Building an Earthship
A BC family's endeavour to build a sustainable home from garbage
Greetings from the Darfield Earthship in the North Thompson Valley of British Columbia, Canada! July 1, 2010 marks Canada Day and the official start of Year two building our Earthship. As of today (July 1) we’ve decked a portion of the roof and have been roughing in electrical. The front wall is framed and it is starting to look more and more like a house!
Since starting our earthship exactly one year ago, we have come to realize what an educational opportunity our home is for many, many people—ourselves included.
What has been remarkable to us, however, is the incredible teaching tool it has become for our children, Katie (12), Stephen (10) and Helen (9).
On June 19th, we presented for the second year at the British Columbia Sustainable Energy Association (Kamloops Chapter) annual Energy Fair in Kamloops, BC. The kids entered a project about the house in the kids contest and they won first prize: a day of sailing or kayaking on the Shuswap!
They produced their display board themselves and fielded questions about earthships for 20 minutes or more during the judging session.
The judges included Tom Owen, director of sustainability at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, (TRU); Dale Parkes, architect and instructor at TRU who designed the green dream home; and Ed Frey, a geologist and TESL instructor. One of the judges was overheard to say, “these kids really know their stuff!”
Once again our children were reminded that they are involved in a really amazing thing. They are starting to talk like real Garbage Warriors!
It was a tough row to hoe in early 2008 when we told the kids that we were abandoning our plans to build a log show home for the business and were going to build a house out of tires and pop cans. Our earliest blog entries tell of the social angst experienced by Katie in the early months of planning. She worried how her friends would react to a house built from garbage.
The kids all talked about how our earthship project would make them feel different and no amount of persuasion in those early days could make them realize that different was a good thing!
Eventually as we helped them talk about the earthship and they learned to share our plans in an instructive and positive manner, they realized that what they were doing WAS special.
In fact, Chris has gone into the kids’ classrooms to talk about vermi-composting and earth composition as these are activities we are exploring as we build, and they fit well into the kids’ science curriculum.
Last summer we opened our project to volunteers. This consequently, opened the kids’ eyes when they realized that complete strangers were so enthralled with the “earthship” idea that they would come and help pound tires, pour concrete and frame front walls. It was an enormous lesson about the importance of community and friendship. Many of our volunteers stay in touch from locales around Canada and overseas. The kids got to know many of these people very well and saw different cultures, lifestyles and personalities, something we see as important in raising interested and tolerant world citizens!
We have learned that it is important to let the kids help … even if we could get the same job done faster. Too often in the past we have missed learning opportunities with the kids because we did not have enough time to let them contribute. Often when they do something for the first time the results are clumsy and slow … it CAN be frustrating. But it is amazing how quickly kids learn, and how much they can contribute.
As much as I’d like to wax poetic about how the kids will work on the earthship eight hours a day, I simply couldn’t do it with a straight face. Our kids can only take a few hours at a time before they want to “play”. Chris and I have to remember that this is o.k.!
They each have their own special contributions to the earthship. Stephen assists Chris in lots of preparation and has learned how to use the compound saw, shop planer, drills, jigsaws and cement mixer. It is great to see his confidence when helping.
Katie seems to like plastering the best and will happily smack concrete and pop cans together, or better yet, help fill in the voids between tires with our own special mixture of dirt, clay and sheep’s wool. She is also getting old enough that she wants to learn how to drive, a valuable skill and simple reality living in a rural community. Katie has been satisfying this ambition by moving building materials around our property with the pickup.
Helen, too, likes to plaster and both girls will climb a ladder to reach high spots. She is also more interested in the garden than the older two kids, and this year got involved in a school community garden and has planted corn in our garden.
The girls like to take charge of the kitchen on work days, bringing us and any volunteers cold water and snacks. Plus they often cook dinner and clean up afterwards!
All of our kids can now read a tape measure! Our home construction project has been teaching valuable skills that a lot of kids are simply not learning today.
Our project is teaching our children lessons in finance. On more than one occasion it’s been suggested to us by one of the three that we hire somebody to help, just to speed things up! (Some days I’d like to!)
When we point out that we’d have to pay this help, leaving less money for other parts of the house (or for their other activities like kayaking, baseball, swimming and quilting) they begin to see the benefits of a do-it-yourself project.
I’m not sure if they entirely appreciate our goal of building our earthship for $60,000—I don’t think they have a point of reference -- but they are starting to understand that when we re-use or recycle materials (for free!) it has an effect on the bottom line of our family’s finances as well as on the environment.
We haven’t yet attempted to discuss the effect of long-term recycling and re-using on GDP; we’ll save that discussion for the day earthships take over the construction industry!
Building our earthship has started a discussion with the kids about the environment, the economy, sustainability and resource depletion. Explaining our reasons for building with used tires and cans, wanting to grow our own food, and not wanting to take on debt has got the kids thinking about broader issues in the world that ultimately affect them. The earthship has led to discussions surrounding the BP oil spill, the water crisis in California, the necessity of Site C damn, here in British Columbia, and the issue of tipping fees at our local dump.
We temper all our discussions with the reality of life today. The kids understand that simply turning off the “oil tap” is not possible. But they now have more than an inkling that their decisions, especially as we build the earthship, can have a larger impact on the world.
These discussions have finally nudged Chris and me to decide to home school the kids next year while we complete our building project. We’ve been contemplating it for several years but we’ve realized ourselves how important this house is to our family and the time we spend together and learn about life. An earthship provides a complete curriculum of learning for any age and we look forward to a year (or more) exploring and talking about the many aspects of sustainable living.
For specific information about our earthship, including our construction plans and details, please visit our site at www.darfieldearthship.com. If you are coming to British Columbia in August to work on the new build in Lone Butte with Earthship Biotecture (the soon-to-be earthship owners are folks who worked on ours last fall for a day!), please stop by to say hello; we are only an hour’s drive from Lone Butte and would love to meet more earthship enthusiasts!
See this story with all of its great photos on the Earthship Biotecture website.
Please also visit the Darfield Earthship website online.
