Earthship building is a type of construction made up by this man in New Mexico named Michael Reynolds. He constructs using a mix of normal construction materials, but also recycled things like old tires, bottles and cans, as well as earth. Over the past 40 years he has built out a little community in Taos, and a construction company and school that builds and teaches about Earthships.
In the Uruguayan summer of 2019 Reynolds and his team were contracted to build a hotel in a city nearby to my house, Colonia del Sacramento. I knew the hotel owners from an earth building workshop I attended with them some months earlier. They invited me to come see the build when it happened.
When you contract Earthship to build something internationally, they almost always also host a school for students to come from around the world to the build. They charge students for classes and hands-on learning. Every morning students have two hours of classroom time with the Earthship staff, and the rest of the time they do rounds with different instructors, so they learn all the aspects of the build.
In this particular build I think the paid Earthship staff was a couple dozen people, and there were maybe 60-70 students, coming from all over the world.
I started interviewing people and asking them “why are you here?” and the answers were astounding. Several people mentioned losing friends to opioid addiction and suicide. They told themselves: “I need to do everything I can to find some other path so that doesn’t happen to me.” Many people mentioned the pain they felt during the recession of 2008-9, and resolved to find some other way to live. Other people just felt this general malaise, like they themselves would resort to suicide if they didn’t break out and try something new.
The people on this Earthship build were all people that were fed up. They could not abide the rat race, so they found themselves seeking out a more (supposedly) radical solution.
Almost no one mentioned ideological or political reasons to me. This malaise they faced was above politics. People were rejecting the whole system, and looking to find something worth caring about.
On the first day I showed up the site was pure movement. People teaching and learning, chatting, cutting wood, moving things, welding, pounding earth into tires, cutting wine bottles in half, handing and finding tools, cooking.
Everyone was working toward a purpose, a tangible goal. For students the purpose was learning theory and hands on skills. For teachers the purpose was education. For everyone the ultimate purpose was: build this hotel.
But in the process of reaching these goals, a latent purpose emerged. People have to find ways to get along socially in the service of production. The social relations are the lubrication of the machine that builds the hotel.
So, many people described (and I observed) these soft skills: communication, teamwork, diffusing tensions, social organization, telling jokes, caring for one another.
A couple of the days after interviewing people I hung out with them for beers. As soon as the build ended for the day, the staff and students would all hop in the back of pickup trucks, or on their bikes, and everyone headed for the beach.
After a day of making things people were giddy, friendly, and relaxed. They were tired, but accomplished. People had days and days of shared memories to talk about and ruminate on, together. If conversation ever turned to politics it would almost feel like a trivial topic in the face of the actual shared experience of building a hotel.
So often we think (and are told) the route to social change is ideological, or to convince others their our ideology is right. We think one of the only routes to change is to petition governments to capitulate to our ideology through policy writing. While I do think there is absolutely room for political action and trying to work with governments, I feel it gets far too much attention as the main pathway for action.
What if the way to the social change we want to see is to simply build the world we want to live in? If my research is any indication, through building things you can make friends, learn new practical and social skills, and you get to participate in the act of producing something real in the world.
The practical work of the act of production not only actually gets things built, it’s also fun. And fun is the great evangelizer.