An off-the-grid community in New Mexico offers insight into sustainable building
ABC News is taking a look at solutions for issues related to climate change and the environment with the series, "The Power of Us: People, The Climate, and Our Future."
Near the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Taos, New Mexico, a community built into the earth is living totally off-the-grid in mostly-recycled structures called Earthships.
ABC News Chief Meteorologist and Chief Climate Correspondent Ginger Zee along with her team, Dan Manzo and Lindsey Griswold, traveled to Taos to stay with the community and find out what everyone can be doing to live a bit more sustainably.
"Everybody on the planet can wake up in the morning and be comfortable without fossil fuel. Everybody can grow food in their house, everybody can have electricity from the sun and wind," Michael Reynolds, founder and creator of Earthship Biotecture, told Zee. "These buildings do that."
Heating, cooling and powering buildings creates more greenhouse gas emissions than anything else in the U.S., according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Furthermore, construction and demolition create more than 500 million tons of debris each year in this country alone, the EPA said.
The community of over 100 Earthships in Taos is made of "living vessels" with gravel, old tires, concrete and other discarded materials like glass bottles.
Earthships are fully self-sustaining structures with timers for wifi and hot water use, according to Earthship Biotecture.
Reynolds said he uses rainwater four times over for different purposes in his home.
"I'm using five gallons — or three gallons of water to take a shower. That same three gallons of water waters my banana trees and my tomatoes," Reynolds said. "That same three gallons of water is recollected to flush the toilet."
Solar energy provides the homes with power, but it's not used to heat or cool the structures. Earthships use trash as insulation to keep them comfortable inside.
Reynolds showed ABC News how Earthships are insulated with old tires filled with dirt.
"Each tire gets about four or five wheelbarrows of dirt pounded into them. So they're basically like steel encased Adobe bricks," Earthship Biotecture rental manager Hillary Hess told ABC News. "And the sun comes in and it hits that mass. And then the tire retains it. And as the temperature in here would drop, that heat would be released."
"You know, on a cold February night, you walk in one of these and you go, 'This is amazing.'" Reynolds said. "This is warm and it's freezing outside and there's no heating system here. So if you've put people in a position to be able to experience it, then that's huge."
An ABC News team stayed in one of the structures in Taos for three days to understand how they work and what it feels like to live in one.
Hess said structure the team would be staying in is 5,400 square feet. Two thousand square feet of that is dedicated growing space.
"In this house there's two ponds in the greenhouse and we have tilapia out there," she said. "So ideally, if you lived in this home, if you wanted, you could even be harvesting your own fish, chickens with eggs. And then you could catch a fish, pick your citrus, wrap it in a bag and leave and grill it out on the fire."
The small percentage of people living in Earthships aren't the only ones saying traditional living and building arrangements need to change.
"The building industry currently is known to account for approximately 40% of greenhouse gas emissions," Lola Ben-Alon, assistant professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation told ABC News. "It's a really huge chunk of our industry in the world."
Ben-Alon said there's no one answer as to what makes up the most sustainable home.
"There's no one solution," she said. "It's really a combination of principles and a combination of design thinking with the local environment and what is available and what is the climatic context, but also the material availability context and the labor context."
Reynolds believes the principles of Earthships can be applied everywhere.
"Not everybody's going to have an Earthship tomorrow," Zee said. "If there had to be one thing from Earthships that we could apply to homes across America, what would be the most important?
"I think it starts with comfort," Reynolds replied. "In other words, you can add a greenhouse on the south side of your house, and that will hit those rooms that are near that. You can even in New York City, you can get an apartment with south facing windows. You can become aware of the fact that heat comes from that thing, and you can catch that heat."
In Santa Fe, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham talked with ABC News about Earthships and other sustainability efforts in the state
"How important is it to experiment with sustainability like that?" Zee asked. "Because that's extreme."
"I think all of that has incredible value," Grisham said. "It is not the No. 1 investment in sustainable living, but it is really powerful."
"Just their water reuse and recycling in its last place, after using it four times, is to grow food. I mean, these are particularly for states in the Southwest arid states," she added. "That innovation and knowing that you can live completely off the grid and have sustainable building materials all recycled, we can do more of that."
For his part, Reynolds said the extremity is necessary.
"I used to try to tone it down because I know that I'm a fanatic about it, and I can't expect other people to understand what I've been thinking about for decades," he said. "So I try to water it down and tone it down, but now it's like, 'yeah, it's not appropriate to tone it down.' I mean, the solutions are the way forward on this planet. It's going to have to be extreme."
