The third book in the Earthship Volume Trilogy written by Michael Reynolds. Earthship Volume 3: Evolution Beyond Economics presents additional details and updated techniques to the art of building Earthships. Based on the accumulated wisdom of dozens of new Earthship projects from around the world, Volume III includes scores of new ideas and refinements to all aspects of designing and building efficient, low-cost Earthships.
Specific topic areas include refinements to the walls, bondbeam systems for the top of the walls, home-made trusses, retaining walls, gutter details, mudstone and flagstone floors, additional details on doors and windows, adding rooms to existing earthships, indoor and outdoor rainwater cisterns, additional water filtering information, improved indoor wastewater treatment systems, better solar power organization, back-up heaters, mud stoves, a thermal mass refrigerator, home-made solar composting toilets, and built-in solar ovens. Also covered are temporary structures to live in while building your Earthship, retroffiting an existing cracker-box house into a module within an Earthship, ideas for planning and initiating Earthship communities, proposals to apply the Earthship approach on a city-wide scale, building code recommendations for owner-builders and inspectors, applications for developing countries, and adaptations for unstable soils or marshy conditions.
In short, there is enough new essential information in this text to make it as essential as Earthship Volume I and Earthship Volume II. It compliments, but does not replace the material from the first two books.
Testimonials:
"This guy is awesome. I love his ideas and energy. All his books are good. One complaint about his buidling methods is that he uses too much material. His houses cost about the same as a convenional house. So, if money and buidling materials must be wasted to buy or build one of these houses, the ecological element is subtracted from. But, over all, if these homes funtion the way he claims they do, they are a blessing to an overburdened earth and overwhelmed humanity."
"My husband and I have been very interested in sustainable living. Michael Reynolds has really put together an amazing series of books that gives information on every aspect of building an earthship. It seems all of our questions have been answered, and when we are ready and able to build our own, we will have all the information and resources we need!"
"Its good, but technical...which means there is a lot of information that can be used out of the book and put to common use."