Unsustainable

Written by Nick Aspinwall

Greater World Subdivision: Ours is a Greater World

Please keep all message board posts civil.  This forum was not intended for gossip or public slander of your neighbors.  Take care of personal issues privately.

Gillian Fryer: One way or another, we’ve been deceived. It’s time for us to take the reins and make this OUR COMMUNITY.

LaNeah Ashford: Not once has anyone denied that this abuse exists. We have all heard stories. Do we still stand silent? Do we still worship our overlord? Do we become enablers in our silence?

Gillian Fryer: There are a number of victims and witnesses. This is not just an idle accusation.

Jody Rhines: Predators know what prey looks like- know who is a good mark and who isn’t… so… here we are.

Anonymous: I know that if I speak out and do what I can to end the criminal activity at EB- I will not be enabling the abuse that has been happening for decades. Can you say the same?

Jody Rhines: Don’t. give. up. Stand. up and speak. up about. things that. matter.

The conversation starts as whispers in a hidden corner of an internet message board, a refuge for those who had once believed in something greater — only to find themselves discarded, disillusioned, or worse. But words on a screen are just the beginning of this story. There is more to be found somewhere beyond the cold glow of computer screens — deep in the unforgiving desert air, in the community where this all began.

Just outside the high desert ski haven of Taos, New Mexico, shortly after the adobe boutique stores give way to untamed, fenced lawns and the paved roads turn to dirt, a swarm of unusual structures begin to appear on the mesa. Glass-faced Earth homes with giant berm walls pop out from the ground, adorned in greenery. A circular Earthen fortress looks out over the horizon, resembling the turret of a castle. To its right, there’s a pyramid built with used beer bottles, wired and plastered together into packed walls. Inside, a ladder leads to a small altar, where a votive candle displays a recognizable figure: 

A gray-maned man, holding up a peace sign, under an inscription reading…

I’ll never say die.

This man is not a long-dead messiah. He’s alive and well, and he’s pulling into the parking lot to meet me.

People from around the world have followed Michael Reynolds to the Taos mesa since he arrived in the 1970s. He started building wildly creative off-grid homes from tires and trash, created a model of sustainable life, and became a green superstar. He became known as the Garbage Warrior. Together, the communities he built have collected glass bottles, used car tires, and aluminum cans and recycled them directly into the walls of off-grid buildings with ambitious names like Phoenix, Equinox and Nautilus, pounding dirt into tires by day and drinking, dancing and dropping acid under the stars by night. His communities have stood by him as he fought battles against the state when politicians got too cozy with the oil and gas lobby and restricted what he could build.

And this green dream has taken off: Earthships have been built in more than 60 countries and attract thousands to Taos to learn to build them, live in them, and create lives around them. Reynolds created a community for them. He gave it a name to match its utopian promise: Greater World.

LaNeah Ashford thrusts open the door of her Earthship, chimes ringing madly, her frazzled hair falling halfway down her chest. Behind her is a lush indoor garden, where recycled water falls onto rocks she handpicked from Lake Superior. The healing crystals and essential oils that line her shelves belie a forceful intensity revealed by her eyes and her smile, the type you fear most in a cage match.

Ashford lived many lives before she came here. She worked with A-list actors, worked on documentaries in Los Angeles, raised her two children in Michigan, but had never quite found what she truly needed. Now 67, the self-described hippie studied photovoltaics in college, before solar panels became widely available, before a scientific consensus of global warming, before Reynolds designed her dream home.

“We knew Big Brother was going to take over,” she says. “We knew all of that stuff and they forced us to go back underground. We know it’s bad. It’s so bad. It’s really bad. We’ve got to do stuff.”

Her sense of urgency is contagious. It’s compelling. It brought her to the man in the candle. “We need this place,” she says. 

It only takes one visit to notice how Earthship residents live in harmonic symbiosis with their homes, connecting with them like a bird does its nest or a bee does its hive. “It’s a living, breathing entity,” Ashford says as she walks into her bedroom, covered in loudly colored throw pillows and Zen tapestries, and notices an open hatch in the back. “I need to shut this door now,” she says.

Earthships heat and cool themselves, their large south-facing windows using the sun to retain a consistently comfortable climate on hot summer days and frigid winter nights; a concept called passive solar.

“Whatever temperature you want the house to be at night, when it gets to be that temperature during the day, you shut everything and it becomes that temperature,” Ashford says. “I have no heating and cooling.”

Her roof collects rainwater which is used multiple times, first for showering and cooking, then to water plants, then to flush toilets. 

Her greenhouse, which stretches the length of her home beneath her large glass windows, grows fruit trees, vegetables, herbs and flowers. Some Earthships have fish ponds. “I live in a biosphere here.”

Ashford had first seen a glimpse of Earthships after taking a wrong turn down this stretch of US-64 on a drive from California. This is where the Earthships of Greater World first jut from the mesa, like a dream oasis subdivision of Tatooine.

“I was going, oh wow, those are really cool. That’s it,” she says.

She had then started watching videos of Reynolds and became engulfed. “He’s this hippie out here doing all these groovy things,” she says. “Mike’s out here making this community and I am at the perfect time in my life that I can go remote now, and I want to buy a house. Hell yeah!”

As an architecture student at the University of Cincinnati, Reynolds wondered if bottles, cans and other garbage could serve the same thermal-storing purpose as earth bricks.

He proposed putting them into walls. His advisors laughed at him. So he took his degree and his motorcycle and went to the Taos mesa. He found the perfect place to dodge the Vietnam War draft — and to experiment. 

