Growing a Greener World

- [Announcer] "Growing a Greener World" is made possible in part by.

- [Voiceover] The Subaru Crosstrek.

Designed with adventure in mind.

Built in a zero-landfill plant.

So you can roam the Earth with a lighter footprint.

Subaru.

Proud sponsor of "Growing a Greener World."

- [Announcer] And the following: Rain Bird, Corona Tools, and Milorganite.

(gentle uplifting music) - I'm Joe Lamp'l.

When I created "Growing a Greener World", I had one goal: To tell stories of everyday people, innovators, entrepreneurs, forward-thinking leaders, who are all, in ways both big and small, dedicated to organic gardening and farming, lightening our footprint, conserving vital resources, protecting natural habitats, making a tangible difference for us all.

They're real.

They're passionate.

They're all around us.

They're the game changers who are literally growing a greener world and inspiring the rest of us to do the same.

"Growing a Greener World."

It's more than a movement; it's our mission.

When we talk about growing a greener world, for most of us, it means this: gardening, growing at least a little bit of our own food, incorporating organic practices, and making our outdoor corner of the world a little more in tune with nature.

But you know, the funny thing about getting more in touch with nature is that you tend to want to bring it into the rest of your life, too.

To make that harmonious relationship with nature not just a hobby that's relegated to the garden, but a true lifestyle that permeates everything we do, and even the places we call home.

(gentle uplifting music) Perhaps you can relate to seeing a house that you love so much that you said to yourself, "Someday, I'm gonna have a house like that."

Well, for one young Freeville, New York couple, their dream home would be made of garbage.

It started with a road trip to Taos, New Mexico to see real life examples of such homes known as "Earthships."

The term refers to a type of house made of natural and recycled materials, such as earth-filled tires and throw-away bottles and cans.

One of the biggest claims to fame is their reputation as off-the-grid homes.

Well, after spending the night in an Earthship, they knew they wanted to build one of their own back in New York.

To speed up the process and save money, romantic dates turned into dumpster diving for unique glass bottles.

Cans were collected at parties, and clothes covered in muck were a common occurrence as they searched through piles of old tires looking for just the right sizes.

Just three years later, Chad and Courtney DeVoe are living their dream, in a house they built with love and lots of garbage.

- We watched a documentary called "Garbage Warrior" several years ago, and that pretty much just sold it for us.

It's a documentary about Michael Reynolds and his journey and vision with building Earthships over the past four years.

- [Joe] Michael Reynolds, an American architect based in New Mexico, is known for the design and construction of Earthships.

- And we were inspired.

We've always wanted to build something sustainable, but this, it seemed like the ultimate package.

And we watched the movie, and afterwards, during the credits, Chad had turned to me and said, "We are building this."

- [Joe] The DeVoes did just that.

They called Earthship Biotecture and began their journey in constructing their own completely sustainable Earthship.

- At the time we lived in a very conventional ranch house that required $2,000 a winter in fuel, kerosene, a $40 electric bill, multiple trips to the grocery store on a weekly basis.

And we looked at this Earthship concept as kind of a solution to those problems.

We could grow our own food.

We could generate our own electricity.

And we sold our house, we found some land, and fortunately, the lady that sold us the land let us live with her for a year while we were building the Earthship.

- [Joe] With Chad's experience in building homes, combined with Courtney's talent for design, their patience and dedication to their goal, along with the help of many hardworking volunteers, slowly but surely their dream home became a reality.

With the build complete, Chad and Courtney are reaping the rewards of sustainable design and construction.

- To me, my favorite part about living here is the greywater system.

Because of the greenhouse and the greywater, we can grow citrus trees year round.

I mean, we're growing limes and lemons here in upstate New York during the winter.

I mean, that's pretty cool.

We're also looking to start a family soon, and being able to raise our children in an Earthship, you know, where turning off the lights after they're done is normal, growing their own food, you know, those skills, that consciousness of where the energy comes from, where food comes from being embedded into the fabric of their lives, to me, is also very exciting.

- I would agree the consciousness of everything.

Building this house ourselves, just knowing every ounce of sweat and labor and love and community that went into this house.

And from there, knowing every inch of it in that way, but turning it around in knowing where all of our electricity comes from, where all of our water comes from, where, I mean, the food that we grow here and eat here, where that comes from, and knowing that before I vacuum, I need to make sure that I'm utilizing the sun or maybe some day wind energy.

It's so neat to be conscious of, like Chad said, everything that we do.

And Earthship Biotecture has said this: You take care of the house and the house takes care of you.

It's like a living, breathing part of us now.

- Chad, I'm sure it comes as no surprise to you that some people don't consider the Earthship to be the prettiest house on the block, right?

