And there are people talking about several-million-dollar homes that illustrate the high-end market.

Think of those 10-million-dollar homes in Telluride. Their owners panic when the power or gas goes out because those homes don't work any more. With the Earthship concept you can show the wealthy that they can have their million-dollar homes with all the luxuries, and they will still work if the grid goes down.

Diane: So you think there will be a surge of interest soon?

Michael: Yes.

Many people think that just because they have money they don't need to worry about anything else. But people are starting to realize after September 11, and after California's energy crisis, that they are vulnerable no matter how much money they have. So we are getting wealthy people building what they call "safe houses." They want to build their second or third home somewhere in the mountains, all beautiful and big and fancy, and that's where they will go when everything fails in the city.

So, fine, if that's the door in, we'll take it.

Diane: Michael, thanks so much for the good work you're doing.

Return to MindShield

© 2006 by St.Clair