The Taos mesa has an extreme high desert climate with hot summers, cold winters, and about eight inches of rainfall in an average year. It inspired Indigenous people in the still-inhabited Taos Pueblo community to use passive solar for heating and cooling and adobe brick construction to preserve thermal mass.

Reynolds started collecting beer cans and fusing them together with chicken wire to create walls, betting they would have similar thermal properties. He started mixing them with dirt. He built a small house, then the pyramid, then the castle. And they worked. No carbon emissions. No utility bills. Total freedom.

Ashford climbs into her SUV. “I thought I’d take you on a little drive and explain to you how this place came about,” she tells me as she starts the engine. Her attention dodges from place to place. We turn from Gorge View Road onto Earthship Way, the main artery connecting the dirt and gravel roads, then onto South Lemuria. The oldest homes in Greater World are here, given to the builders who followed him in the 70s and 80s “to live together and groove together and love together,” she says.

“He had this little commune thing going. And they all could build. The men all could build. And the women were powerful.”

Reynolds sometimes tells an early story of building the first tire walls by packing them with dirt using his hands. One day, a group of women got tired of it. They went to the hardware store and came back with mallets to pound the dirt more forcefully and efficiently. That day, tire pounding — the laborious backbone of every Earthship — was born.

As interest grew, Reynolds started writing books. That’s how many people, like Gillian Fryer, first learned about Earthships. Fryer and her husband had walked into a health food store with a friend, who picked up Earthship Volume 1: How to Build Your Own, a manual and treatise authored by Reynolds.

“It says anyone can build an Earthship,” Fryer recalls. “My friend said, ‘I can do that!’ We said, ‘We can do that too!’”

Fryer meets me in her artisanal soap store, about 10 miles from her home in the Greater World community. Her level headed, discerning demeanor feels almost out of place amongst the renegades of the mesa. She had studied law online, back when the Internet was in its infancy, but she could only sit for the bar in some states, like California and Wyoming, “and I thought, Wyoming’s too cold,” she says.

She met her husband in Taos, at a seminar held by the New Age writer Stuart Wilde. “It drew us several times. It was just, there’s something about the place,” she says. “The sage out there is just, it smells wonderful.”

They lived in a log cabin first, then built their own Earthship on their property. They loved the house, but they didn’t love their isolation, and they bounced to the south of New Mexico, then back to Taos.

“I wanted to live in an Earthship again,” she recalls. Greater World promised what they did not have before, “a cohesive community of like-minded people. That was kind of the idea of living off the grid.”

Fryer was eager to be involved. She joined the board of Greater World, becoming the only member without longstanding ties to Reynolds. According to Fryer, board members mostly talked about violations of the land user’s code that every resident agrees to upon moving in.

“He was intolerant of any building other than an Earthship. He didn’t want people to have freestanding greenhouses because he felt that those would be using fossil fuels,” she says. “It just didn’t fit with his vision.”

This promise was important to Reynolds. He wanted to deliver on his mission that his residents could live comfortably and sustainably, free from utility bills, free from Big Brother.

Reynolds frequently tells confidants about the phenomenon where a magnet can be placed under iron shavings, scattered randomly atop a piece of paper on a tabletop. Tap the surface, and they become organized around the magnetic fields.

Earthships, he believes, can do the same with society. This is the phenomenon his followers come here seeking. 

Ashford attended her first community Christmas party with her son and daughter in 2016, the year after she moved into the community. “So we go down there and we brought beans and rice and we’re going to have a potluck,” she says. “It’s the first time we’ve met the community and I’m thinking, ‘Hell yeah, my people. This is where I’m going to retire.’”

“I’m trying to talk to everybody, right? I’m new, and I’m meeting everybody.”

She approaches one man, who she senses “does not want me anywhere near him.” She finds it strange, but she gives the man space.

Soon, Reynolds stands in front of the room. “Mike’s up there and he starts talking,” Ashford says. “Next thing you know, Mike’s telling this guy to leave, that the police are there to escort him out.”

Ashford and her fellow residents stand there, stunned. She learns later that the man, along with two others, had sued Reynolds and Greater World. “They were in a lawsuit against us as a community,” she says.

The lawsuit accused Reynolds of failing to provide amenities on common land, which were promised in a brochure given to new homebuyers.

“He said we’re gonna have courts, we’re gonna have water sports, we’re gonna have a community center, we’re gonna have this, we’re gonna have that,” Ashford says.

Reynolds tells residents not to worry. The amenities are coming, he says, and the plaintiffs are trying to destroy the community over their own personal vendettas. One wanted to put a container on her property, which was against the rules.

“It was more like she was an annoyance,” Fryer recalls. “We all believed what Mike said.”

“He got people on his side, and it was kind of us against her. He won the publicity war.”

Ashford and I turn from South Lemuria back onto Earthship Way, where new homes are being pumped out one after another.

Earthships are labor intensive and require truckloads of glass and cement. Reynolds was diagnosed with Stage 4 prostate cancer in the late 2010s. He became aware of his mortality. He also saw his designs become more expensive. He wanted Earthships to survive without him.

So he started an internship program at his castle. He taught students, such as Fryer’s husband. They helped him build Earthships. Many became his employees at Earthship Biotecture, the company he formed.

Eventually, that program became a full-fledged academy, where students take four weeks of classes from builders. After that, they can attend a field study and help build an Earthship.

The allure of learning from a green building superstar draws young, environmentally-minded people like Madison Bell.

“I remember I was probably like eight years old and I saw Mike on TV and I told my dad to stop the channel, Bell says. “I somehow knew who this was already. I was like, this is good.”

