The indoor garden is two stories tall. Clementines, grapes, and chard thrive in this manufactured environment. A pair of chattering parakeets flash by a burbling koi pond and land on a hot-pink bougainvillea spilling from the corner. Outside, the temperature has crept past 90, and miles of barren land stretch toward the Rio Grande in one direction and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the other. While the landscape is lovely in a minimalist kind of way, nothing much seems to thrive in the high desert besides sage, snakes, and tarantulas.
Two clashing ecosystems separated by thin glass: one that sustains human life, one that repels it. The crucial difference between the two? Water. Tres Piedras, New Mexico, receives only 13 inches of precipitation in a good year. But in this home, each drop that falls on the roof is collected and used four times: first, for drinking and washing; next, to irrigate the indoor garden; then, to flush toilets; and finally, to water outdoor plants.
This article appears in Issue 34 of Alta Journal.
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The West has been gripped by drought for 25 years—the region’s longest dry spell since 800 CE—which has drained reservoirs, desiccated crops, and fueled ever more destructive wildfires. If we continue to warm the planet, scientists warn, our megadrought could continue indefinitely and result in desertification, turning farmland into dust bowls. If you’re an eco-pessimist, as I tend to be, this is where your mind goes to very bleak places: food and water shortages, mass emigration, economic collapse. The Grapes of Wrath meets Mad Max: Fury Road.
New Mexico offers a glimpse of this potential future. It is the country’s fifth-fastest-warming state, with average temperatures that have risen a startling 3.6 degrees since 1970 and are expected to jump another 5 to 7 degrees by 2070. (For context, the Paris Agreement seeks to limit global warming to 2.7 degrees above preindustrial levels to avoid the worst fallout from climate change.) New Mexico is also very thirsty; 72 percent of its territory experienced drought conditions in 2024.
But at the same time that New Mexico serves up these dire statistics, a funky, off-grid neighborhood outside of Taos offers Westerners reasons for hope. For 30 years, the Greater World Earthship Community has demonstrated how humans can flourish in arid, inhospitable environments. Here, some 100 structures called earthships provide residents with everything they need to survive: shelter, food, and water. And while buildings are responsible for nearly 40 percent of greenhouse gases globally, these homes—whose construction materials include upcycled tires, cans, and bottles—rely on the sun and wind for clean energy.
The inventor of these earthship residences is a renegade architect who believes in wizards and has a long history of rankling bureaucrats with his refusal to obey what he calls “bullshit” building codes. Once dismissed as “a freak in the desert…building out of garbage,” Michael Reynolds is now a darling of the environmental movement.
“I was the ugly duckling for 50 years,” Reynolds, who turned 80 in August, tells me. “I was ridiculed. They took my license and damn near put me in jail. And then they start realizing that what we’re doing is relevant to where the world is heading. And now we’re turning into a swan.”
The past five years have brought an unprecedented surge in weather fatalities, including a nine-day deep freeze in Texas that knocked out the power grid and killed 246 people and a weeklong heat dome in Oregon that killed more than 100 residents. Throughout this atmospheric whiplash, the denizens of the Greater World community have been sitting pretty in their sandy paradise, harvesting bananas in their living rooms, and taking comfort in the knowledge that, even if the rest of the world goes offline, their homes will remain a cozy 70 degrees.
A BEER CAN MANIFESTO
Growing up poor in Pewee Valley, Kentucky, Reynolds learned thrift at an early age. His father, a milkman who made $100 a week, saved anything he deemed “too valuable” to throw away—screws, oatmeal tins, glass jars. When Reynolds was young, his parents bought a four-room shotgun house, and he helped his dad dig a full basement beneath it, giving him an early passion for DIY builds.
After high school, he followed his older brother by studying architecture, graduating from the University of Cincinnati in 1969. His thesis proposed an innovative solution to downtowns gutted by suburbanization. His “residential blanket scheme” offered suburban amenities to city dwellers in a block-size super-structure that would include parking and commerce on the lower levels and terraced, unfinished upper levels where residents could design their own homes and gardens. Half of his classmates sneered at his concept, while the other half praised it.
