An off-grid community in New Mexico offers insights into sustainable architecture

ABC News is exploring solutions to issues related to climate change and the environment through the series “The Power of Us: People, Climate and Our Future.”

Near the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Taos, New Mexico, there is a community built on Earth that lives completely off the grid in mostly recycled buildings called Earthships.

ABC News Chief Meteorologist and Chief Climate Correspondent Ginger Zee and her team, Dan Manzo and Lindsey Griswold, traveled to Taos to spend time with the community to learn what everyone can do to live more sustainably.

Michael Reynolds, founder and founder of Earthship Biotecture, told Zee: “Everyone on Earth can wake up in the morning and live a comfortable life without fossil fuels. Everyone can grow food in their own house , everyone can get electricity from the sun and wind. “That’s what these buildings do. “

Heating, cooling and powering buildings produces more greenhouse gas emissions than any other industry in the United States, according to the EPA. Additionally, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says construction and demolition activities generate more than 500 million tons of waste each year in this country alone.

Taos’ community of more than 100 Earthships are “living ships” made of gravel, old tires, concrete and other discarded materials such as glass bottles.

According to Earthship Biotecture, the Earthship is a fully self-sustaining structure, equipped with WiFi and a timer for hot water usage.

Reynolds said he has used rainwater four times at his home for different purposes.

“I use five gallons of water or three gallons of water for my showers. The same three gallons of water for my banana trees and tomatoes,” Reynolds said. “The same three gallons of water are recycled to flush toilets.”

Solar energy provides electricity to the home but is not used to heat or cool the building. The Earthship uses trash as insulation to keep the interior cozy.

Reynolds showed ABC News how the Earthship was insulated with old tires filled with mud.

“Each tire gets four to five wheelbarrows of dirt pounded into it,” Earthship Biotecture rental manager Hillary Hess told ABC News. “So they’re basically like steel. Like adobe bricks. “When the sun comes in, it hits this mass. And then the tires retain it. As the temperature here drops, the heat is released.”

“You know, when you walk into one of these on a cold night in February, you say, ‘This is great,'” Reynolds said. “It’s warm in here, it’s cold outside, and there’s no heating here. So if you allow people to experience it, it means a lot.”

The ABC News team spent three days in a Taos building to learn how they work and what it’s like to live there.

Hess said the floor space the team will occupy will be 5,400 square feet. Two thousand square feet of that is dedicated growing space.

“The house has two ponds in the greenhouse where we raise tilapia,” she said. “So ideally, if you lived in this home, you could even catch your own fish and raise your own eggs if you wanted to. Then you could catch a fish, pick a citrus, put it in a bag and leave it for the barbecue. Out of fire.

The small group of people who inhabit spaceship Earth are not the only ones who think traditional living and building arrangements need to change.

“The construction industry is currently known to account for about 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions,” Lola Ben-Alon, an assistant professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, told ABC News. “This is a very large part of our industry in the world.”

Ben-Aron said there is no one answer to what makes the most sustainable home.

“There’s no one solution,” she said. “It’s really a combination of principles, a combination of design thinking and the local context, the resource availability and climate context, the material availability context and the labor context.”

Reynolds believes the principles of Earthships can be applied anywhere.

“Not everyone is going to have a Spaceship Earth tomorrow,” Qi said. “If there had to be one thing from Earthships that could be applied to homes across America, what would be the most important thing?

“I think it starts with comfort,” Reynolds responded. “In other words, you could add a greenhouse on the south side of the house, which would affect those rooms that are close to it. You could even be in New York City and you could buy an apartment with south-facing windows. You could be aware of the heat. From that thing, and you can capture the heat.

In Santa Fe, New Mexico, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham spoke with ABC News about Earthships and other sustainability efforts in the state

“How important is a sustainability experiment like this?” Ze asked. “Because that’s too extreme.”

“I think there’s incredible value in all of this,” Grisham said. “It’s not the No. 1 investment in sustainable living, but it’s certainly strong.”

“After four uses, the last place they reuse and recycle their water is growing food. I mean, these are especially true for states in the arid Southwest,” she added. “This kind of innovation, and knowing that you can live completely off the grid and have sustainable building materials that are all recycled, we can do so much more.”

Reynolds said limbs are necessary.

“I used to try to downplay it because I knew I was fanatical about it and I couldn’t expect other people to understand what I’d been thinking about for decades,” he said. “So I tried to tone it down and tone it down, but now it’s like, ‘Yeah, it wouldn’t be appropriate to tone it down.’ I mean, the solution is the way forward for this planet, it has to is extreme.