Bell, now 32, spent her teenage years wanting to be involved with Earthships. During the pandemic, she found herself stuck in Maryland, her mind wandering across the country.

At the time, Earthships were bursting into the consciousness of people suddenly trapped inside, disconnected from resources, feeling the effects of climate change, seeking panic rooms for the moment the world breaks.

In the spring of 2020, while millions stayed inside their homes, Reynolds says he had everything he needed from his Earthship. The next year, deep freezes hit neighboring Texas and knocked out the state’s power grid. Reynolds walked around in his T-shirt, picking fruit from his garden.

Earthships had already inspired builders around the world. Reynolds built an Earthship for the late Dennis Hopper, along with others for actors Dennis Weaver and Keith Carradine. Linda May, in 2020’s Nomadland, told the world she dreamed of building an Earthship. People watching from their home quarantines shared her dream. 

“I remember just being blown away,” says Elise Shacter, who decided to build an Earthship during the pandemic with her husband, Zach, on their land in Colorado.

Zach attended the academy in Taos with his father, an architect and a lifelong fan of Mike Reynolds.

“We had Zach go to the academy with the mindset of, can we do this? What does it look like?” Elise says.

Zach and his father had multiple one-on-one meetings with Reynolds — a chance for his dad to be “a bit of a fanboy,” he says, and for the Shacters to make plans to host a field study.

It came at the perfect time for Bell. She signed up, packed her car, and drove across the country to Colorado.

The Shacters started preparing their construction site, 11,500 feet above sea level high in the Rockies. In the summer of 2020, when the weather warmed up and people could go outside from quarantine, they were ready.

Aside from the dirt for the earth berm, everything has to be hauled in via treacherous mountain roads, from tires to glass panes, about half of which shattered on the way up. “We’ve got dirt, we’ve excavated, we’ve done everything we possibly can,” Elise says. 

Students begin to show up. When Bell arrives from Maryland, she encounters her first surprise.

She had been told she would work on the build crew for a non-profit retreat center in the Rockies, she says, but once she arrived, “it’s like, oh no, this is a private property that we’re building a for-profit house for.”

Earthship Biotecture, the for-profit home contracting business, is just one arm of Reynolds’ multi-headed Earthship empire. He also runs a nonprofit, which organizes humanitarian builds in other countries and recruits academy graduates to join. The pandemic paused the program.

But it felt funny. Was this a learning experience? Was it a labor camp?

Immediately, it feels disorganized. Days before construction was set to begin, the Shacters received an email from Earthship Biotecture. They had not yet obtained the building permit. The staff would not be paid until they did.

Elise asked Reynolds’ staff what they should do, “and they were like, we don’t really know,” she says.

It was just the first sign, Elise says, of “the devil-may-care attitude that he embodies.”

The Shacters have a background in construction and are used to chaotic builds in the Colorado highlands, where workers frequently forego helmets and other safety equipment. But this crew is entirely new. Because of coronavirus regulations, they have not completed an academy before starting the field study. Many have never held a circular saw. Now, they are working, high in the mountains, during a pandemic.

“We’re asking them to wear a mask while they pound tires,” Elise recalls. “We definitely were pretty nervous.”

Fryer has heard the stories of chaotic field studies. She knows Reynolds is stubborn, demanding, controlling. But she believes in him. She believes the lawsuit is frivolous. It just isn’t going away.

“I started investigating more,” she says. “It just wasn’t sitting right with me.”

In the months after the Christmas potluck, Fryer and Ashford realize they’re neighbors.

“She bought the house immediately behind mine,” Fryer says. “At some point, we just talked. I think we probably spent like an afternoon talking and drinking glasses of wine.”

The calm, mild-mannered Fryer could not have found a more opposite personality than Ashford, who dominates the presence of any room, storming into board meetings like a sage and lavender-scented wrecking ball.

“She stomped out of a couple meetings because she was mad,” Fryer says. “Mike would actually yell at her.”

But Fryer and Ashford have common grievances. Fryer, still on the board, convinces the members to hire a lawyer to look into the formation of Greater World, so they can defend themselves from the lawsuit.

Greater World was initially formed as a homeowner’s association. The attorney, however, discovers that it had been illegally incorporated — and, even if it were legal, it was set to expire. The common land would belong to Reynolds.

“We start thinking, oh my gosh, we’ve got to do something,” Ashford says. “Look, it’s right here. Here’s the paperwork. And we’re like, you have to do something. We need it in paperwork that you are not selling the common land.” The board reassures them. “Mike’s got it all worked out.”

From what residents can tell, the homeowners association needs 75 percent approval to be renewed. The board calls a meeting for residents to vote on whether to incorporate as a community.

Fryer, Ashford, and other residents arrive at the meeting. Some people drive in from Albuquerque, about three hours away.

When they arrive, they find a sign on the door. Not enough questions were submitted beforehand, it says. The meeting is canceled.

“We were supposed to be listened to, and then we weren’t,” Fryer says.

She holds her own meeting outside, explaining the situation. If the community chooses not to incorporate, it will have control over its common land. They will no longer pay yearly dues to Reynolds.

“People were wise to what was going on,” Fryer says.

They gather to hold their own vote, figuring that if a majority choose not to incorporate, “they can’t have a new HOA, and they can’t reassign stuff, and they can’t do anything,” Ashford says. “We’re free, right?”

Ashford recalls gathering enough signatures to get to one over half. Then 10. Then 25. “And we’re like, screw you, we’re done,” she says. They put together paperwork and send it by certified mail to Reynolds, and to everyone on the board, “to tell them that we’re out.”

