Tucked into the side of a sagebrush-covered hill and tinted to match the red-colored earth around it, Rita Faruki and Kenneth Wilson’s home outside of Lander, Wyo., is an earthship made from tires rammed with dirt and aluminum cans covered in stucco.

“The thing I love about this house,” Faruki says, “is I feel like I’m outside even when I’m in. We can sit here and see the sky filled with stars right above our heads. The outdoors comes indoors.” The house—which Faruki and Wilson bought from the man who designed and built it by hand—is a labor of love.

Curving interior walls along the south-facing windows are made from hundreds of V-8 juice cans; all exactly the same size, stacked one on top of the other and covered in stucco. The piles of tires inside the load-bearing walls are also identical. Collecting these items took time and patience, but the result is a home constructed primarily of recycled materials with virtually no external heating source (though Faruki and Wilson recently bought a small pellet stove as much for atmosphere as for heating).

For years, “green building” has been equated with projects like Faruki and Wilson’s earthship—buildings that had their own charm and grace, but their futuristic lines and intensive construction demands scared away all but the dedicated few. Green building supplies were often hard to find and inflexible building codes made it hard for new construction ideas to be approved. Solar systems required a do-it-yourself mentality and were often more expensive up front than conventional power sources.

According to GreenHomeBuilding.com these barriers slowed the spread of green building. Most new homebuilders find it hard to go against the flow of conventional wisdom, and the flow right now is for stick-frame homes that go up quickly and easily, but are resource and energy intensive in terms of materials and construction. The rising cost of natural gas may be just the boon the industry needs to make it into the mainstream, as well as the leadership of those who have been willing to make the plunge in the face of perceived obstacles.

Taking the lead
In spite of this, green building is not new. People have experimented with design, materials and systems to power their homes forever. The difference now is that the growing scarcity of natural resources and energy supplies are shifting the motivation to “go green” from one of idealism and environmental ethics to a practical decision and long-term economics. Green buildings and alternative energy systems may not be as cheap as conventional construction yet, but the trend is in that direction.

Ben Ellis and Shannon Shuptrine of Jackson built their off-the-grid home in 1998. They rely on passive solar design, siting, tight construction, insulation, and photovoltaic panels to heat and power their home. They make calculated decisions about their energy use depending on the weather, but don’t see those choices as a sacrifice. “It is fun,” Ellis says. “We are tuned into the weather and the sun in a way we wouldn’t be if we weren’t living in this house. We have a real sense of light as power from living here. We can watch the house respond when a cloud passes over the sun. This has given us a different perspective on the world.”

According to Ellis, he and his wife both come from families of “tinkerers” so they embraced the green-building culture of doing it themselves. But, he says, there are a growing number of designers and builders in the state who can help people who are less hands-on.

“It does require a lot of research, reading and talking to people,” Ellis concedes. “Sometimes this gets lost in the culture of tinkerers. But you get into that kind of mindset and it becomes really fun. You are learning and experimenting all the time and it is extremely rewarding in the end.”

Wyoming Outdoor Council board member Susan Lasher and her husband Chris Pfister also recently completed building a new, passive solar home. Susan says, “Having lived in Wyoming for about eight years in an older house, full of holes and sitting on the dirt, we knew the cost – to ourselves and to the environment – of heating and powering a poorly designed house in disrepair. We knew we could do better by taking advantage of Wyoming’s sun. We determined to build a modern house, not large but comfortable and efficient.

“Surprisingly, residential solar energy planning is still more an art than a science. Our research, including much over the Internet, turned up little reputable, specific information. Our consultations with Rocky Mountain architect / designers turned up even less. Finally, by poring over the standard books in the field—none more recent than the late 70s or early 80s!— and by consulting with Scott Kane and Toby Schmidt at Creative Energies, we zeroed in on a basic passive solar plan, tweaked for our location and needs, as well as an active system designed by our local central Wyoming experts.”

Lasher says they made some compromises, such as including a large west-facing window to encompass their view of the Absarokas, but those kinds of decisions were important to their spiritual well being. Still by early November on the eve of their first full winter in their new home, Lasher says they had yet to turn on any heat. On the western side of the Tetons, Lisa Johnson and Ben Hammond are putting the final touches on their new home in Alta, Wyo. Their house is passive solar, but they also have a geosource heat pump to help warm and cool it. “We figured our largest expense was going to be heating,” Hammond says. “It seemed crazy not to at least take advantage of passive solar. Then I went to a green building conference and heard a guy talk about geothermal heating systems. It was a very convincing presentation.”

The system involves a mile of coiled tubing buried in their pasture in three trenches. The heat of the earth warms the fluids in the coils, which then flow into a compressor that draws the heat out to warm the house. “It works like a refrigerator running backwards,” Johnson says. “We were one of the first systems in the Valley. When they turned it on, all these guys were standing around to see how it worked. “The only energy used in the system is to power the pump. We haven’t lived in the house yet, so we don’t have numbers but the cost should be minimal. Our goal is to eventually have photovoltaic panels to power the pump so the entire system is self sufficient,” she says.

Recycling
In addition to relying on renewable energy like the sun to help warm their houses, many new homebuilders are looking for materials that are less toxic and recycled. Johnson and Hammond have shredded blue jeans providing insulation in their walls and their beams came from an old dry dock in the Willamette River. Ellis and Shuptrine shopped at the Jackson waste transfer station.

“There are a lot of high-end remodeling projects going on in Jackson and we pretty much got all our framing materials from the dump,” Ellis says. “We used bamboo flooring, which is a fast-growing grass rather than a slow-going hardwood. We spent a lot of time choosing materials to be energy efficient and minimize resources. “But all that stuff goes away once you are living in the house. What really matters now is how comfortable we are. We can curl up on the couch, read a book and play with our baby. That’s what it is really all about.”

“Our feeling is that people pay for all kinds of ‘luxuries’ in new residential construction (which is by and large a luxury in and of itself): fancy doorknobs, new curtains, gourmet sinks,” says Lasher. “The materials for green building may be an additional expense at the outset, but isn’t new construction exactly the place to start making the world a better place?”