Taking refuge in refuse
Hardy pioneers ride out pandemic in Earthships
OFF THE GRID NEAR HEBER — Eventually his house would provide all he needed, but for now he still needed supplies, so Ullyses Gordon strapped into his car and made a rare trip into town.
He weaved through his community and headed for the nearest grocery store, a 20-mile trip to Holbrook, in search of the few necessities his home couldn’t create.
Gordon, 47, dreaded the city. Too many people spiked his anxiety, which was part of the reason he’d built a home in the middle of nowhere. By now he could survive a few weeks between trips. Then he’d run out of propane, or bread, or his favorite charro beans and have no other choice. Most trips were uneventful, the stress fading by the time his tires were back on dirt roads.
This time, he drove into pandemonium.
The masks, the lines, the startling shortage of toilet paper — Gordon was baffled. He’d heard of the coronavirus, of course. Even after leaving a
successful biotech career, he tried to keep himself at least somewhat informed. But by late March, he was unaware of how much mainstream life had been disrupted.
“Totally oblivious,” he said, and why wouldn’t he be? This was exactly why he’d retreated into the high desert. Gordon wanted to escape a culture that in his mind was giving way to materialism, to insulate himself a planet midway to catastrophe. So for the better part of a decade, he’d lived separate from society, in the middle of nowhere, in a selfsustaining house made of garbage.
And when he discovered all these years later that the home was perfectly equipped to ride out a pandemic, well, that was just good fortune.
A year after the virus first appeared in Arizona, Gordon can think of only two disruptions to his life. His daughter in California tested positive, though she felt no severe symptoms. The virus also led him to shutter the flea market booth where he sells off-grid tools and survival gear, but he went mostly to get himself out of the house. Other than that, “it has absolutely not affected my life whatsoever,” he said.
Gordon lives in an off-grid community he’d rather not name, down a maze of dirt roads and behind a sign that says, “Invited Guests Only Please,” completely isolated from the cities and its systems. He can see power lines in the distance, but they aren’t connected to his home.
He lives in an Earthship — a sustainable dwelling built not of brick and mortar but of junked tires, wine bottles and a healthy supply of adobe. It resembles a cross between the Grand Canyon’s visitors center and a hobbit home in the Shire. It’s long and squat, three round rooms bookended by a shower and a toilet. One wall is entirely windows. The rest are made of refuse — car tires packed tight with dirt, stacked and coated in adobe. There’s no heating or air conditioning, but the inside always hovers around 70 degrees.
Solar panels generate power. A fine filtration system cleans and recycles wastewater. A greenhouse spanning the length of the house could grow nearly enough food to keep Gordon satisfied. The house cools itself in the summer and heats itself in the winter. The taxes run about $75 a month, and every couple of months he spends $20 to refill his propane tank. Other than that, it costs nothing to maintain.
Designed for self-reliance, Earthships provide everything a human needs to live comfortably and more, like the Xbox One in Gordon’s living room or the satellite dish perched on the roof.
Their inventor, a radical architect-inexile named Michael Reynolds, claims his houses can be the solution to many of society’s ills. He describes Earthships as homes that care for their residents. They’re designed to withstand anything: climate change, civil unrest, and, apparently, a society-shattering pandemic.
“When you learn about Earthships, it’s like, wow, that makes so much sense,” Gordon said. “Why aren’t more people doing this?”
That’s the question that has defined Reynolds’ life.
For half a century, he’s focused on nothing but Earthships. The builder, now 75, abandoned mainstream architecture and devoted himself to building with garbage, preparing for a world in which we’d have no other choice. He declared war on architecture, on the construction industry, on the very idea of the American dream. The battle cost him his New Mexico architecture license. Others dealt a far worse blow — they ignored him.
But he has kept toiling in the desert, one house at a time, certain he knows how to escape planetary doom. His company, Earthship Biotecture, estimates there are now thousands of Earthships around the world. He believes we need more, and we need them now.
“Earthships are to save people from themselves and the planet, which is absolutely crumbling in every way,” he said.
This moment, then, in the grips of a global pandemic and mounting climate emergencies, is Reynolds’ vindication. Many critics have gone quiet. “Now they’re all coming to us, wanting us to build them an Earthship,” he said.
It’s also his greatest opportunity. Interest in Earthships has skyrocketed. The Earthship Academy, which teaches people how to build their own homes, has received a rush of applications. Homes are selling faster than crews can build them. Reynolds recently unveiled an updated design — a new Earthship now costs about the same as a new home in Taos — and is planning a new community, his fourth. He and his staff are eyeing a global expansion.
He swears he won’t stop working until it happens.
If he can keep himself alive.
Reynolds found Taos while fleeing death.
