Earthships: A House Made From Beer Cans Sparks a Movement | Short Film Showcase

People look at this and call it a Mad Max compound. What the heck? These people live like this and a bunch of dirty hippies that don't know how to clean up the land. Wow, it's weird. They call it trashy. The world is not going to build weird houses, but you know, I'm not gonna argue with him. And like, I'm not going to argue with the people dancing on the top level of the Titanic before the iceberg crash. If people don't see disasters in their horizon, you can't convince them of that. They're gonna have to see it on their own, and I'm just making life rafts right now.

Imagine living in a home that cost you nothing, Baku. Imagine building this home yourself. Imagine no utility bills, imagine Earthships. An Earthship is a passive solar home made out of natural and recycled materials. The major building component of an Earthship has used automobile tires, and Earthships power is generated by the sun and wind. Rain and snow is caught on the roof and funneled into a cistern. Heat comes from the sky, water comes from the sky, sewage can go back into biology. I mean, we don't need all these systems that men have created.

The first beer can house was made in 1972, and I found myself fresh out of architectural school. I just said, well hell, we build out of trees, but we don't want to get rid of them, and we want to get rid of garbage. Why don't we try to build out of garbage? It started to be kind of a contrived effort to recycle and has ended up the best way I know of to be able to, regardless of recycling.

Hey, China Senna, hey you idiot, I'm so sick of recycling and sustainable and green and organic, their rhetoric things. You know, this is just my opinion, but I mean so many people are so righteous. Why do you use concrete? Why you use oil-based products? Who cares? I'll use anything I can. Even if it's my mother's down jacket, I'll use anything to make buildings that show people that they don't need infrastructure.

The community set up to have about 130 homes, and there's probably 65 out there. Ah, they're gonna work, yes, perfectly. We moved in in '97, end of '97. The Earthship had been started when my partner and I bought it, and then we started building from there. I really had no idea what we were getting into. I had seen his books, and I thought they were just absurd, and I thought we'd be living in the stack of tires, and I ended up living in a stack of tires.

You know, showing you me after living in an RV freezing to death. You know, we thought we were friggin homeless for a while with no job, no home, none of this was happening, and then we ended up with this. It was like heaven. I love living here. I like that you have to be very conscious living in an Earthship, conscious of what the sun is doing, conscious of the weather. My sister is full right now, but you're conservative; you don't take a half an hour shower. The planter is in my home; I live with my plants.

I love that I had a friend many years ago who, when I told her about the Earthship, she said, man, there's just no curb appeal. And I've overheard them at bars saying, oh yeah, the Earthships, those gopher people. Oh yeah, those people, they live in gopher homes. It's like, yeah, over here it is. I think tradition and culture, you know, are nice. They should be in magazines, on coffee table books, but they shouldn't be in our way of evolution, and they are. Tradition and culture are two of our biggest enemies, in my opinion. They stop us from evolving.

We're not evolving fast enough. Roaches and bacteria, they're evolving very fast. You know, the movement that we need to make on this planet, in my opinion, is not going to go fast enough if we're trying to be palatable. But then again, you have to be palatable or people are not going to do it. It was long and slow for me to understand that what I like other people didn't like. Really, whether this product named this brand Earthships lives or dies is not really that important.

I think the concept of encountering phenomena of the planet for deriving sustenance is going to catch on. I think people are smart enough to realize that it's very artistic. I'm quite impressed. It seemed very comfortable, but you know, like inside you're reusing rather than recycling. It's amazing; you don't have to do the whole thing. It seems it would catch on because things get more desperate. Scotto.