A history of sustainable living
What makes someone give up modern comforts to build a home out of mud, tires, or recycled bottles in the middle of nowhere? It’s a question that hovers over every off-grid, eco-friendly architectural experiment from the Arizona desert to the forests of Scandinavia. At first glance, these places look like movie sets or mirages: a cluster of otherworldly domes baking in the sun, or a hobbit-like house half-buried in the earth. Yet they are very real attempts to answer a deep cultural yearning. Why are so many people—from idealistic architects to Instagramming vanlifers—drawn to the idea of living off the grid? The answers reveal a lot about our changing values, from anti-consumerism and environmental activism to the search for community and meaning outside the mainstream.
Arcosanti, for example, rises from a high desert mesa in Arizona like the ruins of a sci-fi civilization that never quite materialized. In 1970, Italian-American architect Paolo Soleri set out to build this experimental town as the first prototype of “arcology,” his concept blending architecture and ecology. Soleri was a visionary and a pragmatist: he believed cities could be redesigned to minimize cars, sprawl, and waste, while maximizing human interaction. Arcosanti was to be an “off-grid ‘urban laboratory’… self-sustained and collaborative at every level”, producing its own food, energy, and culture. In theory, it would house 5,000 people in harmony with the environment. In practice, Arcosanti never grew beyond a few dozen residents and a handful of striking concrete structures perched above the desert. Today only about 50 people live there, a far cry from Soleri’s original plan. Critics point out the irony that these utopians still rely on weekly car trips to Phoenix for groceries and supplies. The ambitious arcology that was supposed to eliminate automobiles sees almost every resident owning one, and the site’s biggest economic output isn’t revolutionary urban design but the bronze wind-bells its artisans sell to tourists. And yet, Arcosanti endures as a symbol. Visiting it feels like “a fever dream suspended between a present past and a future imperfect,” as one writer put it. Its very existence – half inspirational, half cautionary – shows both the appeal and the challenges of dropping out of the conventional city blueprint.
Meanwhile, a thousand miles to the northeast on a sun-scorched plain near Taos, New Mexico, another architectural experiment was taking shape. In the 1970s, architect Michael E. Reynolds began building radically sustainable homes he dubbed “Earthships.” The name is no accident – Reynolds imagined houses as self-contained ships that could sail on the “seas of tomorrow” without needing any support from the outside world. An Earthship is the ultimate off-grid house: “entirely self-sufficient… built just about anywhere… with no need to be connected to any utilities”. To achieve this, Reynolds married old-fashioned ideas (thick adobe-like walls and greenhouse gardening) with creative reuse of modern trash. Stacked tires rammed with earth form the walls; glass bottles and cans become colorful mosaics that let in light. Every Earthship is oriented to soak up maximum sun through a glass wall, heating the interior by day and storing thermal mass heat for the cold nights. Solar panels and wind turbines generate electricity; rainwater is caught from the roof and funneled into ingenious recycling systems that filter and reuse greywater to grow indoor gardens of bananas and tomatoes. In Reynolds’s view, conventional houses – tied to the grid, wasting energy – are like fancy boats with holes in the hull. “Architecture either has to evolve or hang it up,” he declared, arguing that most modern buildings “don’t float in today’s world”. Earthships, by contrast, are meant to “float” through any crisis. In a way, they were prepper homes before prepping was cool, but with a hippie soul and sci-fi flair.
It’s easy to see the visual appeal of these odd homes in the New Mexico desert: with their rounded earthen walls studded with recycled glass, some have said Earthships look like “Antoni Gaudí meets Mad Max in the American West.”
They sprout solar panels and windmills, blending into the dusty mesas like some post-apocalyptic oasis of green living. What started as one man’s counterculture crusade in the ’70s has grown into a small global movement. Today there are over 60 Earthships in the Taos community and “up to 3,000 across the world,” from Europe to Latin America. Reynolds runs an Earthship Biotecture school teaching others how to build these homes, and dozens of Earthship-inspired projects have sprouted on almost every continent. Researchers who study sustainable architecture often cite Earthships as a pioneering model of autonomous living. One academic review even called Earthships the “epitome of sustainable housing” – combining passive solar design, recycled materials, and self-sufficiency in energy, water, and waste management. In other words, Earthships were doing off-grid and net-zero before those buzzwords hit the mainstream.
Not every expert is completely on board the Earthship, of course. Some architects look at these rammed-earth tire houses and see funky art installations rather than serious architecture. As The Guardian noted, “viewed from the cutting edge of contemporary architecture, Earthships [can] be perceived as ungainly and retrogressive”, lacking the sleek lines and daring forms the design world usually celebrates. Their aesthetic is closer to pueblo adobe meets DIY garage experiment than glossy Dwell magazine modernism. Others question how well the Earthship model translates to different climates – a design that works in arid New Mexico might struggle in a cold, gray northern winter (early Earthship adopters in Canada, for instance, found they needed backup heating). Building officials in many places have been skeptical too. Earthships don’t fit neatly into building codes written for standard stick-frame houses, so getting permits can be an adventure in itself. And like Arcosanti, the Earthship community has its ironies and critics. For one, Reynolds – the guru of off-grid living – reportedly doesn’t actually live in an Earthship himself in recent years, raising eyebrows among skeptics. He’s also had to refine his designs over decades to fix problems like overheating in summer or figuring out how to ventilate those buried rooms. In short, even the most passionate off-grid innovators have to contend with real-world practicality. But none of these challenges have stopped the spread of the Earthship idea; if anything, the mystique grows each time images of a cool new Earthship go viral on social media or get featured in a glossy architecture feature.
