Uprooted, an eco/travel blog

It’s beautiful in Austin: Texas hill country, with low rolling treebanks as far as the eye can see. The Colorado River rambles through the middle of town, and scores of springs bring forth cool water even in the hottest months. You can hear great music wherever you go, and there’s art on every corner. But [...]

It’s always sunny in Colorado. Bright future, too: Denver was recently ranked 2nd in America for clean technology opportunities. The Governor’s Energy Office has submitted a plan to allocate $49.2 million for clean energy jobs and reductions in energy usage; $47.2 million for energy efficiency and conservation grants; and $79.5 million for low-income weatherization. And [...]

Because it’s still pretty chilly out, I’m not back on the WWOOF train yet. Still, I wanted to do some volunteering while I was in town, so I signed up to spend a day working with Habitat.
Volunteering is easy: you just sign up on habitat.org, show up at the build site, and they put you [...]

Even the best ideas can be taken too far. The story of a beautiful home, and how it was lost.

So, in my last entry I showed you what a viga run looks like. But there’s plenty I didn’t show you! Including the fact that the entire escapade took place at R.E.A.C.H., the original Earthship community founded in 1989.

R.E.A.C.H. (or “Rural Earthship Alternative Community Habitat” if you favor flavor over brevity) is a PRIVATE community, [...]

Bottle Brick Bathroom, originally uploaded by Earthship Kirsten

If you’ve been following my Earthships adventure, you know that it is actually possible to build houses using garbage. Can and bottle walls—literally walls made out of mud or cement, with cans or bottles set like bricks—are one of Mike Reynolds‘ time-tested innovations, a building technique that can [...]

After two full weeks of hard work and some pretty rough weather on the Earthship job site, we were all feeling kinda beat. But things are changing! There’s still snow on the mountaintops, but down here in Taos it’s a sunny day; spring is officially around the corner, and it really feels like the change [...]

Because it’s just barely springtime, this group of interns is lucky enough to work on a brand new Earthship build. It’s pretty exciting, and by “exciting” I mean “OH GOD MAKE THE PAIN STOP”. Why? Because the way you start an Earthship is to pound hundreds of tires full of dirt.

Work started here last Friday, [...]