And turns out, it can get kind of boring out on the side of the mountain in a community of a few dozen, or even a few hundred people. I didn’t blame the Earthship dwellers for wanting to get away sometimes to see a concert or visit Taos’s excellent used bookstore. But I did wonder, as I crossed over the massive, terrifying bridge over the Rio Grande gorge, just how reliant Earthship dwellers tend to be on the kind of gravity-defying road infrastructure that their taxes could never hope to pay for.

But the biggest problem with the Earthship model, to my eye, was also what was also what was most beautiful about it: the Earthship dwellers’ sense of rugged individualism. One dweller told me a story about the 100-year flood New Mexico had just experienced, when every single Ship’s cistern had overflowed and residents reveled in the rain. I couldn’t help but cringe; what if all that water had been collected and stored for the next drought year? When does our commitment to not relying on overbuilt shared infrastructure start to become wasteful in other ways?

I do think we have a lot to learn from the Earthship model. We do need far less infrastructure and fewer natural resources than we think we do, and there are common sense, simple ways to minimize our reliance on the massive (and usually debt-financed) things we tend to build. There are houses in my home city of St. Louis that don’t look a thing like an Earthship, but are fully self-sufficient for their electric needs. Drive a few miles north into the countryside, and there are places in Missouri where it’s legal to use your own sewage as blackwater for your plants—a rational response if you’d prefer to live in a deeply rural area where it makes no fiscal sense for your government to run pipe.

And if you are attracted to the idea of living out in the mountains in a little off-grid bungalow? (And trust me—a big part of me is, too.) Do it. But let’s not dream of utopias where everyone suddenly decamps to the hills with 5,000 recycled tires, a building plan, and a dream of total independence. Let’s use what’s at the core of Michael Reynolds’ message, wherever we are: the radical idea that we need far less than we’ve been told.

(Cover photo: Wikimedia Commons)