(Chad laughs) - The exterior aspects of an Earthship definitely aren't the selling points.

But it's designed that way to make use of what nature provides.

When Michael Reynolds designed these houses, he looked at, you know, where is sunlight at what points of the year?

How can I collect the most amount of rain water?

What direction should they be oriented?

So he kind of took all these factors into consideration, and the Earthship basically designed itself when he collected all that data and finally came up with a game plan.

- For example, everyone I've ever seen has a south-facing wall full of glass.

And that's to take advantage of the passive solar heating, right?

- Right.

Yeah, in the Northern Hemisphere, all Earthship face south.

All of the glass is roughly at a 70-degree angle.

And the reason for that is because in the winter time when the sun is really low, the sun can penetrate in basically a straight shot right to the back tire wall, and then you have all that thermal mass inside.

The granite floors, the concrete walls, the tire wall, that soaks up the heat in the winter time.

And then at nighttime, that heat radiates back out into the living space.

- [Joe] Right.

So the ability for the sun to get to that back wall explains why you always see these houses as being so narrow as well.

- Right.

Exactly.

You can't have them too deep or it just wouldn't work.

- Okay.

And then also in the summertime, when the sun is very high and you don't want sun in the house, the angle of the glass makes it so that the sun only goes about three feet in inside.

- Very smart.

So what this house may lack in aesthetics it makes up for in efficiency, right?

- Oh, right.

Yeah, definitely.

And interior design, too.

- Okay, good.

Well, I happen to like it, just for the record.

- Yeah.

Thanks.

(gentle uplifting music) - I'm so jealous of this long, sunny room in your house.

I want one of these.

- Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

- Speaking of rooms, though, we need to talk about the elephant in it.

And I'm speaking of these tires on the wall and the foundation.

Now that's with an Earthship.

What's up with that?

- Yes, tires are one of the main components of Earthship.

They are the foundation.

We ram them full of dirt and they become these 400-pound rubber bricks, and they hold temperature and they're completely strong and- - [Joe] They're not going anywhere.

- Oh, no.

Yeah.

They're bulging with just mass, with earth.

- So you don't just stack them up.

You have to pack them with the soil 'cause that helps absorb the heat and release it as well.

- Yes, Chad and I pounded, we call it pounding, about 800 tires in this house.

You fill it with just dirt that was onsite, and until it's this bulging mass and we can't move it.

We stack them right where they need to be in place and tear it back and berm it in and that's our back wall.

- [Joe] And another common denominator of Earthships, glass bottles and cans.

Talk to me about that.

- Yes.

So we use cans to take up space in a cement wall.

So again, rock tile, cement holds temperature.

And instead of pouring a six-inch wall of cement, we use cans as little bricks.

And they get the cans off the streets so that they're garbage to keep them out of the landfill.

And in some places they don't even use them for a deposit.

And then the bottles, the bottles are actually more of like an aesthetic part of taking up space in a wall.

We butt two bottoms together, just tape them, and place them into a wall.

Except with the cans, we would cover them up.

But the bottles we cover it with cement flush to the bottom.

So the light shines through.

Whether it's a light in the house or sunlight coming through, they glow or they shine, and they make this beautiful, almost stained glass jewel in the house.

- [Joe] Every day and every hour of the day is probably different as you walk through the house with these.

- [Courtney] Yeah.

Yeah, there are some bottles that we find a different part of the year where the sunlight is shining through them where they hadn't before and they're gorgeous.

- [Joe] Yeah, I'm sure they are.

- [Courtney] Yeah.

- With no well to provide their water, Chad and Courtney collect it from their lead-free metal roof.

And a large gutter feeds it into two intakes.

And those intakes direct that water into four cisterns, or storage tanks, which are 1700 gallons each.

Gravity then feeds water into the house.

So even without electricity, they still get water.

From there, a DC pump pushes it through two particle filters.

That water supplies the shower, laundry, and sinks.

The water designated for drinking, though, goes through two more filters before it gets to the sinks.

That's the first use.

From there, water flows into the drains to the front greywater planter cell, where it's used to irrigate all the produce and flowers in a 90-foot pit.

When water gets to the end of that pit, it's filtered and pump to the toilets.

So by that point, all the water has been used three times.

But once the water is used in a toilet or the kitchen sink, it's considered blackwater and goes to a conventional septic system.

One of my favorite features about this house is how it's cooled.

Now, this is the north side of the house, and it's completely bermed up all the way to the roofline.

And see these guys right here?

These are intake tubes for fresh air.

Now, these are galvanized metal tubes that go down into the ground, about 10 feet, and then they elbow towards the house another 40 feet.

But all the temperature around those tubes down there, about 55 degrees constant.

