TO BUILD AN EARTHSHIP FOR MY GRANDDAUGHTER

In rural Nebraska, it’s 10 degrees below zero and the Great Plains winds are roaring at 50 mph. Russell Fitch walks from his kitchen directly into an attached greenhouse structure like few others. In the cold-day sunshine it is 75 degrees warm inside. In the building are lemon, lime, and orange trees, tomatoes, peppers, all manner of edible plants and great quantities of them. He heats the structure with a single solar-powered squirrel-cage fan that circulates air through hundreds of feet of fat tubing eight feet underground where the temperature is 52 degrees year round. It never freezes in the greenhouse.

But this isn’t a story about staying warm. This is a story about staying cool...at the dawn of a hothouse 22nd century. Mr. Fitch has that figured out, too. He covers the greenhouse with shade cloth in summer and keeps that fan going. Now the system acts like an air conditioning unit and the structure stays cool on 100-degree days.

The hero portrayed here likely has grandchildren. When the year 2100 dawns, scientists warn, much of what is now the southern and central Great Plains will be too hot for people to work outside during many a summer day and crop yields will be in decline across the heartland due to extreme heat stress, punishing drought, and occasional catastrophic superstorm winds or flood. Mr. Fitch’s descendants may very well tough it out, though, if they do what he has done. For he has built an Earthship.

While many of our politicians dismiss climate change as a hoax, climate scientists and those who study horrific mass extinction events in the past are publishing cascades of books and reams of scientific articles with a single strident and sobering theme: anthropomorphic climate change is very real, it is worse than even they had imagined, and truly severe impacts of a rapidly changing world are just decades not hundreds of years in the future. To meet those challenges, perhaps we should be readying our youth for a new and hotter planet. We should teach them to build Earthships and live in tight knit Earthship communities.

Earthships are wholistic, self-sufficient homes, structures literally built into the surface of the planet but with long expanses of glass facing south. The best of them can collect and store rainwater, treat human waste with simple composting processes, stay warm and cool without added BTUs or power from utility companies, and produce a majority of a family’s fresh food needs year round. In short, Earthships are designed to be self-contained and sustain their human occupants to the greatest degree possible without outside inputs.

I think of Earthships as modern-day cave dwellings. That’s right, caves. For nearly 200,000 years, the most reliable and comfortable abode our distant ancestors could occupy was a natural deep cleft in rock. Go deep enough into a cave and the temperature is equitable all year round and was so even during brutal Ice Age winters. Often caves provided sources of clean water. They offered protection from predators. Nooks and crannies were used for food and fuel storage. Caves nursed us along through 8,000 generations to the dawn of civilization.

Earthships, the caves of the future, could cradle us in the hothouse landscape that is on the near horizon.

In Concord, New Hampshire, an hour from my home, is a much praised and often awarded example of early Earthship architecture. It is the home offices of the venerable Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests. The building sits on the ground as any structure does, but that’s where commonality ends. For the building looks like it sits ‘in” the ground because its lower floor is banked with heavy earth berms on the west, east, and north sides. The south side is bristling with tall glass panels from corner to corner.

So the building appears to have settled in the ground, and that’s why the structure works. It is ever so effortless to heat and cool, and is so quiet and easy on the soul once one is inside its walls. The earthen walls isolate the building from the elements, but the south wall lets sunlight stream deep into the building in the fall, winter and spring. The sunlight heats the interior surfaces and huge narrow, vertical tanks of water that store the heat of captured sun’s rays. At night the stored heat is slowly released into the building to keep it comfortable for the moment the doors open in the morning.

Some 2,000 miles away, hunkered down at the foot of the Sangre de Christo Mountains, is the little city of Taos, New Mexico. Taos is global Earthship mecca. In the desert expanse outside the small burg, the guru of Earthships, Michael Reynolds, has built and teaches people from all over the world to build Earthships from recycled materials and earth. Surrounding the institute he founded, many “biotecture” structures dot the landscape. Each is a free-form work of art and a self-sufficient home.

