ABSTRACT
Earthships are designed and promoted as a ‘radically sustainable’ approach to building, involving the construction of ‘off-grid’ housing utilizing earth and other materials, including those conventionally viewed as ‘waste’. The life-cycle benefits of building with such materials have been points of contention both within and outside the Earthship movement. Drawing on participant observation at Earthship Ironbank, this chapter outlines the many forms of reuse employed in Earthship construction and argues that the significance of these practices extend far beyond conventional understandings of the lifecycle impacts of materials. Rather, reuse in Earthship construction is a meaningful process of reclamation that challenges and subverts dominant consumerist paradigms by building new physical, social, and cultural systems from the discarded materials of industrial society.
