Earthship Homes

Earthships are like the building/house component of a harmonode homestead.

The Earthship concept is described well on earthshipbiotecture.com, check it out if you haven't seen them before, they're often made quite beautifully.

The Earthship website describes them as:

  1. holistically looking at meeting human needs
  2. trying to harmonize with Nature as much as possible.

It takes a much more DIY approach to building somewhat-LBC-like buildings as single-family houses.

Limitation

Like with the typical challenge of atomic-family homesteads, scope and scale are a limitation here. We truly need to build neighborhoods as human colonies — colonies of paradisise — and not as separate "houses".

As with any development project, implementation details can severely impact the extent to which an Earthship could qualify as a harmonode, for instance the greenhouse could over-heat the living space or numerous other performance flaws could exist. The DIY nature of something that we as a species don't know much1 about lends itself towards such mistakes, but these shouldn't reflect the Earthship concept as much as they should highlight the importance of good design and planning and appropriate trade skills.

Ultimately, the limits of Earthships in attaining the kind of remarkable performance and synergies that qualify something as a harmonode are due to lack of suitable technogies for utilities and, as previously mentioned, the issue of scope and scale.

Notes:

  1. It's not even remotely reasonable to say that humans know much about creating decent, let alone optimal habitat for ourselves.

What harmonodes can look like:

Envisioning: