In 1995, 26-year old Christina Sporrong moved from Seattle to Taos, New Mexico in search of sunny weather. Having experience in residential construction, Christina went to work for local architect and builder Mike Reynolds.

Earthships

Mike Reynolds’ buildings, known as Earthships, use earth-filled tires for the exterior walls and mortar-encased pop cans and glass bottles for interior walls. The tire walls are built into U-shaped rooms with the open side facing south. The walls are earth-sheltered, which helps maintain a constant temperature in both winter and summer.

The south side of the Earthship has large plate-glass windows set over indoor gardens, creating a greenhouse. Winter sunlight warms the tire walls and earthen floor which then release the warmth during the night. This is the essence of passive solar building.

Reynolds has developed a model for shelter that approaches sustainability on every level. Not only are the walls made of recycled materials, but every internal system (heating and cooling, water and wastewater, power and waste disposal) has been designed to use resources wisely and to work as part of an integrated whole. For example, rainwater harvested from the roof is used for cleaning and bathing and is then channeled to planters inside and out. A solar toilet, which combines the principles of a composting toilet and a solar oven, reduces human waste to a handful of ash that can be used as compost.

When hearing about tire walls and below-ground U-shaped rooms, perhaps you envision a dark, cave-like structure. Quite the contrary, Earthships are spacious and light-filled, and the combination of plants, tile counters and earthen floors makes these dwellings warm, inviting, and even luxurious. My aunt Zena lives in an Earthship and says that the shape and feel of her home leave her feeling “embraced.”

Christina’s House

Working on Earthships was an education for Christina. “It inspired me to build my own house and showed me that I could do it alternatively, cheaply and on my own. Mike gave me the tools to do that.”

At a land auction in 1996 Christina purchased a quarter-acre of sagebrush-covered mesa for $500, and set about designing a house that she could build in one summer with the help of friends.

The house design took shape in two sections: one a below-ground living and sleeping area and the other a ground level entry and kitchen with steps leading down to the Earthship room. Christina read up on straw-bale construction, visited local straw-bale homes, and decided to build with bales for her ground level room. She also decided to use a post and beam support for the roof instead of load bearing straw-bale walls.

Christina stopped working construction and picked up a job as a cocktail waitress so that she could build during the day and still earn money at night. In early spring, she went and staked out the area where her house would go.

The next step was to get tires from a local landfill and set them around the perimeter of her house-to-be. At this point Christina’s life took on a rhythm that would last through the summer: work in the evenings to afford materials for the next part of the project, and work during the day digging out the Earthship floor and building courses of tire walls. Each wall tire had to be filled with earth and then tamped down with a sledgehammer. “It took about a half-hour to pound each tire. I could only do about 7-10 tires a day before I went to work—it was totally labor intensive. Even though this is a small Earthship, it still took over 100 tires, and that took a few months to build.”

The first major project was concrete footings for the straw-bale walls. Christina built the forms and then called friends to help pour eight yards of concrete in one day. A month later she gathered materials for the post and beam framework, including posts recycled from an old feed store. Again she called together a crew and they put up the posts and beams. Next were the trusses and roof. Christina used Propanels, corrugated steel roofing with a baked-on ceramic coating which allows for safe rainwater catchment.

Now it was time for the walls to go up. Christina purchased bales from a feed store. “A few were rotten and I had to buy some more. You only want to buy the bales when you’re ready to put them up, so you don’t risk getting moisture on them.”

The straw bales were stacked in offset rows, like giant bricks, inside the post and beam framework. Rebar was driven top-down through the bales with a sledgehammer, and the walls were covered with chicken wire. “If I had it to do again,” says Christina, “I would measure each bale prior to building, and then stack them in such a way that I wouldn’t have to cut any bales. I would also use a weed whacker to clean up the walls before plastering. My bales were so uneven that, after the initial plastering, my place looked like a Smurf house. I had to use extra coats of plaster to even it out.”

Finally the windows went in and Christina had a home. “I’ve taken my time on the finishing touches”, says Christina, “like weather-stripping around the windows, insulating the ceiling and putting color on the walls.”

Building Your Own Home

“Alternative construction may be way more labor intensive,” says Christina, “but it’s worth it. It baffles me that people would choose to do traditional frame building, which is so unfriendly to the environment. Sustainable building expresses a different set of values, using materials that at some level are friendly to the environment.”

