Uprooted, an eco/travel blog

This post is the first of a three-part series on bike culture. Come back Friday to read about anarchy, bike jousting, and two-wheeled social protest.

Remember when you got your first bike? Was it a Christmas present, or maybe a birthday gift? Remember how much fun you used to have on that bike, how fast you [...]

When I first told my friend Landry I was going to Detroit, she advised me to visit the Heidelberg Project. Thinking it was some sort of museum piece, I put it on the Maybe List—and later forgot about it completely as Detroit’s stark reality washed over my little head.
Nonetheless, later that day we drove right [...]

Sustainable living is cheap living. Here are some ideas from two kids who live green, cheap, and happy in Louisville, Kentucky.

Hostels, done right, are some of my favorite places to stay. They aren’t always awesome (see Abominable Snow Mansion), but the ones that have their act together are great places to meet people, live (and eat!) for cheap, and generally get the most out of whatever town you’re passing through.
I’d heard that the Austin hostel [...]

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 [...]

Madrid, New Mexico: found-art haven, reborn ghost town, and the most photogenic place I’ve ever visited.

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 [...]