By Mick Kelly

You wouldn’t think a home called an Earthship would be made of some 450 regular rubber car tires. But the plans for an eco-friendly Earthship, dreamed up by New Mexico-based architect Michael Reynolds in the 1970s, can call for thousands of car tires, beer and soda cans, and piles of plastic water bottles, depending on its size.

Though they were always open to unusual ideas, Sue and Geoff Stone were never radical types and they certainly wouldn’t have pictured themselves in something called an Earthship. They met as teenagers in a small town in eastern Massachusetts, got married, had a son, Jason, and a daughter, Ellen, and moved around the country with Geoff’s jobs as a chemical engineer. Sue, who has a masters’ degree in counseling and worked as a music therapist, frequently did social work, taught literacy programs and conducted sing-a-longs in nursing homes.

One day in 1994, after their children moved away and they were living in Ozark, Arkansas, Geoff said he was tired of the corporate slog. He was ready to take early retirement and live a bit differently. For a few months, they spent weekends and vacations traveling all over the country—to Utah, New York and Virginia—scoping out “intentional communities.” That term has come to include eco-villages, communes and other alternative groups who live in some sort of close-knit communal space and are often governed by rules that community members vote on.

The Stones picked Earthaven, a 320-acre eco-village near Black Mountain; its mission is “caring for people and the Earth, and recognizing the Oneness of all life.” Appropriately, they wanted to build an Earthship, which they had seen at a seminar in New Mexico on one of their scouting trips. Several Earthaven members live in green-built or hand-built structures and teach classes in permaculture, herbalism and earth-friendly building methods, and the Stones were anxious to learn. So, in 1999, they cleaned out their 1,700-square-foot house in Ozark, dropped off some furniture at their kids’ houses and brought only what would fit in a two-room Earthaven cabin. It had no running water and they lived there for six years while they built their house.

“It was better than a yurt,” says Sue, though she admits that, had she known they were staying for six years, she might have chosen something slightly bigger.

They picked out a piece of rugged mountaintop on the Earthaven grounds, bought Earthship house plans in 2001 from architect Michael Reynolds for around $2,000 and watched videos on building an Earthship. The process involves packing dirt into the insides of car tires to make them solid-enough building blocks for a foundation. Sue had always been a gardener and had done some painting and redecorating work in their former homes, but building the Earthship was by far their most ambitious and labor-intensive project yet. She was more than a little intimidated. “I wanted to have a house,” she says. “I kept saying to myself, if you want a house, you have to work for it.”

While Geoff took care of the tire-pounding, wiring and much of the other heavy construction, Sue did the plastering and the back-breaking work of shoveling and hauling large rocks to make a flower garden. “It may be my last big project,” she says. “My body thinks we’re nuts.”

The main walls of an Earthship, which are now found in most states in the country, are built by stacking dirt-packed tires on top of one another and plastering over them. In the Stones’ house, they used approximately 450 tires in the foundation and in all load-bearing walls, then plastered over them and used concrete with clay to add an earthy color to the outside. The home is “bermed” into the side of the mountain, remains remarkably warm in the winter, around 58 degrees Fahrenheit without heat, and at least ten degrees cooler than the outdoor temperature in summer. Large tanks near the house capture water from the roof and the Stones have tapped a spring on their land for drinking water that they filter into a separate tank. Huge solar panels on the roof heat water for the house. The Stones’ refrigerator and stove run on propane gas and, while they don’t get water or electricity from Black Mountain or Asheville, they do have a phone line and DSL for Internet. (At Earthaven, where Sue is currently the “firekeeper,” something like the president of the community, members regularly debate whether to install wireless Internet service.)

Most Earthships are U-shaped, with curvy walls inside, to maximize passive-solar heat at certain times of the year. But the Stones chose a long, rectangular floor plan to fit snugly into their hillside. Because North Carolina has a mild climate, they didn’t need quite as much sun. Sue’s favorite room is her private bedroom where a glass wall looks out over the front garden and, on most afternoons, is flooded with light. “Nobody messes it up but me,” she says. She had always wanted a piano in her house so she put one in her room and plays whenever she feels like it.

In total, the house cost around $150,000 and everything took twice as long and twice as much money as the couple anticipated. Not everything works exactly as planned. Their solar-powered water pump, for example, is too loud, says Sue. The plumbing didn’t fit into the wall in the utility room, so it sticks out into the middle of a walkway. Geoff says that ten years ago he was struck by the romance of simple living, and yet he really had no clue what was involved in an everyday existence off the grid. He’s surprised at how much effort it takes to maintain all of the house systems—the water pumps and the electrical system and other things that need monitoring—which gives him new respect for all the American homesteaders who figured it out before him. He gets a great deal of satisfaction keeping things ticking, making order out of chaos. “We have a mission to show people there’s a better way to live without suffering,” Geoff says. “You can have comfort, convenience and beauty, and it can be done in an energy-efficient way.”

The Stones find that the humidity on their mountaintop makes it difficult to dry herbs outside in the summer, so Sue dries her rosemary, thyme and basil on a special rack in the back of their Honda CR-V, which has a bumper sticker that reads: “Renewable Energy is Homeland Security.” She says she’s looking forward to the day when the house is finally finished (they keep adding tires and bottles to the landscaping all the time), but in the meantime she’s quite pleased just to be living—and living well—in a house like theirs.

“It was frustrating writing letters to legislators hoping they would change things,” she says. “I realized what I had control over was my own life, and I like living this way. I feel like I’m accomplishing something.”