Both of Christina’s choices, recycled tires and straw bales, were environmentally sustainable. Straw is plentiful and is a waste product often burned in the fields rather than being harvested. The authors of Build It With Bales offer the following eye-opening perspective: “Using only one quarter of the straw available each year in North America, we could build over 3 million houses having an interior square footage of 1500 square feet.”

If you’re planning to build a sustainable shelter, you’ll want to learn about different methods [see articles and resources thorughout this special issue]. Consider taking a workshop, or helping with a building project.

Once you begin designing your place, you may want to build a model or draw a floor plan. “The very first thing I did,” Christina remembers, “was to build a miniature model of my design—it was a winter project. I remember using charcoal briquettes for the tires, and tying straw into tiny straw bales. I needed to build the model to visualize what I would be creating.”

It’s a good idea to check out your plans with a professional. An architect friend gave Christina input. “He said my design needed more windows,” she remembers, “and had me change some things to make it more structurally sound.

Be sure to think through all the systems-not just the outer walls. Incorporate earth-friendly alternatives wherever you can (e.g., passive solar heating, solar power, greywater systems, etc .

The Earthship is the most labor intensive of the sustainable building methods. Christina managed to finish hers because she kept it small, and her design simple. By designing small you will simplify your building process and may find your life “lightened” as well.

“Building the house”, says Christina, “was like running my own construction job. Each day I’d start my morning by looking at what I had to do the following day and making a list (of people to have work with me, how many bags of cement to pick up, etc). Then I’d set about doing what I had planned (the day before) to accomplish that day.

Budgeting money and time is a challenge. It’s easy to get caught up in details and fall behind on the basics. “Remember that,” as Christina points out, “once you are in your house, you can do the smaller projects on your own schedule. I built a stovepipe into my wall, and built the fireplace later. The trick is to realize what you can do with the resources you have so you don’t wind up with an enchanting house but no financing for the roof. I’ve seen that happen.” Christina also warns against buying all the materials in advance. “On my house there was no waste of materials, because I purchased as I went. I’ve seen people buy all their materials at the beginning and then not use half of them or have them get ruined.”

Finally, use the people resources all around you — to get ongoing advice, to help with building, or for professional input. You might want to hire someone with experience to help with part of the project. Whatever you decide, follow Christina’s example: “I asked many questions. I had to understand everything before I did it, and I picked up lots of tricks from others (like things to do so you don’t have leaks in your roof).

It takes enormous commitment to build a home. And, says Christina, “determination, pride, a strong ego, and craving a home space.” The focus this kind of project takes is amazing. “I pretty much lived the house for an entire year. I was completely obsessed. I dreamt about it at night, then would wake up and make changes. It was a test of mettle, for sure, and it definitely made me stronger.”

Designing and building a sustainable shelter for yourself is one of life’s unforgettable journeys. In the end, the experience of building and the friendships that happen in the process may well be as important as the home you create. As Christina says, “Everyone is going to learn in their own way; everyone will approach building a house differently. The only guarantee is that there will be hard times, and there will be beautiful times and, in the end, it will change your life. I mean, what an achievement, to build your own house!”

Becky Kemery is a carpenter, cook and freelance writer focusing on sustainable building. She currently is in the mountains of north Idaho working on a book about yurts. If you have interesting yurt stories or pictures, please send them to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

For millennia people have built homes for themselves out of the materials and resources at hand. It is only in the past 100 or so years that we have lost the knowledge and ability to build beautiful, climate-appropriate buildings for ourselves at little or no cost. The relationship between home and owner was once a personal one; home was a reflection of cultural heritage, values, and a unique expression of self. The end of World War II put an end to this and marked the beginning of the housing industry as soldiers returned home and families looked to the suburban monoculture to fulfill the "American Dream."

Necessarily, housing and construction were standardized and Americans were removed from the intimacy of designing and building their own homes. Since then, homeownership has devolved from an intimate relationship between family, home and the environment, to acquiring 30 years of debt to pay for a home that is often empty because one must work all day just to afford it. And these are the lucky few! Only 31% of California families can afford a median-priced single family home. In the San Francisco Bay Area - ground zero for California's hi-tech economy - the figure is 84%!

