Sustainable Living
June 2007

The Sustainability of Earthships --Part III
by David Martineau

Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason, mastery demands all of a person. ãAlbert Einstein

An earthship home may be an enjoyable place to live, but part of what Rick and Sandy Moore wanted to do was to encourage other people to build sustainably. Once word got out that an earthship was constructed near Colville, people came to see. The Moore's have been accommodating. "We've had somewhere between 150 and 200 people look at the house," Rick recalled. Invariably commitment to the earthship concept wanes once they discover how much work they are to construct. "Out of all those people, we had just two or three people that thought they were actually going to build an earthship. It's a lot of hard work and you really are on your own. It seems like when you look at the plans, as a person who's never built anything before, there are lots of lines, words and arrows. This is great until you start building. It really tells you about half of what you need to know."

"There were supposedly consultants for us down there that worked for a little while, then they got tired of talking to us. It was a long distance love affair which never works out that well. They wanted to move on to other things, so that got to be really frustrating. So for the most part, we were just figuring it out ourselves." Sadly, earthship owners in Colorado and New Mexico shared many of these same frustrations. Confusion over construction plans, procedures and regulations have cost many earthship owners a significant amount of time and money. Additionally the talent pool for constructing an earthship is very limited. Rick explains, "Professionally, there was no one around here that really had a clue what we were doing. So if you said 'screw this, let's put out the money and just hire someone,' there was no one to hire who knew what to do. It was way more work than we ever thought it would be, probably because we didn't know what we were doing."

Rick adds that things could have worked out better with subsequent houses. "The second one would've been substantially less work. By the fifth one we built, it probably wouldn't be much more work than a regular home. Just everything was bizarre, and we are still working on it to get things to work properly. We ended up having to take a bunch of windows out; we had way too much glass. Just a lot of stuff like that. All learning by trial and error."

When the Moore's embarked on their project in 1998, their family had mixed reactions. "Both my brothers were very supportive of it. They thought it was very cool. They still think it's astonishing. My sister, I think, thought it was more weird than cool. Sandy's mom was very supportive. Both of Sandy's sisters -- they've never been out here -- but I think they thought we were complete lunatics."

Building a home using sustainable technology requires a lot of up-front money. It takes financial commitment, but Rick Moore feels it justified. "To build a house these days and not take advantage of these ideas borders on selfish it, seems to me."

Perhaps the critical question is whether or not they would ever do it again. After pausing briefly for reflection, Rick Moore stated he'd do it over again. "I enjoy for the most part the process. It's like most things. The further you get from it, the more fondly you think back on it. I learned just so much stuff doing that. It was a wonderful exercise in problem-solving. If you like taking a conundrum and wrestling with it for a while and coming up with a solution, then build an earthship."

Read more about earthships at Earthship Biotecture, http://www.earthship.org/.





David Martineau studied sustainability and environmental planning in the Urban and Regional Planning Program at Eastern Washington University. For more on environmental sustainability, visit the Monthly's website at http://www.ncmonthly.com/.

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