Taos, New Mexico, one of the oldest continually-inhabited places in the United States, is also the birthplace of a sustainable architectural style made for the future. Meet the Earthship, invented in 1975 by Michael E. Reynolds, inspired by the rammed-earth and adobe construction methods of the Navajo and Pueblo peoples that have called New Mexico home since time immemorial, and refined by trial and error for decades since. (I once met Reynolds through an ex-stepmom. He was the kind of self-satisfied, crunchy type that you would probably expect from someone who would invent a sustainable house called an Earthship.)

Most Earthships are two-bedroom, broadly U-shaped houses that resemble a Hobbit hole crossed with street art. They’re designed to be completely self-sustainable, gaining all their electricity from solar and wind; their water through reclaimed rainfall (and this even in the arid climate of New Mexico!); and their heating and cooling through an ingenious system of insulation, (using the thermal mass of the earth, repurposed glass bottles, tin cans and rammed-earth filled rubber tires) passive solar heating (every Earthship’s equatorward wall is a greenhouse fertilized by its septic system, angled 10 to 15 degrees off of true south or north to minimize exposure during summer and maximize it during the winter), and natural ventilation that enables it to be up to 40 degrees Fahrenheit (around 22 degrees Celsius) cooler or warmer than the surrounding environment.

Students from around the world have come to New Mexico to study the building of Earthships, and where legally possible (as you can imagine, not many zoning codes are written with houses built of mud and garbage in mind) they have been built from Quebec to South Africa and from Sweden to New Zealand. They require no skilled trades to construct, can be made relatively expensively, and if constructed properly for the environment, can operate completely off-grid indefinitely– like the spaceships they’re named after, they’re designed to be a self-sufficient environment. I hope someday to build and live in my own Earthship or a similarly sustainable home.