“And I said to Gillian, he’s going to do it anyway, just watch,” Ashford says. “She’s like, what? I said, he’s going to go down and say that we all signed up. Just watch.”

“In September, Mike marches his ass down to the county, tells the county that everybody in the entire community has signed on with him again.”

Aside from renewing the homeowners association, Fryer and Ashford find that Reynolds has transferred the common land to a new subdivision called Greater World Inc., which he has incorporated. The land is technically out of his name — a defense against the lawsuit — but it is very much in his control.

“That’s when the heist took place,” Ashford says. “That’s when the fraud actually happened.”

With their dues, Greater World residents paid for property taxes, repairs and maintenance on the land, which the lawsuit alleges amounts to more than $90,000.

They’ve essentially been paying Reynolds’ bills. The lawsuit even alleges that Reynolds has used the common land as collateral against building loans, which Reynolds denies.

“That was what really fractured the community,” Fryer says. Suddenly, residents feel wronged by the Greater World board and by its figurehead, Reynolds. “It was like friendships were being torn apart.”

“We knew what we were getting into as far as the house goes,” she says. “We didn’t know what we were getting into as far as the community goes.”

Reynolds denies any wrongdoing, saying he only formed a homeowners association to begin with because the state made him. According to him, angry outsiders with money started moving in and destroying his dream, one still shared by people all over the world.

“He’s incredibly good at understanding human nature,” Fryer says. “He’s a convincing personality.”

In a video posted to Earthship Biotecture’s YouTube channel in 2020, Reynolds shares his plan to start a new community, with no homeowners associations or subdivisions, only accessible by helicopter. People will pay a small membership fee to live together, sustainably, following a natural diet that prevents cancer and arthritis…

“If I have to be a benevolent dictator, I trust myself,” he says. “I trust myself not to require that everyone give me a blowjob to be living here.”

Ashford and I approach the new homes on Earthship Way. Many are a model called the Unity, where the long, straight earth wall is replaced by two U-shaped berms at its back.

We drive closer to one, atop the highest hill of Greater World. We look out of the car window, and security cameras peer back at us. They watch the doors and windows. They watch the driveway, in case someone puts nails under the tires. They watch the water cistern, in case someone poisons it.

Anna Knickerbocker bought this land in 2021, during the pandemic. She meets me in her living room and offers a plate of dates, walnuts and apricots. She is immaculately dressed, wearing delicate jewelry and makeup, like a princess watching the wind-swept mesa from inside her castle.

Earthship Vol. 1 begins with the words: “Noah was told by God to build an ark. Just exactly how God told Noah is left up to the imagination.”

“I’m from Armenia, where there’s a mountain, Ararat, where Noah’s Ark landed,” she says. The first time she met Reynolds, he told her that Earthships were a modern day Noah’s Ark, providing food, water and shelter during calamities. He promised her she could have her own.

The encounter feels like destiny. She gives Reynolds a silver coin from Armenia with an inscription of Noah’s Ark. And she agrees to buy land within Greater World for $60,000, the site of her future dream home.

Knickerbocker shares the exact specifications she has in mind for her new home. She knows it will be a Unity, with its U-shaped berms and a single glass wall. Most Earthships have two glass-paned walls to control thermal mass, with the greenhouse acting as a buffer. The Unity saves money by replacing one wall with thick curtains, available on Amazon.

She also plans her bottle walls, the famed ornamental features that use beer bottles to refract colorful light. They can emulate stained glass, giving interiors a flourish frequently compared to the work of Antoni Gaudi.

Knickerbocker wants her master bedroom to evoke the mountain springs of her birthplace in the foothills of Ararat. She ships light green bottles from her Florida home to Reynolds herself. They review the design. “He said he will do it, no problem,” she recalls.

When she receives an update months later, she is horrified. Instead of the design they agreed upon, the photo shows a wall of red, blue and yellow bottles, some of them cracked. She demands that it be fixed, she says, only to be told it needs to be demolished and rebuilt at her own expense.

The build drags on and on, and Reynolds’ business manager asks for more and more money. Knickerbocker is incensed. “I’ve been financially molested,” she says. The stress of the Earthship build becomes unbearable; she cites it as a factor in her divorce.

Reynolds convinced her to build a new home rather than buying one, saying it would be cheaper, she says. But her home performs poorly, failing to retain heat during winter. She shows me how its radon levels have skyrocketed to eight times what is considered safe. 

Knickerbocker, frustrated and alone, begins looking for answers. She comes across a website for the Greater World community, dedicated to documenting Reynolds’ alleged misdeeds. There are pages of court documents, of community meeting minutes, of angry testimonies. She reaches out to the people behind it: Ashford and Fryer. They become allies.

Ashford and Fryer rallied the community behind the idea that Reynolds had renewed the homeowners association without their consent. The pair, along with another resident, urged their neighbors not to pay their yearly dues.

Many of Greater World’s residents signed a “declaration of independence” from the homeowners association, saying they would not pay their dues and that they did not recognize Reynolds’ ownership of the common land.

Ashford and Fryer ignored the board’s repeated demands that they pay their dues. But it wasn’t over. They were only beginning to discover what was lying behind the scenes.

Greater World message board:

@LaNeah Ashford: We thought this was all of it. We thought what had happened to the community was complete but we could only see as far as our own noses.

The Shacters notice some things that aren’t quite right.

Zach and his father were given attention and respect by Reynolds when they attended the academy. Now, at the field study, Elise does not feel the same.