“It was the beginning of something that kept happening in my life,” he says. “Somebody hands me a plate, and on one side is raspberries, and on the other side, dog shit. It caused me to learn to take neither seriously.”
His thesis was noticed by editors at the prestigious Architectural Record magazine. “His ideas here are frankly visionary,” the publication raved. “They take as their goal the creation of a better way for people to live…and disregard all of the existing building codes, banking systems, patterns of private ownership and transportation techniques that restrict that vision.”
After he graduated in 1969, Reynolds moved to Taos with his first wife, Susan, an art student he’d met in college. At the time, Taos—then a conservative Catholic town—was being blindsided by a hippie invasion as caravans of wild-haired youths arrived, drawn to the cheap land and opportunities to engage in organic farming and communal acid trips.
But that wasn’t Reynolds’s scene. He and Susan bought an old barn in an apple orchard outside of town and turned it into a livable space, installing a bathroom and furnishing their home with repurposed trash. The fireplace was an old boiler. The chairs, hammered together from scrap wood. The living room table, a wire spool from the electric co-op. While studying for the national architectural licensing exam, Reynolds made chump change playing harmonica at a cantina and raced motocross, half hoping an injury would prevent him from being shipped to Vietnam. Instead, he received a deferment for teaching drafting at a vocational school.
One evening in April 1970, he was watching TV when CBS preempted Hawaii Five-0 to air a special report on the first Earth Day, hosted by Walter Cronkite. Correspondents had fanned across the nation to film pollution-belching power plants, trash-clogged streams, and cans tossed from passing cars. Cronkite concluded on a somber note: “To clean up the air and earth and water in the few years science says is left to us means personal involvement and may mean personal sacrifice, the likes of which Americans have never been asked to make in time of peace.”
That same night, Reynolds sat at his table stacking empty beer cans. After several false starts, he arranged six of the steel cans into a rectangle and wound baling wire around the top and bottom to secure them in place. The block was lightweight yet sturdy. He turned it over, musing: His invention could help solve the litter problem as well as address the controversial practice of clear-cutting forests for timber. It could even bring down housing costs. He met an older engineer friend at a bar and excitedly told him about his idea. The man called Reynolds a “disgrace to the architectural community” and walked out.
Undeterred, Reynolds kept experimenting. He mortared a row of can blocks between wooden beams and tested its integrity by pushing and pulling on it. It held. He filed a patent for a “Building Block of Empty Cans” and paid locals to collect cans from local businesses and form them into bricks. In 1972, he built a two-bedroom home out of 70,000 cans. It cost $11,000—about 20 percent less than a conventional stick-built house. The Denver Post featured it on its front page.
“New Mexico was very backward in those days and building permits were not seriously enforced,” he writes in his self-published Journey: Part One, a record of that time. “This really is the reason that so much was learned—because we were free…free to experiment.”
It was a high period. Susan gave birth to their son, Jonah, in 1973. Their orchard grew apples, pears, cherries, and plums. They raised ducks and chickens and five dogs. Reynolds built a two-story addition next to the barn, now laying the cans directly onto wet mortar and incorporating discarded glass—pickle jars, whiskey and pop bottles—into the walls to create a stained-glass effect.
He received his architect’s license, and when fuel prices soared during the energy crisis, he began using passive solar design in his clients’ homes. Large, south-facing windows maximized winter sun exposure. Flagstone or concrete floors acted as thermal mass, absorbing the sun’s warmth during the day and then radiating it back into the house at night.
Then another bit of 20th-century detritus caught his eye: tires. Americans dumped hundreds of millions of them each year. He packed dirt into one to create a “thermal brick” and found it was much better at storing heat than cans. In 1979, he built a house with tire walls on his property, sinking the north end into the ground to further stabilize the temperature. An attached greenhouse collected solar heat and grew vegetables. It was a rather slovenly affair, with black tire rounds jutting at odd angles from concrete. He called it the Hobbit House. This was his first true earthship. When a blond hippie named Gini washed up in Taos living out of a converted school bus with her three kids, he felt sorry for her and let them move into it.
FORMULATING THE FUTURE
It was around this time that Reynolds got into pyramid power.