On the whole, homeownership rates have been increasing across the nation, yet the disparity between those with ownership opportunities and those without grows larger. Local, state, and federal government provides assistance to low-income populations in the form of development subsidies, rent-control programs and other low-income housing programs. Some of these programs have been miserable failures - as we’ve seen with public housing until recently - and some have had remarkable success. Yet, little of what is accomplished involves restoring the dignity, pride, and traditions of families and individuals in need.

A more intelligent and eco-logical solution to affordable housing involves a systems approach to solving multiple housing and environmental problems. For example, we know the following:

• There is an affordable housing shortage;
• Families are economically stressed by the increasing cost of housing;
• We are supporting logging, mining, trans-national financial institutions and the petro-chemical industry when we purchase and/or build a conventional stick-frame home;
• Forty percent of landfill waste is attributed to construction;
• The housing industry is dependent on cement - an industrial product with high embodied energy that contributes up to 10% of greenhouse gasses to the biosphere;
• Scientists have identified 1500 bacterial and chemical air pollutants given off by paints, carpets, and manufactured products; and
• Our forests continue to be clear-cut; today only 4% of ancient forests remain in the U.S.

Ecologically sustainable, economically viable and socially just housing will address these issues by marrying time-proven building technologies with contemporary design and construction to achieve affordability and to return sacredness to home.

Once upon a time, in a world not long ago, all housing was affordable - if not free - and buildings were inherently sustainable. Today, over 1/3 of the world’s population (count em: that's 2 billion people!) still lives in earthen homes. Considered sub-standard by resource-consumptive Western culture, native people and people of developing nations have yet to abandon sustainable, indigenous building techniques and materials. This is not to say that they would choose their simple, traditional structures over a modern home; however, it is a good reminder that most of the world has lived for most of history in buildings built from natural materials using simple human- or animal-powered technologies. These buildings are inherently sustainable, utilizing local, climate-appropriate materials, and labor. Throughout history, these buildings have ranged from modest huts in Africa to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, to the contemporary and elegant rammed earth and straw bale homes of North America and beyond.

Incorporating locally available resources like rock, soil, straw, reclaimed or recycled materials and on-site timber resources into residential construction can lend itself to housing that is more affordable because transportation, processing, packaging, and profit are reduced. By participating in design and construction and by using sweat equity, expenses can be further reduced. By refusing to participate in consumer culture and focusing on simple living, many people find that housing size can be reduced - sometimes dramatically - furthering goals of affordability. Eco-designer and architect David Arkin says that the first step in building an environmentally responsible (and affordable) home is to build one smaller than your parent’s. Smaller homes are more intimate and require less “stuff” to fill empty space. The smaller home nourishes affordable, eco-local living.

Natural and locally occurring materials can create beautiful, affordable, non-toxic homes. Cob construction, owner-built straw bale and rammed earth, and super-adobe (sandbag construction) are among the more popular materials and techniques that are pointing the way toward more sustainable and affordable housing. Building code officials are slowly catching up to the growing interest in this type of construction, and lending institutions - notably Fannie Mae - are supporting green building through resource-efficient and environmental housing programs. In California, cob, straw bale, rammed earth and light straw-clay homes are permitted. Regulations can no longer be blamed as an impenetrable barrier to affordable, natural living. Rather, we must recondition ourselves to value an affordable, healthy and beautiful home instead of the 4000-square-foot toxic starter-mansion and half a lifetime of debt.

Alison Pernell thinks everyone should have the opportunity to empower themselves by building their own natural home. She lives in Sacramento and works for the Local Government Commission, promoting resource-efficient, livable communities.

Let the People Rebuild New Orleans
by Naomi Klein


On September 4, six days after Katrina hit, I saw the first glimmer of hope. “The people of New Orleans will not go quietly into the night, scattering across this country to become homeless in countless other cities while federal relief funds are funneled into rebuilding casinos, hotels, chemical plants.... We will not stand idly by while this disaster is used as an opportunity to replace our homes with newly built mansions and condos in a gentrified New Orleans.”

The statement came from Community Labor United, a coalition of low-income groups in New Orleans. It went on to demand that a committee of evacuees “oversee FEMA, the Red Cross and other organizations collecting resources on behalf of our people.... We are calling for evacuees from our community to actively participate in the rebuilding of New Orleans.”

It’s a radical concept: The $10.5 billion released by Congress and the $500 million raised by private charities don’t actually belong to the relief agencies or the government, but to the victims. The agencies entrusted with the money should be accountable to them. Put another way, the people Barbara Bush tactfully described as “underprivileged anyway” just got very rich — except that relief and reconstruction never seem to work like that.

