Greater World Earthship Community is a subdivision outside Taos, New Mexico, composed of dozens of Earthships—homes designed to provide for many basic needs without conventional utility connections. The community matters in the book both as a distinctive built landscape and as a concrete example of the kind of durable, self-sufficient home Linda May hopes to create for herself and her family.

Setting and Appearance

The community lies in the desert outside Taos. Its Earthships do not read as a uniform housing development: their forms can include spires, turrets, columns, and arches, while adobe-colored walls and bottles arranged like stained glass make individual buildings visually distinct. The result is a settlement with a playful, speculative appearance, far removed from the standardized subdivisions Linda associates with conventional housing.

The buildings’ inventiveness is paired with accessible construction. Earthships do not require sophisticated building techniques, leaving room for amateur builders to adapt their homes and express their own designs. The community therefore demonstrates not just an alternative architectural style but a way of building in which individuality and reuse are compatible with practical shelter.

How an Earthship Works

The Earthship model combines salvaged materials with systems for managing heat, water, food, and electricity. Discarded cans and bottles can be incorporated into the structure; dirt-filled tires form load-bearing walls. South-facing windows admit sunlight, and the tire walls absorb heat during the day and release it at night, helping regulate indoor temperatures.

Rain and snowmelt are directed from the roof into a cistern. The collected water is filtered and reused for drinking and washing, for indoor fruit and vegetable gardens, and for flushing toilets. Solar panels—and, in some cases, windmills—supply electricity. These interconnected systems make the Earthship an intended means of reducing dependence on outside utilities, rather than simply a house made from unusual materials.

Linda May’s Model for a Future Home

Linda’s interest in Earthships grew from their combination of self-sufficiency, ecological design, and personal craftsmanship. She admired that an Earthship was not mass-produced and believed it was a home she could build with her own hands. Her plans were informed by images and documentary material that helped bring the concept to a wider audience, including a film about actor Dennis Weaver building an Earthship after moving to Colorado in 1989.

For about a decade, Linda searched online for floor plans, diagrams of the building systems, and interior photographs. She organized favored examples in a three-ring binder with a wood-grain-patterned cover, and used an Earthship beneath a New Mexico sunset as her Facebook profile image. Her accompanying description emphasized recycled tires, bottles, and cans; power from sun or wind; rainwater reused multiple times; and food grown indoors. To her, those features offered the prospect of living with fewer bills and greater security.

The community is presented as an example of the architecture Linda wants to emulate, not as her own home or building project. She hoped to find inexpensive land somewhere with lax building codes, identify sources of free materials, and recruit volunteers. The scale of that ambition made the Earthship more than a retirement fantasy: she wanted to leave a lasting home for her children and grandchildren. The book sets that long-range goal against her immediate need to keep earning money while reducing living costs.

Place in the Book’s Account of Home

Greater World Earthship Community gives visible form to a different idea of housing: shelter can be assembled from discarded materials and designed to meet everyday needs through systems under a resident’s control. For Linda, that possibility answered anxieties about aging, low-wage work, rent, and the limited support she expected from Social Security. The appeal was not simply unusual architecture; it was the prospect of a steadier life.

The community also clarifies the distance between imagining such a home and obtaining one. Linda still needed land, materials, help, time, and a way to support herself during construction. Her hoped-for Earthship thus stands in contrast to the temporary parking places and seasonal work that structure so much of the book’s account of mobile life. Greater World is an existing demonstration of the model, while Linda’s own version remains a project she is trying to make possible.