Popularized by the New Age movement, pyramids were believed to harness mystical energies that could sharpen razor blades, preserve food, and improve mental and sexual prowess. Reynolds built a pyramid on top of his two-story addition and spent nights there, watching the moon through a skylight and jotting down whatever thoughts blew through his mind. After 10 nights, strange things began to happen, he says. He heard high-pitched sounds. The room spun and tilted and filled with red haze. After reading that priests in Egypt slept on top of their pyramids, he built a coffin-shaped open box on his and strapped himself in once a month to gaze at the round moon. “The full moon came across the southern sky and almost burned a hole straight through my brain,” he writes in Journey.
He was strapped into his box atop the pyramid when, he says, he was visited by three wizards who introduced him to metaphysics and helped him overcome the stigma about building homes from trash. “In nature there is no such thing as garbage,” he writes in another book, A Coming of Wizards. “Garbage is simply a concept of the human dogma.”
Encouraged, Reynolds bought 20 acres of remote desert outside of Taos to continue his experimentation. Susan had no interest in following him into the wilderness. But Gini did. So they bumped her skoolie through the sagebrush to start a civilization founded on trash. Gini was Eve to his Adam, both of them topless and smearing cement over Schlitz and Coors empties to make their first structure, a beer can dome.
“We worked in the sun and the wind and the dust and wild, cracking, streaking desert lightning,” he writes in Journey.
Naturally, his marriage to Susan ended. Over the next decade, he and Gini would get married and divorce three times. With a motley crew of friends, they built a larger pyramid for meditation. A solar-heated chicken coop. A house powered by a wind turbine that recycled gray water to grow food. All of it fully detached from public utilities.
As supreme ruler of his patch of land, Reynolds sought permission for nothing. When a crew member was killed in a car crash, he cremated her body beside the pyramid and told responding firefighters that it was just a “full-moon ceremony.”
He tossed a bearskin rug on the floor of the beer can dome, lugged in a chair rescued from the dump, and sat there smoking weed and “formulating the future.”
“To me, this was ultimate living, to be sitting out there in a fucking velvet chair in a dome made of beer cans,” he writes in Journey. “I was just in daily ecstasy, basically. I owned my life. I didn’t have to work. I did work some, but mainly it was just on building my own stuff there.… No bills, no mortgage payments.”
Why wouldn’t everyone want to live this way?
A COMING OF CODE ENFORCERS
But how could he bring his radical self-reliance to straights? How could he go from weird to widespread?
He sketched out a ranch-style home featuring a series of U-shaped rooms connected by a greenhouse hallway. The tires were concealed in adobe; the glass-faced front looked modern. It wasn’t too far from conventional. Before he could begin mass production, however, he needed the blessing of the powers that be. He invited officials from the New Mexico Construction Industries Division to watch a cement truck drive onto a low tire wall. The wall held the heavy vehicle’s weight; the functionaries were duly impressed. He took this as permission enough to move forward.
In 1989, he purchased 55 acres of raw mountainside 12 miles north of Taos to start an off-grid community at 8,500 feet. The grade was so steep that his bulldozer operators kept quitting, so he used solar-powered jackhammers to carve out sites. He called the development REACH (Rural Earthship Alternative Community Habitat), and the 12 self-sufficient homes he built there embodied all of his learned wisdom. Roofs funneled rainwater and snowmelt into 3,000-gallon cisterns, passive solar energy and thermal mass kept interiors comfortable, indoor greenhouses grew food.
He sidestepped subdivision codes by establishing what he called a land users association. Homebuyers didn’t own the land under their houses; instead they purchased association memberships whose price was tied to each home’s square footage. “This is not a real estate investment, and land is not being sold for profit,” Reynolds wrote in a flyer explaining the concept in 1992. “It is an adventure in living, and land is being made available for those who are ready for the evolution of humanity.”
Reynolds moved into REACH with his third wife, Chris, a cocktail server he met after his final breakup with Gini. He led media tours and published a how-to book called Earthship Volume I that kept selling out. Dennis Weaver, the Gunsmoke actor and an avid environmentalist, bought a home in REACH and then hired Reynolds to build a 10,000-square-foot earthship in Ridgway, Colorado.