When I was in Sri Lanka six months after the tsunami, many survivors told me the reconstruction was victimizing them all over again. A council of the country’s most prominent businesspeople had been put in charge of the process, and they were handing the coast over to tourist developers at a frantic pace. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of poor fishing people were still stuck in sweltering inland camps, patrolled by soldiers with machine guns and entirely dependent on relief agencies for food and water. They called reconstruction “the second tsunami.”

There are already signs that New Orleans evacuees could face a similarly brutal second storm. Jimmy Reiss, chairman of the New Orleans Business Council, told Newsweek he has been brainstorming how “to use this catastrophe as a once-in-an-eon opportunity to change the dynamic.” The Business Council’s wish-list is well-known: low wages, low taxes, more luxury condos and hotels. Before the flood, this highly profitable vision was already displacing thousands of poor African-Americans: While their music and culture was for sale in an increasingly corporatized French Quarter (where only 4.3 percent of residents are black), their housing developments were being torn down. “For white tourists and businesspeople, New Orleans’ reputation is ‘a great place to have a vacation but don’t leave the French Quarter or you’ll get shot,’” Jordan Flaherty, a New Orleans-based labor organizer told me the day after he left the city by boat. “Now the developers have their big chance to disperse the obstacle to gentrification: poor people.”

Here’s a better idea: New Orleans could be reconstructed by and for the very people most victimized by the flood. Schools and hospitals that were falling apart before could finally have adequate resources; the rebuilding could create thousands of local jobs and provide massive skills-training in decent paying industries. Rather than handing over the reconstruction to the same corrupt elite that failed the city so spectacularly, the effort could be led by groups like Douglass Community Coalition. Before the hurricane this remarkable assembly of parents, teachers, students and artists was trying to reconstruct the city from the ravages of poverty by transforming Frederick Douglass Senior High School into a model of community learning. They have already done the painstaking work of building consensus around education reform. Now that the funds are flowing, shouldn’t they have the tools to rebuild every ailing public school in the city?

For a people’s reconstruction process to become a reality (and to keep more contracts from going to Halliburton), the evacuees must be at the center of all decision-making. According to Curtis Muhammad of Community Labor United, the disaster’s starkest lesson is that African-Americans cannot count on any level of government to protect them. “We had no caretakers,” he says. That means the community groups that do represent African-Americans in Louisiana and Mississippi — many of which lost staff, office space and equipment in the flood — need our support now. Only a massive injection of cash and volunteers will enable them to do the crucial work of organizing evacuees — currently scattered through 41 states — into a powerful political constituency. The most pressing question is where evacuees will live over the next few months. A dangerous consensus is building that they should collect a little charity, apply for a job at the Houston Wal-Mart and move on. Muhammad and CLU, however, are calling for the right to return: they know that if evacuees are going to have houses and schools to come back to, many will need to return to their home states and fight for them.

These ideas are not without precedent. When Mexico City was struck by a devastating earthquake in 1985, the state also failed the people: poorly constructed public housing had crumbled and the army was ready to bulldoze buildings with survivors still trapped inside. A month after the quake, 40,000 angry refugees marched on the government, refusing to be relocated out of their neighborhoods and demanding a “Democratic Reconstruction.” Not only were 50,000 new dwellings for the homeless built in a year; the neighborhood groups that grew out of the rubble launched a movement that is challenging Mexico’s traditional power holders to this day.

And the people I met in Sri Lanka have grown tired of waiting for the promised relief. Some survivors are now calling for a People’s Planning Commission for Post-Tsunami Recovery. They say the relief agencies should answer to them; it’s their money, after all.

The idea could take hold in the United States, and it must. Because there is only one thing that can compensate the victims of this most human of natural disasters, and that is what has been denied them throughout: power. It will be a long and difficult battle, but New Orleans’ evacuees should draw strength from the knowledge that they are no longer poor people; they are rich people who have been temporarily locked out of their bank accounts.

Those wanting to donate to a people’s reconstruction can make checks out to the Vanguard Public Foundation, 383 Rhode Island St., Suite 301, San Francisco, CA 94103. Checks should be earmarked “People’s Hurricane Fund.”

Reprinted from The Nation; September 13, 2005