New Mexico

An off-the-grid community in New Mexico offers insight into sustainable building

Published

2 years ago

April 22, 2024

An off-the-grid community in New Mexico offers insight into sustainable building

ABC News is taking a look at solutions for issues related to climate change and the environment with the series, “The Power of Us: People, The Climate, and Our Future.”

Near the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Taos, New Mexico, a community built into the earth is living totally off-the-grid in mostly-recycled structures called Earthships.

ABC News Chief Meteorologist and Chief Climate Correspondent Ginger Zee along with her team, Dan Manzo and Lindsey Griswold, traveled to Taos to stay with the community and find out what everyone can be doing to live a bit more sustainably.

“Everybody on the planet can wake up in the morning and be comfortable without fossil fuel. Everybody can grow food in their house, everybody can have electricity from the sun and wind,” Michael Reynolds, founder and creator of Earthship Biotecture, told Zee. “These buildings do that.”

Heating, cooling and powering buildings creates more greenhouse gas emissions than anything else in the U.S., according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Furthermore, construction and demolition create more than 500 million tons of debris each year in this country alone, the EPA said.

The community of over 100 Earthships in Taos is made of “living vessels” with gravel, old tires, concrete and other discarded materials like glass bottles.

Earthships are fully self-sustaining structures with timers for wifi and hot water use, according to Earthship Biotecture.

Reynolds said he uses rainwater four times over for different purposes in his home.

Michael Reynolds talks with ABC News Chief Meteorologist and Chief Climate Correspondent Ginger Zee outside Taos, New Mexico.

ABC News

“I’m using five gallons — or three gallons of water to take a shower. That same three gallons of water waters my banana trees and my tomatoes,” Reynolds said. “That same three gallons of water is recollected to flush the toilet.”

Solar energy provides the homes with power, but it’s not used to heat or cool the structures. Earthships use trash as insulation to keep them comfortable inside.

Reynolds showed ABC News how Earthships are insulated with old tires filled with dirt.

“Each tire gets about four or five wheelbarrows of dirt pounded into them. So they’re basically like steel encased Adobe bricks,” Earthship Biotecture rental manager Hillary Hess told ABC News. “And the sun comes in and it hits that mass. And then the tire retains it. And as the temperature in here would drop, that heat would be released.”

“You know, on a cold February night, you walk in one of these and you go, ‘This is amazing.’” Reynolds said. “This is warm and it’s freezing outside and there’s no heating system here. So if you’ve put people in a position to be able to experience it, then that’s huge.”

An ABC News team stayed in one of the structures in Taos for three days to understand how they work and what it feels like to live in one.

Hess said structure the team would be staying in is 5,400 square feet. Two thousand square feet of that is dedicated growing space.

PHOTO: Outside Taos, New Mexico, a community of Earthships offers off-the-grid living claiming to be the answer to building sustainability. — Outside Taos, New Mexico, a community of Earthships offers off-the-grid living claiming to be the answer to building sustainability.
ABC News

“In this house there’s two ponds in the greenhouse and we have tilapia out there,” she said. “So ideally, if you lived in this home, if you wanted, you could even be harvesting your own fish, chickens with eggs. And then you could catch a fish, pick your citrus, wrap it in a bag and leave and grill it out on the fire.”

“The building industry currently is known to account for approximately 40% of greenhouse gas emissions,” Lola Ben-Alon, assistant professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation told ABC News. “It’s a really huge chunk of our industry in the world.”

Ben-Alon said there’s no one answer as to what makes up the most sustainable home.

“There’s no one solution,” she said. “It’s really a combination of principles and a combination of design thinking with the local environment and what is available and what is the climatic context, but also the material availability context and the labor context.”

Reynolds believes the principles of Earthships can be applied everywhere.

“Not everybody’s going to have an Earthship tomorrow,” Zee said. “If there had to be one thing from Earthships that we could apply to homes across America, what would be the most important?

PHOTO: News Chief Meteorologist and Chief Climate Correspondent Ginger Zee sits with Earthship Biotecture founder and creator Michael Reynolds outside of an Earthship near Taos, New Mexico. — News Chief Meteorologist and Chief Climate Correspondent Ginger Zee sits with Earthship Biotecture founder and creator Michael Reynolds outside of an Earthship near Taos, New Mexico.
ABC News

“I think it starts with comfort,” Reynolds replied. “In other words, you can add a greenhouse on the south side of your house, and that will hit those rooms that are near that. You can even in New York City, you can get an apartment with south facing windows. You can become aware of the fact that heat comes from that thing, and you can catch that heat.”

In Santa Fe New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham talked with ABC News about Earthships and other sustainability efforts in the state

“How important is it to experiment with sustainability like that?” Zee asked. “Because that’s extreme.”

“I think all of that has incredible value,” Grisham said. “It is not the No. 1 investment in sustainable living, but it is really powerful.”