Those feats were the raspberry side of Reynolds’s plate.
Then came the doggy doo.
The county shut down construction at REACH after determining that the road was too precarious for emergency vehicles, and the state revoked Reynolds’s architectural license after clients complained about faulty temperature control and cost overruns. (He blamed these problems on custom builds, including north-facing windows or second stories that interfered with thermal batteries.) His ego was bruised, but the loss of his license didn’t stop him from building—he retained his general contractor’s license and employed architects in good standing who would stamp his blueprints.
In 1993, he bought 1,100 acres 24 miles west of Taos at the base of the Tres Orejas Mountains to establish STAR (Social Transformation Alternative Republic) under the same “land users” arrangement. He envisioned a self-sufficient community of 300 residents but to date has built only 15 earthships there. The neighborhood, at the end of a seven-mile dirt road, is simply too remote for most people.
In 1994, he purchased 630 acres of land fronting two miles of Highway 64 to create the Greater World Earthship Community. This would become his most successful development, with a visitor center selling blueprints and tours and the Earthship Academy teaching his techniques to students from around the world. But in 1997, after 25 homes had been built at Greater World, the new Taos County planning director accused Reynolds of building three illegal subdivisions—at STAR, REACH, and Greater World—and issued stop-work orders for all of them.
His old government allies had died or retired, and their replacements were by-the-book bureaucrats. Reynolds, along with a group of homeowners, filed a lawsuit arguing that the communities weren’t subdivisions since he owned the land and the occupants didn’t use public utilities. In the yearlong standoff that ensued, frustrated residents lived in half-built homes and began to grouse to reporters. In 1998, Reynolds bowed to pressure and applied for subdivision status. This meant issuing property titles to owners, digging wells as a backup water supply, and getting approval to recycle water and build roads, among other things—all requiring coordination with multiple local and state agencies. It would take another three years for the tire pounding to recommence.
A PILE OF CRAP IN THE DESERT
On the June day that I arrive at the Greater World Earthship Community, a record-breaking, triple-digit heat wave bakes much of the United States, affecting more than 100 million Americans. Tres Piedras isn’t part of it, although 90 degrees on a cloudless, breezeless afternoon feels sweltering enough.
I’ll stay here for four nights, at two different earthships. The first one is down a dirt road, a single-story home fronted by a greenhouse and a bank of solar panels. A giant green arch spelling out atlantis stands over the entrance, as if it were a theme park. Here, all of Reynolds’s innovations are on display—cans and bottles embedded in walls, banana trees pressing against windows, the north end of the house buried in an earthen berm.
The inside smells loamy from all the plants and is refreshingly cool. There’s even a slight breeze: A convection system sucks air from tubes running through the berm, which chills it, and expels it through transoms over the doors.
The Yamaha motorcycle that Reynolds raced through the desert as a young man molders on a side patio. I sit in a suspended swing overlooking the mesa and try to make out my neighbors from the telltale lumps of their earthen berms. The sky is so dark that night that I can see the Milky Way from the front yard. And when the temperature drops to 49 degrees outside, I am snug in my sealed-up earthship as the tire walls release their stored solar heat.
The next morning, Reynolds, a slight man with piercing blue eyes and shoulder-grazing white hair, drives over for tea. He remains voluble and sharp, his native Kentucky still evident in his dragged vowels. In 2019, he was diagnosed with stage IV prostate cancer, and he’s largely DIY-ing his treatment by avoiding animal products and booze and loading up on garlic, microgreens, and turmeric.
The octogenarian is at the apex of a long career. He’s been featured in hundreds of media outlets and built demonstration earthships around the world. In 2024, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art acquired one of his original can bricks for $4,500. That much money for trash: The thought makes him chuckle.
“I’m blown away,” he says, “but at the same time, I’m like, this is sad—that this little pile of crap in the desert is the best thing that there is on this planet.”
He’s still battling red tape. Thirty years ago, a state engineer gave him a variance to install one well for 130 homes in Greater World, he says, but now that man’s dead and his replacement wants Reynolds to dig one well per 12 homes. He’s hired a water lawyer to fight it.