In a landscape where the annual rainfall is just nine inches a year, residents capture rainwater from the roofs of the Earthships and store the water in underground tanks. They recycle the water four times and do not run out of the precious fluid. The grey water from each home is piped into the indoor greenhouse growing space and through trickle irrigation lines in the outdoor gardens. Fresh food is plentiful all year round, including citrus and tropical fruits.

Earthships work even in high latitudes. Living is a bit more of a challenge in the far north, but Earthship “pilots” such as Craig and Connie Cook in Ontario, Canada, learned to store heat during the late spring, summer, and early fall by pumping as much hot greenhouse heat underground where the earth stores it. In winter that stored heat is retrieved to warm the building. If there is a heat shortfall on a bitterly cold night, a tiny woodstove or rocket stove may be fired up for just a few hours to hold temps in the comfort range.

As climate stresses mount, Earthships offer other advantages that conventional houses do not. In California fire season, living in an Earthship may save your life, sequestered within the earth and under an expansive metal or earth-covered roof. In high wind and tornadic storms, Earthships allow winds to travel largely unimpeded over their surfaces. In blizzard conditions when power goes down, Earthships sail along with their own photovoltaic electrical systems and internal heating capacity. In super emergencies of week and month-long durations, Earthships can be their own supermarket, providing fresh food to their owners to compliment stored bulk foods tucked away in a cool dark pantry in a back corner of the home.

Lastly, Earthships can be cheap to build. In many corners of the world, the material of choice to erect the exterior walls is used automobile tires that are obtained anywhere for free. The tires are filled with rammed or tamped earth and used like giant bricks; they are extremely strong and once covered will last forever. The west, north, and east walls are built of the tires and then they are covered with soil on the building’s exterior and planted with grass, shrubs, food crops, or desert flora. The tires exposed on the interior are coated with adobe cob (straw and clay mix) to create a lovely livable surface.

The roof of such buildings is often held aloft by simple peeled logs. The logs are topped with boards or dimension lumber and the wood is, in turn, covered with a substantial layer of foam insulation. Strapping is laid atop the insulation and metal roofing is installed to finish the roof. Some builders go so far as to cover the entire roof with sod or desert soils and desert plants, depending on where they build.

The people of island nations, such a hurricane ravaged Puerto Rico, would be best never to build anything but Earthships that provide their own storm shelter, their own power, their own cooling, and their own food and water supply. Eighty years from now, as the 22nd century dawns on a hotter global climate, island nations and the heavily populated coastal regions around the world will likely suffer repeatedly from the landfall of super hurricanes powered up by warmer ocean waters. What better way to meet the onslaught of wind and water than to huddle in an Earthship that can withstand the worst of it.

And then there is that age-old truly ominous natural disaster waiting in the wings: disease. The last great global pandemic that killed millions around the world raged in 1918. Should some unearthly plague erupt in a warmer environment before the end of the century when everyone must go to town to shop in a supermarket at least once a week and work in an office daily, how does one avoid contact with others to isolate oneself from exposure to the contagion? Under such circumstances, Earthships become safe havens from disease. Since these abodes can sustain their owners for months, families could wait out the disease in isolation and survive.

Let’s bring this tale back home to roost in 2019. Right this minute, in the USA, millions of families loath paying the electric bill, the water bill, and the fuel bill each month. Imagine, if you will, living in a home that, because of its design, doesn’t consume those consumables and you never get bills for such necessities. Imagine what that might save you over the course of a lifetime. Imagine never having to paint or pay for and replace siding, replace a roof, tear out rotted sills, or fix storm damaged materials.

I’m bullish on Earthships, wherein the owners control nearly every facet of their daily lives and are beholden to no utility, no corporate pariah (remember Enron?), no globalization behemoth. In that sense, Earthships are sanctuaries of freedom. If you can produce in abundance most of the things you need to live out this life, you will want for nothing.

But I do want something. I want my granddaughter to live her adult life in an Earthship. I’d like to help her build one largely of recycled materials when the time comes, if I’m still vertical and taking nourishment. I envision an Earthship as true life insurance for her. I see Earthships as land arks that can and will withstand the powerful forces of an uncertain future.

I want my granddaughter to set sail in an Earthship, and I want your grandchildren to do the same. Yes, I do.