Are your
pockets a little empty these days? Don't know what to do about the
exorbitant amount of cash you funnel off to the utility
monopolies every month? Wish there was just some
fantastic,
magical way to get free
water and
electricity, just the way
God meant it to be?
Enter
Earthship. The
Earthship is a form of self-sustainable,
environmentally friendly housing, fully capable of supplying its
tenants with ample
water,
electricity,
heating, and
food to survive indefinately (although unless you enjoy living solely on
fruits and vegetables you'll probably be making trips to your local, friendly
supermarket on occasion) throughout the
summer and
winter months alike. All this, and it looks really
cool, too.
Earthships are a lesson in
recycling. What goes into making an
Earthship? The foundation is merely packed
earth (flooring added later, of course), and the walls are constructed of -
are you ready for this? -
used tires. Along with
aluminum cans, old tires, which normally are hard to
recycle and more often than not end up discarded in tire piles, are
put to good use to create
solid, insulative, and
organic (no
right angles for you) walls for an
Earthship. Each
tire is first placed exactly where the builder intends to have
it in the end
product, and then is extensively packed with
dirt until you're left with a 200-300 pound
cylinder of rubber and earth. It's important to have it where you want it before it's packed or chances are you'll never be able to
haul it over to where you need it to be.
Gaps between the tires are filled in with
straw and
adobe, and eventually everything is given a good coat of
adobe and the end product is a
solid,
smooth,
free-flowing wall that will stand up to most anything save for
Armageddon and possibly
Mormons. As mentioned above,
aluminum cans,
glass bottles, and other containers also can make up the smaller, non-
loadbearing walls.
The
roof is a fairly simple deal, made from
reinforced metal sheeting and help up with wood beams (
make only from the most nonendangered and otherwise plentiful trees, of course!). It is constructed at a slanted angle to
trap,
filter, and
store rainwater in a
cistern for later use. The water itself is recycled several times throughout its use in an
Earthship. It is first used for
drinking,
showering, or otherwise being utilized by
humans. After this phase of use, the water is run through the "
greenhouse" (
Earthship without plants?
Unthinkable!) area of the '
ship, or in other words, the front hall of the place (we'll
touch on that later). Once the plants have thoroughly
soiled and helped themselves to the water, it runs to, of all places, the
toilet! Obviously you won't care too much if your
toilet water is already a little dirty, considering the
terrible,
unspeakable horrors you fill it with each time you lock that
bathroom door. Once it's
done its duty in the
bowl, the water is flushed down into a solar
septic tank. Exposure to the sun allows the liquidized waste materials to more quickly break down into less
offensive forms, which then travel through a layer of various
rocks,
minerals, and other natural filters before getting reabsorbed as nutrients by plants
outside.
The
electricity isn't generated by
water, but rather by
thermal and
solar power. While you may not be accustomed to having to
conserve energy (unless you coat your lawn with
solar cells), the
good news is
you won't have to!. First off,
Earthships use extremely energy-conservative appliances. Secondly, you will never have to spend a single
watt of power to heat your house because
your house does it for you. Allow me to first explain just how an
Earthship is constructed. In the front is almost always (unless you're feeling really
adventurous) a long
hallway from end to end of the house. All the rooms of the house are connected to one side of the
corridor, and the other side is reserved for a long, long, row of
vegetable matter (read:
greenhouse) and plate glass.
Windows all the way down, from end to end. This functions not only to keep those plants
photosynthesizing (and producing food to shove down your
pie hole), but to keep the house amply heated. During the day, your trusty tire-walls trap the
heat generated from the
sun through the windows and release it during the night to keep the temperature just right all year long. You'd think that those walls trapping the heat in the summer would make it
sweltering hot inside, but on average temperatures in an
Earthship stay in the mid-to-high 60s (
Fahrenheit).
Earthships are
inexpensive to build as well as maintain. Obviously, their self-sufficiency makes paying the
utility bills either nonexistant or a
cinch (you'll only be paying for
electricity if you run out of all the stuff you've generated first), but because an
Earthship's design is so
easy and cheap to build (not to mention the availability of
prepackaged Earthship plans that some companies will sell you that cover the
electrical/
water systems,
septic tank installation,
etc.), building an
Earthship with amenities comparable to that of a regular
house will cost you tens, possibly even hundreds of thousands of
dollars less than a normal,
whitewashed, cookiecutter home, especially if you and your
friends/
family do all the
construction work yourself(selves).
I have yet to find any particularly large
downsides of an
Earthship over a regular house. Due to the solid walls,
Earthships might be a little cool at times (a
fireplace will fix that right up, though), and oftentimes they're a little on the small side, but that is mostly due to the sort of people who are usually attracted to
Earthships:
environmentally conscious liberal-thinking people who may or may not have a spouse but usually don't ride into
town in a
white minivan stuffed to the brim with the little'uns. There's simply no demand for big
Earthships, although they can and do
exist.
The
Official Earthship Site (apparently): www.earthship.org
Go there so you can actually see some
pictures of
what the hell I'm talking about here.