One day, she warns Reynolds that a wall would have issues with water intrusion. It would stand adjacent to a mountain, where large amounts of snow melt every spring.

“And he just laughed at me,” she says. “Like ha ha, little lady, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She watches as men would take responsibility and women would look on, frustrated.

Elise asks one woman about it, “who told me, you know, it seems pretty obvious that if you sleep with one of the guys who’s working here, you’re going to get to do more,” she says.

Bell recalls that men on staff would talk about women “in a degrading sense,” not treating them like they are there to learn.

This surprises her. Earthship Biotecture prides itself on giving women equal opportunities; it’s the kind of place where they can pick up saws and sledgehammers.

In the days before Earthship Biotecture had an academy, it informally recruited interns who would learn on the job for a month or so. 

They would sleep in the Hive, an old Earthship first purchased by an eccentric millionaire who stuck hundreds of amethysts into its walls, installed an anti-aging flotation tank, and drove a stretch Hummer running on biodiesel around the mesa. After the millionaire went bankrupt, Reynolds bought the home back out of foreclosure and it became a dormitory for interns, a home for lifelong connections and wild parties.

“A lot of people who come to Earthship are very lost,” says Rae Smith, a queer, non-binary former anthropologist, who completed the academy and began working for Earthship Biotecture just before the pandemic. “I’m no exception in that way.”

“I think they’re looking for something,” Smith says. “They have some sort of baggage they don’t want to face within themselves.”

When the academy opened, the lines between student, teacher, friend and partner were as blurred as ever.

But for those who choose to participate, after-work gatherings are fueled by alcohol, by drugs, and by Reynolds, who was always a party animal.

“It’s just people partying and doing whatever they feel like,” says Lauren Anderson, a former staff member who once helped run the academy. “It’s like an adult summer camp.”

When he was young, the story goes, Reynolds wanted to be a rock star. It was only when he struck out making it big that he dedicated himself to building with garbage.

“Now, he’s a rock star,” Fryer says. “He’s not a rock star in music, he’s a rock star in the green movement.”

Reynolds now finds himself surrounded by people who idolize him. Many of them are young women.

The culture spreads within the company, which was staffed mostly by former students. Once you arrive on the mesa to work for Earthship, it becomes your life. Most people pay rent to Reynolds for housing and do not make enough to live elsewhere, earning just above minimum wage.

“I really had no other choice,” says Bell, who moved to Taos months after the Colorado field study and began working for Earthship Biotecture.

When she arrives, she sleeps in a sleeping bag, in an old Earthship that “should have been condemned,” she says, with leaky roofs and faulty wiring. She learns that some staff members who were loyal to Reynolds, like the builders who joined in the early days and the employees who always took his side in conflicts, are allowed to live in Earthships for free. 

Bell approaches Reynolds about advancing in the company — to better positions, better pay, better housing — “and he was like, you’re the runner up for every position. Just wait for someone else to fuck up and you’ll get their job,” she says. “I was just like, oh, I see why everybody treats everybody like shit here, because this is your fucking philosophy.”

When the field study is over and their home unfinished, the Shacters do not ask Earthship Biotecture to finish the job. Instead, they decide to hire people separately whom they trusted, some of whom are themselves starting to pull away from a community on the verge of fracturing.

The post goes live on a cool autumn day, just before Thanksgiving. November 23, 2021.

The screen glows, the weight of the moment pressing down on the one who hits post. A deep breath. No taking it back now.

The Instagram feed refreshes, and there it is: #EarthshipMutiny. A series of graphics, bold black text with some words in bright red, screaming for emphasis.

The caption beneath it is short but sharp. It spreads like wildfire in a place built on whispers and unsaid truths.

“I do not want anyone to harass Michael Reynolds or his employees. I would never wish ill will on anyone, which is exactly why I’m sharing my experience.”

A series of tags. @earthship, @michaelreynolds, #sustainableliving. There are more. #MeToo. #MeTooMovement.

The comments roll in. There is support. There are gestures of reassurance. There are moments of realization: I felt it, too. It could have happened to me. There is outrage.

Phone screens light up inside Earthship homes, glowing through bottle-glass walls. In hushed corners, groups huddle over their devices, scrolling, reading, messaging. The post spreads. First through Greater World. Then beyond.

Inside the pyramid, at the altar, the candle stands. The face above it remains frozen, holding a peace sign, smirking beneath the inscription that has stood there for years:

I’ll never say die.

But the mutiny has begun.

A photoshopped image of Reynolds in a police lineup is posted to the thread by a young woman. Her caption makes the most damning allegation yet: That Reynolds raped her while she illegally worked for him overseas.

Reynolds, she posts, “yields a lot of power as not only a business owner but the creator of a social movement.” 

It’s a movement she is a part of. She writes about how she followed it, first attending the Earthship Academy before being brought on staff. She soon began working closely with Reynolds and says she confided in him after feeling stressed during a project in a foreign country.

“At the time, I was living in Michael Reynolds’s house, working for his company, and completely dependent on the community he created,” she writes. “Instead of helping me, Reynolds used my vulnerability to rape me.”

As she types these words into the thread – etching them into existence with a finality only the internet can achieve – the early-20s young woman feels she’s finally found a place where she is safe to share. She had, until now, felt like there was no one to confide in. She withdrew from the community and stopped going to work regularly, she writes. 

As she types her words, she feels such efforts are long overdue. “I believe that for years (maybe decades), Michael Reynolds has been using his influence to force staff and students into sexual relationships.”

