I visited the Earthship Welcome Center in Taos, New Mexico

When I was in high school, I encountered the Wikipedia page for Earthships for the first time and lost my damn mind. There are guys who live in the desert inside homes made out of trash. The homes look exactly like Star Wars sets. The load bearing part of their walls are made of tires filled with sledgehammered dirt. The interior walls have beer cans in them. The homes are passively cooled and warmed and are half-buried in the earth to make this possible. They all have off-grid water-processing systems which utilize indoor greenhouses and outdoor leach fields to both process wastewater, and grow vegetables and shade plants. They look fucking nuts. I would never, ever live in one of these, but boy howdy, do they look good: Many of these photos are actually of "experimental" buildings nobody lives inside. Most of the structures that people live inside do not have visible beer cans anywhere on the walls - they're sealed under concrete or adobe - and most of the homes are partially…