If Arcosanti and Earthships were born from the 1970s wave of environmental consciousness and countercultural experimentation, they are far from alone. The desire to build intentional communities and eco-homes has cropped up around the world in various forms. In 1962, long before anyone hashtagged #offgrid, a small group in Scotland founded the Findhorn community, which later evolved into one of the first self-described ecovillages. They experimented with wind power, organic gardening, and even built houses out of old whiskey barrels on the windy Moray coast. In India, the community of Auroville was established in 1968 as a “city of human unity,” drawing seekers and architects from around the globe to construct a sustainable international town on the barren Tamil Nadu plateau. The 1960s also saw hippie communes like Drop City in Colorado, where artists built geodesic domes from scrap metal in a utopian burst of creativity (Drop City didn’t last long – it was largely abandoned by the late ’70s – but “its impact on architectural culture has been significant and long lasting” through the domes and DIY ethic it popularized). Each of these projects, successful or not, added to a growing repository of knowledge on how to live with less reliance on the industrial grid.
Today, off-grid architecture is having a renaissance – albeit a quirky, globally distributed one. You see it in the rise of the tiny house movement, which combines Thoreau’s old mantra of “simplify, simplify” with millennial DIY culture. Tiny homes (typically under 400 square feet) exploded in popularity in the 2010s as people sought affordable, minimalist lifestyles. By “placing greater emphasis on quality living, personalization, an environmental ethic, and community values, the tiny house subverts the consumer-based mindset”, as one review of the movement noted. In other words, choosing to live in a micro-house – or a yurt, or a converted school bus – is often as much a statement against mindless consumerism as it is a housing choice. Pop culture has picked up on this vibe: Books and memoirs about ditching the rat race for simple living hit bestseller lists, and films from Into the Wild to Nomadland have explored the allure and hardship of dropping out of mainstream society. Even TV and streaming series feature off-grid homesteads or eco-communities as backdrops for drama, recognizing that there’s a real audience fantasizing about unplugging for good. On social media, the #offgrid and #vanlife trends present an idealized version of this life – beautifully filtered images of solar-paneled vans by a riverside or a cosy cabin in the woods. In fact, the #offgrid tag now has hundreds of thousands of posts, and #vanlife boasts over 6.6 million posts on Instagram. The notion of quitting your 9-to-5 to build a cabin (or buy a van) and live intentionally has transformed from a fringe daydream of “eccentrics and eco-warriors” into something closer to mainstream aspiration.
So, what do academics and urban theorists make of this phenomenon? Many see it as a mirror held up to the broader society, revealing our dissatisfactions and hopes. Sociologists who study intentional communities often frame them as “laboratories” where people prototype new ways of living. There’s a term “prefigurative politics” – basically living the change you want to see – which is exactly what these off-grid pioneers attempt. Researchers have noted that going off-grid is a way to “reduce the burden” of mortgages and bills while shrinking your carbon footprint, motivations that are both economic and idealistic. It’s no coincidence that interest in off-grid living spikes whenever there’s a sense of crisis in the wider world. The late 60s and 70s had the backdrop of the Vietnam War, oil shocks, and the first Earth Day – fertile ground for questioning the system. Now, in the 2020s, we face different but equally daunting crises: climate change, housing affordability, the feeling of digital overload. In response, thousands of people are again seeking refuge in the idea of a self-sufficient life. Scholars point out that this impulse isn’t just about escaping something (be it consumer culture or a high-stress urban life); it’s also about toward moving something – a tangible community, a closer relationship with nature, a sense of agency. As one eco-village founder quipped, earlier communes might have been driven by “religion, polyamory or drugs” but today’s off-grid projects are often driven by a desire for innovation and sustainability, a proactive answer to environmental urgency. That said, researchers also temper the enthusiasm with realism: not everyone can or wants to build a mud hut or solar dome, and systemic change can’t rely on everyone opting out of society. The challenge, then, is figuring out which lessons from these off-grid experiments can scale up or inform the mainstream without losing their soul.