Beneath her words, the comments explode like a bull released from its cage.

“Omfg this is insane. I’m so thoroughly disgusted.”

“He’s gotten away with this for too long.”

“There are (and have been) tons of rumors around town about his behavior, but they all sound too ridiculous to be true. Turns probably many of them are.”

“People go there with so much hope and Mike absolutely preys on that shit in a number of ways. It’s a breeding ground for abuse and that’s why I left.”

“Iv been uncomfortable with the culture of sexual energy around there for a while”

“This dude has been doing this for yearrsss!!Sexual abuse, verbal abuse, emotional abuse, physical abuse, alcohol abuse. To his staff, interns, and some of his family members. He’s a narcissistic, alcoholic, toxic af human being.”

“Your story clarifies how truly sick this man has become with his power & attention.”

“The print of your post made me nauseous. He is a monster”

The community was already fractured. This completely broke it. As one person put it: It completely melted. 

Now, Reynolds faces an internal exodus.

The company puts out a statement, anodyne and vague. It believes survivors, but the allegations are false. Enough to calm the storm, temporarily.

Then, Michael Reynolds takes to email, his words sprawled across the screen like a challenge.

“These very serious remarks represent an agenda that I am not fully aware of yet,” he writes to his staff. 

The name of the accuser is right there, printed for everyone to see. No hesitation. No attempt to soften the blow. Just another dismissal, another act of control.

Murmurs begin to spread across the mesa as inboxes ping, one after another. Conversations are hushed, then sharpen into something dangerous.

“He actually named her?”

"He’s doubling down.”

The women on staff are the first to react. Anger moves like a wildfire through the community, their frustration no longer simmering beneath the surface but crackling out in the open. And then, the men speak up too. Lines that once felt blurred are now razor-sharp. This is it.

“This is going to crumble,” a longtime employee thinks. The weight of inevitability descends atop them. “The whole staff is going to leave,” Fields says.

Reynolds calls a staff meeting and opens the floor to questions for more than two hours. One longtime employee is the first to speak up. “There are actions that we all are responsible for that has happened, you know, and even so-called gotten away with behavior in this company, at parties, with students.”

But Reynolds digs in deeper. “I don’t want to say we can’t party with students,” he responds. “We got to relate to them. We got to befriend them. We got to be with them. They’re going to, hell, they’re going to be part of us.”

He does agree that there should be zero tolerance for bad behavior and admits: “We have fucked up. I have fucked up. Half the stuff we’ve done across the planet is fucked up.”

The whole thing was recorded. Watching it back is like watching a one-sided boxing match.  

“He just got assaulted,” Fields says.

Reynolds admits to having affairs with students and interns in the past, but repeatedly denies the allegation of rape. “This is vindictive,” he says. “You wanna get somebody in trouble, you pick a rock star and you pin a target on their back and you accuse them of rape.”

Anderson, who is handling media inquiries at the time, speaks up. “We are on a global scale. We have partners with universities. You’re a public figure. And it’s a matter of time before maybe more information comes out and more accusations. And we could be in big trouble.”

Reynolds does not reassure her, saying he cannot predict “what other #MeToo things can come out there, regarding me or anybody else in this company. I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“Now I've been accused of being a thief, I've been accused of being incompetent, I've been accused of being a rapist. Rapist is the most potent one these days,” he says. “I'm a dead man walking, but I'm walking.”

“If we want to get hardline and just fire people that are not in compliance with what we suggest, we’ll be firing a lot of people. Do we go into alcohol? Do we go into dope? Do we go into, you know, do we go into fraternizing? Where does it stop and where does it start?”

A longtime employee pushes back. “In any job you have, sexual harassment is not tolerated. It’s not the aim. Here, it’s tolerated.”

Reynolds digs in. “I’ll go out and do it in Timbuktu or wherever. Because I want out of democracy. I want out of economy. I want out of pharmacy. I want out of everything that we do as humans on this planet.”

He scoffs at the residents who sued him, at his enemies, his critics. “What right do you have to hold me accountable?”

The words are shocking. So is the allegation. But to those in the room, none of this is surprising. 

Staffers hurl more questions at Reynolds. He dares dissenters to leave. If they don’t like it here, if they don’t want to commit: “Get a more conventional job,” he says. “Meet and greet at Walmart. Or work for Amazon.”

Leave this “renegade company.”

Smith raises their hand. “What the fuck are you talking about, Mike? We choose to be here because we love Earthship. We love this community.”

“Well, you don’t love it enough,” he snaps back. “You don’t love it enough to take it for what it is.”

“I never came back after that meeting,” Smith says now. “I said what I said in the meeting, and I left.”

Reynolds eventually realizes that his reputation will hurt the company. He reluctantly agrees to step back from teaching classes, and the academy reduces his face time with students at build sites, where everyone would gather and drink beer at the end of the day. “We did try and mitigate how much Mike was around,” Anderson says.

He also agrees, again reluctantly, to hire a human resources consultant. Fields recommends a friend in Colorado, who agrees to provide training and advice as a contractor.

The consultant, who asked not to be named to protect her professional identity, goes onto the Earthship website. “It was the most guru, cultish shit. Mandalas everywhere, pictures of him, verbiage that was like, this is a way of life,” she recalls. “Which is fine, if it’s not used to abuse people.”

The consultant arranges video calls with Anderson and the business manager of Earthship Biotecture and quickly learns it is not a normal company.

Students complain about staff members making sexist and racist jokes. Reynolds finds them hilarious. “These were instantly fireable offenses,” the consultant says. But when she approaches Anderson and the business manager of Earthship about taking action, “they would say no, Mike won’t do that.”