“I spend 75 percent of my money and time fighting to build sustainable housing and only 25 percent of it doing it,” he gripes. He was the galvanizing force behind the 2007 New Mexico Sustainability Testing Site Act, which permits, in certain areas, the construction of experimental homes that would otherwise violate local ordinances. But after four years of grinding through various committees, the 200-acre sites he proposed were whittled down to a mere 2 acres. “We are not evolving fast enough to survive.”
He believes that he has finally designed an earthship with mainstream potential: a two-bedroom, two-bath, 1,600-square-foot model called the Refuge. “The Refuge is the answer to the world’s problems: easy to permit, easy to build, maintenance-free. I’m going to spend the rest of my life getting them built.”
His days of troublesome custom builds for rich clients are over. After five decades, Reynolds thinks he’s found a formula that works: sell the plans to DIYers (starting at $1,499) or let homebuyers hire his team to do the builds. “Nobody lets you customize your car—you can’t go to Chrysler and say, ‘I want five wheels and a steering wheel in the back.’ An earthship is also a machine, like a car.”
IT TAKES CARE OF YOU
Later, I watch Reynolds teach at the Earthship Academy, in a building next to the visitor center. A group of nine students, most in their 20s and 30s, take notes on how to build a “simple survival” shelter—a one-room studio that costs $50,000 and uses about 200 tires. The pupils include Sal Salcedo, a hairstylist and influencer whose home burned down in the Eaton Fire and who recently bought land in the Mojave Desert, eager to build a disaster-proof home for his young family. At a construction site, I watch another group of students sledgehammer dirt into tires while funk plays over a wireless speaker. Among them are an Indian architect who wants to adapt earthships to the tropics and a middle-aged, underemployed movie grip who lives in a van and wants to build an off-grid house to live free of mortgage payments and utility bills.
I stop by the half-finished Refuge earthship of Deborah Binder, director of parent company Earthship Biotecture’s nonprofit arm, which constructs dwellings and community centers around the world, often in the wake of natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis. Binder hired academy students to build the walls (1,000 tires) and roof of her home but has reduced her costs by doing much of the detailing work herself, such as embedding blue-glass bottles in the shape of a wave in a wall to remind her of her native Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands. Although it’ll take three and a half years to finish her house, she says she won’t have a mortgage when it’s done.
Jess and Brian Johnson invite me to their 2,700-square-foot earthship, which they bought for $475,000 just before the pandemic. As their two French bulldogs trot after us, Brian gives me a tour of the hallway greenhouse, pointing out banana and fig trees, grapes, gooseberries, and sweet potatoes. The couple are still learning the rhythms of their unique house. Running too many appliances after sunset or on a cloudy day, for example, drains the solar batteries and requires a backup generator. And water scarcity can be an issue. In 2018, when Tres Piedras received less than nine inches of precipitation, some residents trucked in water or showered and did laundry in town. But those are minor inconveniences, the Johnsons say. “Every day, I feel delighted here,” Jess says. “I feel a genuine relationship to this home. You take care of it, and it takes care of you.”
I spend my final two days at Greater World in the Phoenix, a Gaudí-esque, 5,300-square-foot showstopper of an earthship, complete with rooftop turrets and a dragon’s head. Almost half of the interior is dedicated to growing plants. It’s a strange experience to walk through a living room dodging tree limbs or to lift a vine as you reach for your toothbrush. But it’s also deeply satisfying to shower in water caught from the sky instead of pumped from a distant, shrinking reservoir and to switch on a light that’s powered by our nearest star and not a carbon-spewing power plant. To let nature nurture.
On my last morning, I’m up at dawn to catch my flight back to California and drinking coffee on the patio when something extraordinary happens. As the sun rises over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, its rays wash over the mesa and start to crawl up the retaining wall beside me. Row by row, the jewel-colored rounds of embedded glass begin to gleam, like a panel of indicator lights. Like a machine turning itself on.•
Julia Scheeres is the New York Times bestselling author of Jesus Land, a memoir; A Thousand Lives, a narrative history of the Jonestown tragedy; and Listen, World!, a biography of intrepid Hearst columnist Elsie Robinson.