Indeed, criticisms of off-grid architectural movements often focus on their limitations. Detractors call some of these communities naive or even elitist. It’s great to live in a hand-built paradise, they argue, if you have the time, money, and physical ability to do so – but what about those who don’t? There’s a concern that some eco-villages or tiny house enclaves can become bubbles of the like-minded, inadvertently shutting out diversity or overlooking the struggles of less privileged folks. Other skeptics say, nice composting toilet, but this isn’t fixing our cities. They worry that pouring one’s energy into an off-grid homestead is a form of escapism that leaves the larger problems – urban pollution, social inequity, climate policy – unchanged. If a few thousand people live in Earthships and Arcosanti-type labs, what about the millions in the sprawling metros? It’s a fair question. Even Paolo Soleri eventually faced the reality that his micro-city in the desert remained, as one observer noted, “at a peaceful remove from contemporary crises”, more of a philosophical art piece than a blueprint for Phoenix or Los Angeles. And yet, to dismiss these efforts entirely would be to miss their quiet influence. Ideas from the fringes do have a way of seeping into the mainstream over time. The early adopters smash the bottles and pound the tires, and a generation later some of those practices – rainwater harvesting, solar heating, natural building materials – find their way into your neighbor’s renovation or the local building code. The off-grid ethos also challenges the rest of society to ask: why can’t our normal homes and cities be a bit more like this? Why can’t we incorporate more solar panels, community gardens, rain barrels, and shared spaces that reduce consumption?
The good news is that this cross-pollination is already happening. Green design is no longer relegated to “eco commune” projects; it’s becoming standard fare in architecture schools and even luxury development pitches. Major cities have seen the rise of co-housing communities and eco-districts inspired, in part, by the success of intentional communities. Technology is also bridging the gap. A high-tech “smart” eco-village concept in the Netherlands called ReGen has attracted global attention with its plan for futuristic off-grid neighborhoods that produce their own energy and food. The project’s founder reported a “firestorm” of interest after unveiling it, with thousands of people saying “we want in desperately: this is our dream.”
Even governments and big developers talk now about net-zero communities and resilient design, which echo the principles that off-gridders have honed for decades. In a time of mounting climate uncertainty, the once-radical notion of self-sufficient housing is being taken more seriously: after all, when the electric grid fails in a heatwave or wildfire, who fares better than the family in the Earthship with solar power and stored rainwater? As one sustainable architect recently asked, “What happens when the grid fails? …When large populations become climate refugees?” Questions that sounded like hippie paranoia years ago now underpin real urban resilience planning.
Ultimately, the enduring fascination with off-grid architecture comes back to a basic human impulse: the pursuit of a good life on one’s own terms. For some, that means a direct confrontation with consumer culture – living in a way that proves “the value of the environment and human interaction is much greater than the value of material goods.”
For others, it’s about preparing for an uncertain future by relearning self-reliance skills our great-grandparents took for granted. And for many, it’s simply the draw of adventure and authenticity, carving out a space that feels truly one’s own. The chuckle-worthy truth is that off-grid living has become a little trendy even, with influencer YouTube channels touring solar cabins and TikToks of people baking wild yeast bread in cob ovens. Perhaps there’s a paradox here: using cutting-edge tech and social media to propagate what are essentially low-tech, anti-media lifestyles. But contradictions are part of the package. The key is that these movements are sparking conversations about what we really need to live well, and what we might be happier doing without.
So, why are we so drawn to the idea of living off-grid? Maybe it’s because, deep down, many of us sense that our hyper-connected, mall-saturated, 24/7-electrified existence is missing something fundamental. The off-grid architects and intentional communities boldly assert that another way is possible – a way that is more connected to nature, more rooted in community, and less harmful to the planet. You don’t have to romanticize everything about them (compost toilets are indeed an acquired taste) to appreciate the kernel of truth they offer. In an age when anxiety and disconnection often run high, places like Arcosanti and the Earthship community remind us that we can choose how we live, that we can design our homes and neighborhoods around values other than profit or convenience. They remind us that anti-consumerism and environmentalism aren’t about sacrifice alone, but about gaining something richer in return – autonomy, creativity, intentionality. The task ahead is to take these values and make them accessible to more than just a dedicated few. It means bringing the spirit of off-grid living into the cities and suburbs where most people reside, and ensuring the movement doesn’t become just a refuge for those who can afford to opt out.
In the end, the off-grid architecture trend is less about houses than about people and what we yearn for. Community, equity, and sustainability aren’t mutually exclusive; in fact, combining them might be our best path forward. The real promise of these experiments lies not in isolating ourselves from society, but in inspiring society to transform itself. Perhaps we won’t all move to the desert and build arcologies, but we can insist that our cities function more like supportive communities than concrete jungles. We might not each hammer tires into walls, but we can demand buildings that tread lighter on the earth. The curiosity and creativity that drive off-grid projects can energize anyone who’s ever thought, “there must be a better way.” And embracing that spirit—whether by starting a neighborhood garden, installing solar panels, or simply reducing waste—allows us to live out some of the off-grid ethos right where we are. The culture is indeed changing: what was once fringe is inching toward the mainstream, powered by the hope that we can live more sustainably and authentically. The question that started as “why do they do it?” might just become “why don’t we all?” — and that optimistic vision of widespread, equitable intentional living is one trend worth rooting for.