He finished architecture school when the Vietnam War was at its bloodiest peak, a time when young, healthy men searched for ways to avoid the draft. Reynolds thought he could injure himself badly enough to avoid service. He moved to New Mexico and started racing motorcycles, running recklessly to increase his odds of a draft-deferring injury. It made him fearless and unbeatable. He’d hit hairpins at full speed and blow by hesitant competitors, focused only on winning and saving his own skin.
But shortly after he moved, Reynolds learned of greater threats. He saw reports on the evening news that beer cans were piling up around the country. He learned that loggers in the Pacific Northwest were chopping entire forests to use their lumber for houses.
Reynolds thought he could solve both problems. His father had hoarded old objects, saving mayo jars and milk cartons just in case he found a use for them later. Now the young architect found one.
“I said, ‘Hell, why don’t we make housing out of beer cans and save the trees?’” he said in a video posted to the Earthship Biotecture YouTube channel. That idea led him to build his first beercan home in 1972. He called it the Thumb House.
To be truly sustainable, though, a house needed to run on minimal fuel. Temperature control was the biggest barrier. A scientist suggested Reynolds look into thermal mass, a phenomenon of physics in which dense objects store or release heat, depending on the temperature of their surroundings. Later, when a Tucson brewery sent Reynolds cases of canned water, he noticed they kept his bedroom warm.
He kept studying. Tires proved durable, and abundant. Pack them tight with dirt, Reynolds discovered, and they’ll hold heat better than almost anything else. A wall of windows let in just enough warmth and allowed for a flourishing greenhouse, as long as it faced south. A fine filter made it possible to recycle wastewater, and food could grow just about anywhere.
Twenty years and five marriages later, Reynolds realized he needed a home for himself. “So I just applied everything for me, how I would want it,” he said. “And we built the first Earthship.”
Then he set out to convince the world. He diverged from much of modern architecture, so he started calling himself a “biotect.” He introduced new designs, each one promising to outperform the last. He started to build an entire community of Earthships high in the mountains, and when the government shut it down he just built another.
He opened the Academy and launched an internship program that charged people for the privilege of building somebody else’s home. When a tsunami struck the Bay of Bengal, he sent crews of volunteers to build from the debris. It was the right thing to do, but it was also an opportunity to spread the Earthship principles.
He told people he wasn’t only working to save the planet. He was trying to protect himself.
“If humanity takes the planet down the tubes, I’m dead,” he said in “Garbage Warrior,” a 2007 film documenting his battles with state and county governments. “I’m trying to save my own ass, and that is a powerful force.”
He’d spent his entire adult life outrunning death. A breakthrough was near.
But death finally caught up.
By the time doctors discovered Reynolds’ prostate cancer, it was already stage 4. His PSA level, a measurement often used to detect prostate cancer that is supposed to read in the single digits, sat at 296.
His staff anguished when they heard the news. Reynolds was a friend, a mentor, a father figure. He was also their employer and the driving force of a movement they believed in. Without Reynolds, they worried, what would become of Earthships?
Last winter, Reynolds traveled to Houston to consult with doctors at MD Anderson, one of the nation’s leading cancer centers, where a doctor laid out an extreme treatment plan. Reynolds needed surgery to cut out his prostate and surrounding lymph nodes, a routine of chemo and radiation and an $11,000a-month bottle of pills.
Reynolds retreated to his Earthship, where, between arguments with his insurance company, he searched for a way out. His mind works in patterns, and these were staring him in the face. His body was in crisis; the planet was beginning to overheat. The food and pharmaceutical industries filled him with carcinogens; construction spewed pollution and ravaged the planet’s natural resources. Everybody assumed there was only one way to build a house; his doctors insisted only medicine could beat cancer.
He’d fought his entire career to prove that sustainability and radical simplicity could save the planet. Why couldn’t those same principles save his own life? He called his doctors.
“I choose death,” he said, and he hung up the phone.
“When you learn about Earthships, it’s like, wow, that makes so much sense. Why aren’t more people doing this?”
Ullyses Gordon
Lives in an Earthship
On the best of days, Ullyses Gordon stands in his Earthship and watches the planet exist without him.
He hadn’t planned to be quite so alone. Four friends were supposed to share this land, but nothing in his life so far had really followed a clear path. He had been a biotech entrepreneur, a Buddhist monk, a Cape Town hotel manager, a professional cannabis grower, and eventually one of two men elected by their friends to attend Reynolds’ Taos-based Academy.
At the time, the program lasted nearly two months. Reynolds and his staff taught the fundamentals of thermal mass and the core Earthship concepts. Then the students went to work. To reach full certification, every Academy student had to work on somebody else’s home. For Reynolds, the work assignments served two purposes: The extra hands sped construction, and the sense of community inspired students to build their own homes.
Gordon and his friends did just that, buying 150 acres in Arizona and plotting to fill it with Earthships. Gordon’s home was first. He hired Reynolds to build a Survival model. It was one of Reynolds’ simplest designs, three simple rooms with a shower at one end and a toilet on the other. Reynolds recruited 50 volunteers to camp in the Arizona desert and help build a stranger’s home.