Now, the tubes terminate inside the house as vents.

And when it gets really hot, that greenhouse, well, they have vents too, and they're opened up and the hot air rushes out.

But through convection, that cool air in the tubes, that comes into the house.

It's free, natural air conditioning.

Not bad.

Every step along the way of building this Earthship was an amazing process.

If you'd like to see an expanded video on how it all came together, it's on our website at growingagreenerworld.com under the show notes for this episode.

Now, an Earthship home, it might be an extreme that some people aren't quite ready for.

But at its heart are ideas and concepts and practices that are starting to seep their way into mainstream home-building.

And it might be just a start of what the future of home-building looks like.

But what if you built not just a home with mother nature in mind, but designed an entire community from the ground up with conservation as the guiding principle?

Well, now you're making giant leaps and bounds to growing a greener world thousands of acres at a time.

According to the American Farmland Trust, we're losing one valuable acre of fertile farmland every minute of every day to urban development.

To put it in perspective, all of this would be gone in three minutes.

This farmland is prime real estate to developers because it's relatively flat and it drains well, and it's affordable.

But unfortunately, once this open space is paved over, it usually becomes crowded, unsustainable, cookie-cutter communities that are, more often than not, referred to as the typical suburban subdivision.

Just outside of Chicago, there's one suburban neighborhood that's anything but typical.

Prairie Crossing, a conservation community in Grayslake, Illinois, is a complete redesign of the American dream.

With 60% open space, Prairie Crossing has only 359 homes within the 667-acre subdivision.

It's surrounded by over 3000 acres of protected prairie, pasture, and wetland areas.

As an alternative to standard golf or tennis subdivisions, this place has a 100-acre working organic farm as the center of the community.

Meet George and Vicky Ranney, the husband and wife team who spearheaded this development over 20 years ago.

Both of the Ranneys have long histories in conservation and environmentalism.

And although they hadn't seen this done before, they believed that a community could co-exist with both protected land and sustainable agriculture.

Their vision was to build that while supporting the stewardship of the land.

- Prairie Crossing began as an effort to stop dense development on 675 acres of land.

And it was started by a group of neighbors who owned farms adjacent to it and wanted to protect the environment and their own property.

They needed to do something to get the edits going in a way that would generate some return for them.

They also wanted to do something positive.

- The difference between Prairie Crossing and a typical subdivision, I think, is that it is intended to be a community and it's intended to be conservationist.

That is, to conserve the best there is of the land in various ways, natural areas, swimming areas, trails, farm, so forth.

Most subdivisions aren't set up that way.

They're not set up that way by government regulations, and they're not set up that way by developers who typically want to sell houses and move on.

- People like these kinds of features.

They like to live in nature.

They like to live in a community that has activities that are oriented to something like nature.

They love the idea of education in line with the environment.

They love a healthy lifestyle.

And it's turned out that this is very, very different than the conventional subdivision.

And we're just delighted to see other developers pick up on these ideas, which is now happening.

- The 10 guiding principles that we came up with at the very beginning have been very important 'cause we go back to them as touchstones as different opportunities arise.

They are things like lifelong learning and education.

And an example of how that worked was that shortly after we started construction, the state legislature passed a law allowing people to start charter schools.

So we thought, "Aha, let's see if we can do it."

And we started a charter school oriented around the environment with kids using the farm and growing things themselves and being outdoors a whole lot.

- We've tried to plan for the future here by creating a foundation that would carry on activities, including farming, here on the property.

And we've paid for that in part by charging a fee for each house that's sold.

And that has been very successful.

That little foundation has grown so it generates a million dollars a year that we put into farming for places other than Prairie Crossing, as well as protecting it and expanding it here.

- In terms of the future, what I hope is that this remains a thriving, wonderful community as it is today In terms of what other people copy, I hope that different developers consider this model for the places where they are developing.

And it should be different in different places.

- All of this is looking towards the future, trying to take what we've done at Prairie Crossing and extend it so that it's influential upon other people.

(relaxing music) - Nestled inside the Prairie Crossing community for the past 10 years is Sandhill Family Farms, an organic, independently-owned business setup asa partnership between two farming families.

Half of that team is comprised of Jeff and Jen Miller.

Now, they're the resident farmers responsible for overseeing the 45 acres on the farm, as well as running the community-supported agricultural co-op.

They're also in the unique position of being both neighbors and one of the major food suppliers to the community, as well as the Greater Chicago area.

(relaxing music) So Jeff, explain to me the dynamics of the farm-to-community relationship.

I mean, here you are, a pretty good size farm, right here in the community that you happen to also live in.

So how's that working for you?

- Oh, no, it works really well.

It's great to have a much closer relationship with our customers and be on a first-name basis.