Staff members living on the mesa invite students to their homes, often after drinking together. Underage drinking is commonplace. When people end relationships, they have nowhere to go. Women accuse men of stalking them and fear the company will not take action. “It’s clearly not a safe setup,” the consultant says.

The website has now changed, removing the mandalas and imagery of Reynolds as a guru. It still lists the core values of Earthships and contains a link for students to apply to the academy where an all-caps disclaimer reads that every application requires a letter of recommendation and a photo of themselves.

“Oh, god!” The consultant recoils in disgust at the photo requirement. “The whole dynamic is just ripe for abuse. It very clearly screams to me that this man, Mike, knew he could do this because he had an ability to bring in young vulnerable people and keep them here.”

In the staff meeting, after the photo requirement is instated, one employee says they heard the academy is selecting attractive young women to work with Reynolds. “How are we going to be protected from this?” the employee demands.

“How are you going to be protected from me, is the question,” Reynolds replies. “I’m the one with the bad reputation.”

It becomes clear that Earthship staff will not challenge Reynolds’ behavior. “They were telling me that he hooked up with girls, but he was always saying it was consensual,” the consultant says. “They were asking me, what do we say to kids? Because Mike will probably try to hook up with them.”

“This is beyond HR. This is fucked,” she recalls thinking to herself in disbelief. “This man thinks he’s a god.”

Reynolds’ initial accuser spoke to me, but then requested that she not be involved in this story. She said she wants to move past it, but that she still wants the story to be told.

“I spoke out to stand in solidarity with the other victims of Michael Reynolds and his staff at Earthship Biotecture,” she says now. “If we don’t listen to folks who are using their voice, history continues to repeat itself like it has been in Taos.”

According to multiple people in the community, she was harassed to the point that she deleted her posts, made plans to sell Earthships she had purchased, and left Taos for good.

Within the company, Reynolds tells women the allegations were false, but tells male staffers that he and the accuser had a consensual relationship. For bragging rights. He even jokes about it at a Christmas party.

Bell recalls how the predominant attitude became: “Is she the only one, and can we just say that she’s crazy?”

“She was ostracized,” Zach Shacter says. “I believe her stories and they all match with the things that I have seen.”

Ashford was incredulous. She was so mad, it grew to the point that Fryer and other residents began to keep a distance.

“She thought the community should be outraged,” Fryer says. “She was upset that they weren’t, you know, picketing Reynolds’ offices or something.”

In the months after the allegations, Ashford, Fryer, and another resident met the accuser.

“He groomed her,” Ashford says. “He gave her gifts. He called her.”

For Ashford, a survivor herself, it is now personal. Her own daughter and her friends went to the academy, where they were “told to watch out for this particular type of thing to happen,” she says.

She hears from a neighbor that Mike would hold big, catered parties for crew members with drugs, sex, and “all kinds of things happening.”

And she had felt sexually intimidated by Reynolds in the past. She once asked him to look at some things in her house that needed fixing. “He agreed, which I found out later is very unusual because he doesn’t fix anything,” she says. “When he got to my door, he didn’t knock. He just entered my house, took his shoes off and came right into my living room.”

“My kids were in the bedroom at the time and they came out, and his entire demeanor changed,” she says. “I felt energetically that he was not there for what I had asked him to be there for.”

The thought that there were others disgusts her. Ashford hears that on nonprofit builds in foreign countries, prospective students are being selected based on their looks.

Ashford says at least four unrelated people told her that when young women would attend the academy, male staffers would approach them and ask them “Who’s your number one?” They were referring to the men.

“In each case, that same similar wording was used. Who’s your number one? Who do you like here? Pick or I’ll pick for you.”

“That’s part of what you do to learn from them. You participate in their man games to learn from them. You come here and give up your vagina so that you can learn from them.”

Ashford has been at odds with Reynolds before, but this is different. This is total war.

“Yeah, he’s a garbage warrior. It’s a different kind of garbage,” she says. Her voice trembles with rage. This is the wrecking ball. This is the force of nature that was banned from board meetings.

“You’ve got a cult. You’ve got a cult full of people who are beholden to you, and you guys are culting out,” she says. “And now I find out you’re a really bad guy, so I’m gonna take you down. I’ll do everything I can to take you down. It’s just not right.”

Reynolds meets me outside the Earthship visitors center, half an hour late, idling in the white Chevrolet pickup which he often uses as an impromptu office.

He doesn’t exchange pleasantries or make eye contact before telling me about his newest Earthship model, called the Refuge, which he describes as a simplified Earthship that’s easy to maintain but does not sacrifice performance. “I’ve been doing this for 55 years, and it feels like I’ve finally got the product,” he says.

He offers to drive me to his most recent build. “It’s got to [cost] equal or less than any other type of housing, and we’re equal right now, but we don’t have a utility bill,” he says. “So that’s huge, but still not huge enough.”

We walk inside and are greeted by warm, pleasantly humid air, providing an immediate blanket from the freezing January morning. To Reynolds, the inherent resilience of an Earthship makes it the perfect long-term investment in a volatile world.

“This is as good as any gold brick there is,” he says. He insists his next goal is to make it affordable. “I’m not Jesus Christ. I’m not gonna turn all the water into wine and all that shit. But I can make these for grocery money and cause them to be easier to get.”

Taos, like much of the United States, is facing a housing crisis. Reynolds admits he is not solving it. At least one-quarter of the Earthships in Greater World are currently listed on AirBnb, a number that could change due to new county regulations restricting rentals. And Earthships, which are more labor-intensive than most buildings, have become expensive to build.