It took one month. The volunteers left as friends.
Next, a friend built an Earthship beside Gordon’s, on the other side of a standalone greenhouse. Most days, it’s the only sign of human life that Gordon can see. But just as their community was coming together, the group ruptured. Only Gordon and his neighbor remain on the property. The men no longer speak.
Still Gordon said he’s never lonely. He is instead concerned he’s become too comfortable. He wanted to keep building until his home was perfect, but after eight years his pace has slowed. The wall he wanted to block the wind is still unfinished, little more than a pile of tires. He’s stopped noticing the missing trim inside. If he works hard, Gordon said, he is probably three years away from perfection.
But the house functions perfectly. A weather monitor hangs in the kitchen. Outside it was 52 degrees, a chilly, breezy late January afternoon. Inside, the temperature topped 69 degrees.
He wants for nothing. “It’s a real comforting feeling,” he said. Out here, life takes its purest form, stripped of fear and frivolities. Time loses its structure. He needs some mental math to remember his own age. Usually, he struggles to name the day of the week. He lives by the rhythms of nature. Through the giant windows of his greenhouse, he can see the sun rise over the ridge, filling the glass bottles in his walls with light and sending colors dancing across the floor. Some mornings, a herd of baby elk grazes outside his door. He’s learned that sunset is the best time to get in the shower, where he can see the amber light that floods his home.
And sometimes, during the monsoon, Gordon can spot the storm clouds gathering on the horizon. They roll and billow and block out the sun, then start their slow crawl northward, toward his property. He stands in the greenhouse, in a building designed to care for him, and watches them draw close. “It’s almost like, is it going to make it?” he said. Sometimes, the storm clouds reach him. Usually, they don’t.
But it’s beautiful every time.
A year after he rejected his doctor’s orders, Reynolds jumped out of his oversize pickup and ambled toward the site where Earthship Biotecture planned to build his brand-new Unity model. The
Greater World Community, a 640-acre splotch of high desert north of the Rio Grande Gorge, was filling up fast. Nearly two-thirds of the lots he’d drawn already held an Earthship, and there were always more clients.
Reynolds surveyed the landscape and let out a long, slow breath. He’d spent the past hour meeting with a client, rolling his eyes as they requested a custom Earthship. Reynolds had no time for details.
“I’m making these as fast as I can,” he said, keeping his eyes on a backhoe that was leveling the lot. “I’m doing it because it’ll make me safer on this planet, assuming I do live another decade or two or three.”
More than a year had passed since his diagnosis, and Reynolds claimed to feel just fine. He still hadn’t agreed to the surgery. No chemotherapy, no radiation, no ludicrously expensive pills. He accepted an occasional shot of cancerfighting drugs, but even those he’d quit taking for a spell. The man who’d rejected mainstream architecture did the same to Western medicine.
He returned to the only thing he knew to be true.
“Turns out my Earthship work has set me up to be able to cure my own cancer,” he said. He adopted a plant-based diet and relied on what he could grow in his home. A study said exercise helped, too, so Reynolds kept up the hard labor of building Earthships. He pointed to a small pile of tires near the backhoe, each one packed with dirt until it was rock-hard. He filled those himself, he said, toiling for three hours with a sledgehammer and a view of the mountains.
It probably sounded crazy, Reynolds admitted. But it was working. A recent PSA test showed his level had dropped back into the single digits, though it had started to rise again. He felt alive.
There are patterns everywhere, Reynolds reminded himself. The swirls of the Milky Way can be found in the smallest seashells. The principles of Earthships apply to all life’s threats.
“He is taking the Earthship concept and the act of living in an Earthship to the Nth degree, because he has to,” said Jonah Reynolds, Mike’s son and an Earthship employee. “It is an extension of the Earthship concept.”
But every faith has its blind spot. Cancer taught Reynolds to focus only on the day ahead, but Earthships have become a movement, ready to be swept into the next generation. The pandemic presented his greatest opportunity yet: vindication, global expansion, a chance
to cement Earthships far into the future. He could finally change the way the world thinks about housing, even if he wouldn’t live long enough to see it happen.
Reynolds refused to think that far ahead, wouldn’t consider making a plan. Some of his employees believe the movement could grow faster without its figurehead. Their boss won’t talk about it.
“Mike doesn’t want to make a plan,” said Lauren Anderson, who runs the Academy and is building a home in the Greater World community. “He doesn’t want to think about this without him.”
To consider a future with him in it would be to lose focus on surviving each day. And a future without him? He worked so much, he later said, that he lost sight of the line between Earthships and Mike Reynolds. The two could not be separated. They were one and the same, two entities hell-bent on selfpreservation.
“I’m going to work myself to death, probably,” he said. It felt like he was back on a motorcycle, pulling ahead of the pack as the first turn approached, reminding himself that it hurt less to crash than it did to lose.