A lot of our kids go to school together, and so we get to see them at all sorts of outside of the farm events.

- So what's the best part would you say of having the farm right there in your community?

Ts it the interaction that you get with your customers or what would it be?

- I think the interaction and the relationships we have is probably the number one opportunity or the best piece of it.

There's a lotta sort of less tangible things I think that we have just with our proximity to people and how we can work closely with them and the activities that they can partake in the farm that if we were that much more removed, we might not be able to.

- Yeah, and for you, especially when you see the people that you are actually feeding, I mean, that's gotta be kind of a cool feeling.

- Mm-hmm.

It's really great.

And then when we go to a party with them or see them at, you know, the school play and then the off comment they'll make about how much they've been enjoying everything.

And on occasion it's a little awkward, I suppose, but I don't know that we hold ourselves to much of a higher standard because we're part.

I think we would have the same standard whether we are part of the community or not.

It's just we get that added benefit of being able to see them and talk to them.

And then occasionally we get a lot better feedback because of that, because we're also sort of friends and we live in the same community.

So sometimes I think we get better feedback from them because we're friends that we might not otherwise if it was just strictly a, you know, farm and consumer kind of relationship.

- When it comes to having a true understanding of all the environmental benefits of Prairie Crossing, Mike Sands knows them best.

He started 19 years ago as the founding executive director of the Liberty Prairie Foundation.

He was also the environmental team leader, responsible for all of the design and installation of the natural areas, including the lake, prairie, and wetlands.

Beyond the agricultural component to this, which is fascinating in and of itself in this community, you've done so much more as it relates to conservation and environmental protection.

Talk to me about some of those other elements.

- From the very beginning, we considered this a conservation community.

We were committed to working with the landscape to build the best possible community in terms of its environmental impact.

We focused really on three major elements: first, stormwater management, second, biodiversity, and third, community involvement and advocacy.

When you look around you, you'll see that the prairie, it all slopes towards the lake.

It's raining out here today.

We've got the water running off the trails, running off the roofs, running off the streets.

And what happens is that water then runs sequentially through the prairie, through the wetland, and into the lake.

That both improves the quality of the water and reduces the amount of flow stormwater.

So that lake is our stormwater detention basin, but it's also because of the high water quality and amenity.

We actually swim in our detention basin.

- Wow.

- We've been able to decrease the water, leaving the site by 60% compared to prior to development.

We use the same landscape to enhance the biodiversity.

So these prairies and wetlands probably have over 100 plants in them now.

That supports a wide variety of birds, insects, reptiles, amphibians.

If you use, for instance, birds as a marker, there are probably 10 to 15 bird species here prior to development regularly.

We now have over 130 that we've measured over the past couple of years that are using this site.

Finally, we've focused on, through the site design, engaging people in that open space.

So everyone fronts onto the natural areas.

That gives them the opportunity, both out of their backyard but also using the trails, that they really start to understand best these natural areas.

And that then leads to their becoming advocates, not only here in the community, not only here in the state of Illinois, but nationally and globally.

And we think that's an important piece of what we need to do in the larger picture.

- So true.

Although they may not have come on board with that appreciation, by living in it and then experiencing what they have here, surely they get the point and that's contagious.

- It is contagious.

We've worked hard at it, and I think we've done a pretty good job.

It's been an interesting journey.

- Communities like Prairie Crossing and homes like the Earthship are still the exception rather than the rule, but hopefully not for long.

Every revolution starts with one simple idea, just like every plant in a garden starts from one tiny seed.

But you keep doing the right things, and with enough care and nurturing, you can get incredible results.

And it all adds up to growing a greener world.

And I hope that you'll give some thought to the lessons that you learn from the garden and bring them to the places that you call home.

Thanks for watching everybody.

I'm Joe Lamp'l, and we'll see you back here next time for more "Growing a Greener World."

- [Announcer] "Growing a Greener World" is made possible in part by.

- [Voiceover] The Subaru Crosstrek.

Designed with adventure in mind.

Built in a zero-landfill plant.

So you can roam the earth with a lighter footprint.

Subaru.

Proud sponsor of "Growing a Greener World."

- [Voiceover] And the following: Rain Bird, Corona Tools, and Milorganite.

(upbeat electronic music) Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh-oh-oh oh Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh - [Voiceover] Continue the garden learning from "Growing a Greener World."

Joe Lamp'l's online gardening academy offers classes designed to teach gardeners of all levels from the fundamentals to master skills.

You can take each class on your own schedule from anywhere.

Plus opportunities to ask Joe questions about your specific garden in real time.

Courses are available online.

To enroll, go to growingagreenerworld.com/learn.

(intense energetic music) (uplifting music)