reading Thoreau at the Earthship

The irony is hardly lost on me that Henry David Thoreau was 28 when he left the academic Elision Fields of Harvard for the material-free life of Walden. This year John is 28 and I am 27 and after renting an Earthship in Taos every long weekend and vacation we can muster
for a year now, we’re seriously speculating on small pieces of land upon which we can build our own little fully sustainable getaway from society.

The allure of the Earthship must be identical to the renewal and peace Thoreau found in his little shed, which by the way, was built with sustainable values as he bought an immigrants old shed (cabin), tore it down, and reconstructed it on his good buddy Ralph Waldo Emerson’s land rather than felling trees afresh to construct his abode.

Earthships are built from old tires with dirt pounded into them and stacked to form walls. Discarded cans and bottles fill the holes between the tires and simple adobe made from the dirt onsite covers the tires. Like a pioneer’s dugout, three sides of the home are built into a constructed or carved-out hill. The forth side is entirely comprised of windows and solar panels. Just inside this wall of windows is a long, narrow flower bed, called the jungle, which absorbs the graywater from the home’s occupiers daily dishwashing and showering. The roof is constructed so that rainwater runs off it into a giant cistern, typically an 8 ft by 8 ft circular adobe tub. With at least 7 inches a year, the home has adequate water to supply the family’s conservative use. Thus, with the solar panels and collected water, Earthships have no need for utilities.

The most notable detail of living in an Earthship, aside from the tranquility of working with the Earth rather than against it, is the silence. One forgets the noise of the collective appliances, always running on some low voltage of electricity for built-in clocks or lights. Achieving this silence is dependent from an entire Earthship, as houses are built to subsist off-grid all the time, and more common, with minimal help from the electric company. This was a lesson clearly demonstrated to us a year ago when the universe introduced us to a man from Wisconsin aside the big Kiva at Chaco Canyon.

Back in the seventies, the utility companies wanted him to pay for the connections to his land because he was outside their normal service area. Incensed, he began to work on developing his own energy sources for his home. By the eighties, he was making more electricity than he needed, and because the government requires electric utility companies to purchase energy from individuals if available (in an effort to depend less on foreign energy sources), the utility company he had quarreled with was forced to build lines to his land after all, but to purchase rather than sell electricity.

Now, his entire living is to engineer people’s homes for renewable energy. He explained to us that the road to living off-grid begins simply with using less and less energy from the grid. Every time you have to buy or repair an appliance, purchase the smallest and most energy efficient version of that appliance you can find. In time, you may have your wattage down enough to use solar panels on your roof rather than electricity from the utility company. Just as Thoreau didn’t pay his pole taxes because they would have gone to support the invasion of Mexico by the United States, I deeply believe we (to use Thoreau’s term) awakened citizens are bound by duty to minimize our energy cost because the corruption of energy suppliers globally is the central fueling force of most the world’s wars and economic destabilization right now.