Taos, New Mexico

Taos, New Mexico, is associated in the book with an existing community of Earthships: unconventional, largely self-sufficient homes that turn salvaged materials and passive-solar design into a way of living beyond ordinary utility systems. The settlement serves as a tangible model for Linda May’s own ambitions, though her planned homestead lies elsewhere.

The Greater World Earthship Community

Dozens of Earthships stand in the desert outside Taos in the Greater World Earthship Community. Their distinctive forms—sometimes marked by arches, turrets, vivid adobe, or bottles set into walls like stained glass—make the development appear less like a conventional subdivision than an imaginative outpost. The book compares the clustered homes to a moon colony shaped by Dr. Seuss, Antoni Gaudí, and the designers of Star Wars.

The homes are built around practical systems as well as expressive forms. South-facing windows admit sunlight, which warms dirt-packed tire walls by day; those walls release heat at night. Roof water and snowmelt collect in cisterns, then are filtered and reused for household needs and indoor gardens. Solar panels, and sometimes windmills, provide electricity. Because construction does not require sophisticated techniques, the approach is open to amateur builders and leaves room for individual design.

A built example of self-sufficiency

The community gives physical presence to an idea that can otherwise sound aspirational: a dwelling made with discarded tires, bottles, and cans, designed to supply its occupants with power, water, and food-growing space. Its significance in the account is not that every Earthship is inexpensive or easy to build. The book notes that costs vary widely, and that even though the materials may be humble, the finished homes can approach the cost of conventional housing. Rather, the Taos-area settlement shows how the design can be realized as a community and adapted with considerable visual freedom.

Architect Michael Reynolds, who developed the Earthship concept, is central to Linda May’s interest in it. She admires his sustained effort to realize the design despite resistance from building regulators, a history recounted in the film Garbage Warrior. The Earthship therefore represents both a practical building method and a challenge to the assumption that shelter and basic household needs must remain wholly dependent on conventional systems.

Linda May’s connection to Taos

Linda’s interest began after a documentary about actor Dennis Weaver building an Earthship introduced the idea to a broad audience. She later searched online for floor plans, diagrams, and interior photographs, collecting her favorites in a wood-grain-patterned binder. Her stated appeal was the combination of self-reliance and personal creation: an Earthship was not mass-produced, and she imagined building one herself.

For Linda, the model offered a possible route away from recurring bills. She was drawn to a home that could use sun or wind for power, collect rainwater, reuse water, and grow food indoors. The Taos community made that aspiration more than a picture or set of plans: it showed a cluster of homes embodying the design she hoped to make her own.

Model and destination

Taos is a point of reference in Linda’s story, not the location of her planned homestead. She hoped to find inexpensive land somewhere with permissive building rules, which Reynolds described as pockets of freedom. Her ambition was to create a lasting home that would draw on her skills and leave something for her children and grandchildren, but low-wage work and rent made it difficult to begin. She needed a way to reduce living costs while continuing to earn.

By the time the narrator arranged to see her land, Linda had five acres near Douglas, Arizona, and planned to visit after her Amazon job ended. The contrast clarifies Taos’s role: the community outside it supplies a visible example of the Earthship ideal, while Linda’s own attempt to realize that ideal was taking shape on a separate piece of land.