Way off the Grid
Alpine Ranches, Arizona · By Ashley Rood and Rose Houk
The name “Earthship” might raise the question whether the alternative home design this word refers to is something of this world or perhaps the next adventure into space. In fact, these homes are quite earthbound and represent a self-sustaining, self-determined masterpiece of each owner’s dreams. Charlie Laurel and his co-conspirator, Margaret Spilker, brought the Flagstaff, Arizona, area its first Earthship in 1996. The design, which incorporates rammed earth, used tires, recycled wood, and solar panels, is a truly sustainable home. With its curved walls, adobe plaster, and warm sunlight, the structure creates an overwhelming sense of calm and comfort the moment you enter.
Margaret and Charlie arrived at their mutual goals from divergent paths. Margaret came from a family of Nebraska farmers. She distinctly remembers her father attempting to convert to organic farming back in the 1950s, when such practices were almost heresy. It was this agricultural background that instilled Margaret’s ethic of sustainable living. It derived from a farmer’s need for common sense – figuring out what was really practical, what really worked in the long run. “Most important,” she says, “is the firmly held belief that because things are done a certain way by most people does not mean that’s always the best way.”
This simple but defining ideology has freed Margaret to pursue new ideas. She lived in a progressive community in Santa Cruz, California, where she learned about solar energy and protested nuclear development. “Even more, I came to understand,” she explains, “why we shouldn’t continue to do what we are doing. There was information about positive alternatives, and this exposure to information and example was important to me.”
Meanwhile, Charlie spent his youth fishing, hunting, and catching snakes in the swamplands of southwest Florida. As he grew up he witnessed the heartbreaking destruction of his childhood playground by thoughtless development – millions of acres of pine forests and wetlands bulldozed, burned, drained, and paved. In high school he participated in an environmental education seminar in which he learned about the local ecosystem in the field and then helped preserve a threatened cypress slough as a regional park. Charlie’s philosophy was also shaped by watching important adults in his life be driven by the demands of monetary goals. “I decided,” he says, “that fulfillment through money didn’t make sense to me. I had a head start on being skeptical of materialism.”
When Charlie and Margaret met, they found they shared similar ideals that had arisen from very different experiences. During this time, in the 1980s, Charlie was building luxury homes in the San Francisco Bay area. As the two began to think about marriage and their future, buying an affordable home became a logical next step. Charlie corresponded with a friend who was building an adobe house, and that inspired him to research alternative buildings. He found a copy of Mother Earth News magazine. The cover – “Build a Home Out of Old Tires for $30 a Square Foot!” – caught his eye, and changed his path. The article was about architect Michael Reynolds’ Earthship home design. Reynolds was the pioneer designer of the Earthship, an ecologically viable and affordable alternative home.
Charlie reexamined the work he was doing. “I was finishing up a 4,000-square-foot house, with seven split levels and nineteen-foot-tall glass walls that faced the wrong way, for two people to live in,” he explains. “I thought about all the trees that went into that house, about all the energy that that house would need to stay in the comfort zone. I thought about people chaining themselves to redwood trees, global warming, and the increasing poverty of the Third World. The next day I was driving across the varied deserts of the Southwest to work on Earthships in Taos for a month.”
That New Mexico experience inspired Margaret and Charlie to head to northern Arizona and build their own Earthship. As Charlie explains, they were attracted by the region’s sunny climate, and by the possibility of introducing the idea to a new area. “I was anxious to get one of these houses built as a showpiece,” he says.
Though each Earthship is unique, most share fundamental qualities such as high thermal mass, an earth berm, passive solar features, and water collection and graywater recycling. Earthships are typically self-contained when it comes to water and energy, and they use locally available materials to attain thermal mass.
But Charlie and Margaret quickly realized that while the decision to build an Earthship was easy and obvious, other decisions were not so straightforward. The choices and compromises involved location, size, efficiency, materials, resources, and transportation. One of the most difficult decisions for them was finding the right location. Land in Flagstaff was expensive, but cheaper land outside of town would mean a longer commute and increased consumption of fossil fuels. After carefully considering the tradeoffs, they selected land twenty miles east of Flagstaff – a longer commute for Charlie, but shorter for Margaret’s work in Winslow.
On their forty acres of high desert land they found abundant sunshine and plenty of space to live as they wished. Building codes in Coconino County did not prove an obstacle to their unorthodox construction. Some engineering matters had to be worked out, but mainly it was a matter of documentation and education. After satisfying the first requirements of design, engineering and permits, Charlie and Margaret launched into construction. The core materials for their house – 900 used tires – came from tire shops and a county transfer station. They hauled them to the site, packed them with dirt, and used them for the footings and load-bearing walls. As Charlie quips, the thousand-square-foot house is built of “steel-reinforced, rubber encased, rammed earth bricks.”
The house is passive solar and has no mechanical heating system. There is a woodstove, but they didn’t have to burn any wood the first five years, and have only used the stove a few times since. The south-facing walls are comprised of windows, the north side is earth-bermed, and the roof is heavily insulated. A small 400-watt photovoltaic system provides all the electricity needed to operate household appliances such as lights, stereo, computer, power tools, and washing machine. “We just don’t use everything at once,” says Charlie.
Rainfall in their location is a meager six to ten inches a year. Still, they manage to capture enough for drinking and other uses off the roof; the water is held in a 4,500-gallon cistern. In dry springs they sometimes have to haul water before summer rains arrive. Graywater is filtered through indoor planters; the plant roots oxygenate and purify the water, which is reused in the outdoor garden and in other locations.
The house contains beautiful details – used glass bottles set into an adobe wall send colored shafts of light from the bathroom into the bedroom; lavender, lemongrass, and avocado sprout bountifully from the indoor planters; a herringbone pattern of recycled wood elegantly graces the living room ceiling.
For people contemplating building a sustainable home, Charlie offers this advice: “Foremost, think small.” It’s not square footage, but quality that matters. Savings from building small can be invested in energy efficiency, solar or wind power, and alternative building methods. The amazing thing about their Earthship, Charlie says, “is that it is so simple.” And in his mind it comes closest to his idea of true sustainability. “The future,” he insists, “is not in high-tech substitutions, but in low-tech, human-powered construction.”
Charlie and Margaret’s Earthship home is an essential model of sustainable building, and it illustrates a way to put ideals into practice. In a world sometimes submerged in despair about the environment, these two people have shown that with thoughtfulness and fortitude, the positive is possible.
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