Still, he believes that once he brings costs down, his new Earthships have unlimited potential.

He lists societal ills — inequality, mass shootings, big tech oligarchs, the truck attack in New Orleans on New Year’s Day — and offers a cure: “I believe that independent, sustainable housing worldwide would organize humanity.”

But Reynolds does not blame himself for failing to organize his own community. The newest Refuge sits just down the road from Ashford’s Earthship. About a mile away is Knickerbocker’s home, covered in cameras.

“There are people that will say they don’t feel safe. Okay, go to New York City and see how safe you feel,” Reynolds says.

He denies taking advantage of Knickerbocker, blaming the budget overruns on the rising cost of materials during the pandemic. And he maintains that the homeowners association is legal. “They’re all sitting here in buildings like this that take care of them,” he says, “and still complaining, still finding fault with me, with everything.”

Reynolds admits that his reputation has cost him business. I’m curious what has changed, and how he is ensuring that women attending Earthship Academies are safe. “I’m not. I don’t ensure the safety of anybody. I can’t,” he says. Human resources consultants and sensitivity training, he says, are a waste of the time and money that he’d rather dedicate to building Earthships. “I don’t want murder, and I don’t want rape, and I don’t want people to be super abused, but I don’t want people to come here that need to be taken care of,” he says. “It’s the Wild West. Don’t get on this wagon train to California if you don’t have time to take care of yourself because I don’t have time to take care of you.”

Of the 11 former staffers I spoke to while reporting this story, all of them cited the company culture as a reason for leaving; most explicitly mentioned behavior that Reynolds enabled or exhibited himself. Some migrated to other organizations building sustainable and affordable homes. Some left Taos entirely.

Reynolds bristles, recalling how his longtime male staffers criticized him after he was accused of rape. “I’ve been with those guys. I know what they are,” he says. “I’ve seen them. I’ve gotten drunk with them. They’re men.”

Robin Williams, he says, once joked that God gave men a brain and a penis, but only enough blood to run one at a time. “Men do shit, because they’re fucked up,” he says.

It was another male staff member, he says, who started requiring academy students to send in their photos. “You should have heard the comments he made about tits this, ass that,” Reynolds says.

“At least I’m not paying hush money like Donald Trump and shit like that. I haven’t had to keep it a secret or anything,” he says. “But I don’t have it in me to rape somebody.”

He brings up his accuser without being prompted. “She tried to fuck me,” he says. He describes a vivid scene of, through his eyes, an employee who fell hopelessly in love with him as they worked closely on an Earthship in Australia. They were both drunk, he says, and he resisted her advances, describing the scene in intimate, discomforting detail.

He points to a man working on an Earthship on the mesa. “I could accuse you of butt fucking him right now and say I saw it,” he tells me.

Ashford and I turn back onto Gorge View Road and drive toward her Earthship, past a growing string of for sale signs. Fryer has already left, closing her soap store and selling what she thought was her dream home. Knickerbocker plans to put her home on the market. But she wants buyers to know the truth about Reynolds, about the people who left her feeling deceived.

“You have to crucify people,” she says. “They can’t just keep being here and just carrying on that virus.”

In the year after the allegations, more than a dozen employees left the company once it became clear its culture was not going to change. Earthship’s experienced builders, plumbers and electricians walked away, leaving the company without reliable hands. Former staff members worry that new academy students are being taught by inexperienced builders; that the next generation of Earthships, from Unity to Refuge, will become failures.

As for Reynolds - he keeps fighting. When Greater World residents stopped paying their dues, he had his business manager place liens on their property to cow them into submission.

Ashford introduces me to a new resident, who tried to organize the community against Reynolds, to carry on the fight. But instead of solidarity, she encountered bickering. Infighting. Gossip behind each other’s backs.

It was as if they needed a villain to gather around. That they couldn’t imagine a new world without one — a Greater World without Reynolds.

He has left behind a trail of admiration intertwined with scorn. The Shacters love their new Earthship, but just as Elise predicted, it leaks every spring when the snow melts. Smith and Bell both left the company on good terms. But when they see their former colleagues in town, they receive glares and cold shoulders.

“That’s very much the cult speaking,” Bell says. “I just want to yell back at them, ‘Oh yeah, you work for a rapist.’”

Ashford and Fryer’s website is still online, but its troves of legal documents and resident testimonies have become contested territory.

According to Fryer, she was locked out by Ashford after handing over the login details. Ashford disagrees, saying Fryer hijacked it first while she paid for it. That was the end of what Fryer calls their “tenuous friendship.”

Ashford is selling her Earthship. She recently got a visit from the website-turned-reality series Zillow Gone Wild. She still loves her home, which she says performs perfectly, but she wants to leave the fight behind.

Still, she is animated. The newest Earthships, she believes, are technically not Earthships because they don’t have slanted glass walls, making them illegal in the homeowners agreement. Her voice rises. Her face reddens. She wonders if that can be added to the lawsuit. Another Reynolds scam.

Finally, she pounds the table and stands. “I’m done,” she says. “I want this to be over. I want him to burn in hell.”

Greater World feels broken. But Reynolds, despite all of the legal trouble, the accusations, and the community discord, is unbothered. He says he’s still here to share his mission: 

“I’m just going to very quietly try to get the magnet under the piece of paper and organize the iron shavings. I’m not going to mastermind a revolution or anything like that.”

Nick Aspinwall is a journalist covering climate change and sustainable building. His words have appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, BBC and more.