Earth Ship

I accompanied my awesome friend Anders and his amazing girlfriend Bailing to help build the first ever Earth Ship in China. For those of you who don’t know, an Earth Ship is a completely self-sustained house that is made primarily of recycled and natural materials. Think re-used old tires, plastic bottles, and dirt from the very hillside into which it is built. It collects, stores, pumps, and re-filters its own water for use in the sinks, toilet, shower, and even watering the plants in the built-in greenhouse. Finally, as you might guess, all of the electronics in the house typically run on solar power generated by rooftop panels. While I can’t say that I would likely suck it up and live full time in a home made out of tires packed with dirt, I definitely advocate the message behind it of living our entire lives in a more sustainable way. Earth Ships were first designed by a man named Mike Reynolds in New Mexico way back in 1969, and the official ones are built by a company that you can find here: http://www.earthship.org/ I really think it’s great to see something like this going on in China. Even moreso, it was wonderful to meet locals who are passionately involved in the project and trying to spread the concept of environmental living around their home country.

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Throughout the day, I had quite a few inspirational conversations with my fellow volunteers. One notion that Anders and I discussed dealt with education systems. The project leader Damien mentioned that he had to calculate a right angle in order to build a certain part of the house just so for maximum strength. He said that while none of their young interns could remember that for this task they should use the Pythagorean Theorem, this exact 7th-grade geometric equation is what he utilized. Thus, we initially discussed how a practical, hands on education can be much more effective in teaching students useful application. Take the kids out into the field and have them volunteer and build a damn house, helping out the community while learning about applied geometry at the same time. (There’s a fine line between this and child labor, so please be careful when heeding this advice.)

Secondly, how many of these kids are actually going to be building a house or working in a field where they need to know how to calculate the hypotenuse of a right triangle? Minimal, at best. Most of the information that we learn is really only a means to a way of thinking and a basis for answering further questions through logic. Thus, I think it a major shame that teachers tend not to focus on this meta-education. Education about education. Learning about why you learn. Making the connection that will be what actually helps you in the future. I had one professor who explicitly did this in college, constantly telling us to write down the QUESTIONS instead of the ANSWERS that we learned. This is some of the most valid advice I ever received in my education, it’s just unfortunate that it came so late.

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Finally, I will leave you with what I look at as an amazing bit of wisdom from the man who is responsible for the Earth Ship project in China, Ian. While I mostly zoned out during an intense philosophical discussion far beyond my Chinese abilities, the conversation actually ended with a short bit of English. Ian looked each of us in the eyes, and said “You are the most important people in the world to me. But only right here, right now.” I project this to mean a vast volume of things, as I hope you can read into as well, and perhaps at a later date I’ll expand more into how it tremendously effects the way that life is lived.