“Just their water reuse and recycling in its last place, after using it four times, is to grow food. I mean, these are particularly for states in the Southwest arid states,” she added. “That innovation and knowing that you can live completely off the grid and have sustainable building materials all recycled, we can do more of that.”

For his part, Reynolds said the extremity is necessary.

“I used to try to tone it down because I know that I’m a fanatic about it, and I can’t expect other people to understand what I’ve been thinking about for decades,” he said. “So I try to water it down and tone it down, but now it’s like, ‘yeah, it’s not appropriate to tone it down.’ I mean, the solutions are the way forward on this planet. It’s going to have to be extreme.”

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New Mexico

New Mexico Lottery Powerball, Pick 3 Day results for Dec. 15, 2025

Published

6 hours ago

December 16, 2025

Press Room

The New Mexico Lottery offers multiple draw games for those aiming to win big. Here’s a look at Dec. 15, 2025, results for each game:

Powerball

23-35-59-63-68, Powerball: 02, Power Play: 4

Check Powerball payouts and previous drawings here.

Pick 3

Day: 2-3-6

Evening: 4-5-5

Check Pick 3 payouts and previous drawings here.

Lotto America

08-11-29-36-50, Star Ball: 07, ASB: 02

Check Lotto America payouts and previous drawings here.

Pick 4

Evening: 2-5-0-2

Day: 7-2-1-6

Check Pick 4 payouts and previous drawings here.

Roadrunner Cash

01-12-17-26-29

Check Roadrunner Cash payouts and previous drawings here.

Powerball Double Play

20-23-38-42-65, Powerball: 19

Feeling lucky? Explore the latest lottery news & results

This results page was generated automatically using information from TinBu and a template written and reviewed by a Las Cruces Sun-News editor. You can send feedback using this form.

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New Mexico

New Mexico expanding use of gun and bullet scanning technology to more easily link crimes

Published

18 hours ago

December 16, 2025

Press Room

New Mexico expanding use of gun and bullet scanning technology to more easily link crimes

NEW MEXICO (KRQE) – State-of-the-art tech, credited with cracking some of the metro’s highest profile gun crimes, is now getting deployed across the state. A handful of new bullet casing scanners are being deployed in four new regional hubs stretching from Farmington to Roswell. The goal is to link evidence from shooting cases across city and county lines in rural communities. “What makes this different is that we very intentionally distributed these machines and the personnel necessary to run the machines across the state, so that the state itself could conduct its own comprehensive analysis,” said New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez.

The New Mexico Department of Justice will be at the center of the effort with their new Crime Gun Intelligence Center. He said they’ll be the only AG’s office in the country managing a statewide program that scans bullet casings and guns found at crime scenes. Analysts will then figure out what crime scenes could be connected. The AG is deploying the scanning machines to Farmington, Gallup, Roswell, and Las Cruces. The scans get uploaded in the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, or NIBIN database, to see if the same gun was used at different scenes.

It’s the same technology the Albuquerque Police Department used to figure out and arrest the people tied to shootings at elected officials’ homes in Albuquerque. “Instead of waiting weeks and months to connect discovery, investigators now can link shootings from firearms, shell casings, and suspects in a matter of hours or days, and cases that once appeared isolated can now quickly be connected, helping us identify repeat offenders and patterns of violent activity more quickly,” said San Juan County Sheriff Shane Ferrari.

Right now, almost every community outside the metro has to bring in its bullet casing evidence to Albuquerque in order to get it scanned and sent into the federal NIBIN system. The process can take six to 12 months. “Rural communities often cover large geographical areas with limited resources, and crime does not stop at the city limits,” said Sheriff Ferrari.

The attorney general said the machines being deployed will be used as regional hubs, available for any New Mexico police agency to use.

The New Mexico Department of Justice got a million dollars from the feds, with the help of Senator Martin Heinrich, to stand up the system, which they said is ready to start on Tuesday. AG Torrez called out state lawmakers for not helping fund the initiative. “It is a system that is broken. It’s a system that can be fixed. and the only thing we lack at this moment is the political will to do so,” said AG Torrez.

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New Mexico

Event spreads holiday cheer and aims to stop spread of viruses

Published

1 day ago

December 15, 2025

Press Room

Event spreads holiday cheer and aims to stop spread of viruses

An event allowed families and their kids to spread holiday cheer and prevent the spread of viruses and illnesses this season.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — One could say that holiday cheer is usually infectious as you see pure joy on kids faces as they line up to see Santa Claus or light the menorah.

Unfortunately, this time of the year, that’s not the only thing that is infectious. Flu season is now in full swing but local organizations recently came together to spread the good and try to prevent the bad.

“We want to make sure that we’re there for the community as a destination point, not just for culture and celebration, but also for everyday needs, like health care,” Zackary Quintero, executive director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center.

Families came to the National Hispanic Cultural Center on Sunday to meet Pancho Claus – or Santa Claus – and get their holiday fun on but many also came to get protected.

“The main goal is for all New Mexicans to be proactive in the prevention and not just when they have to go to the emergency room. We want them to be proactive in seeking medical care regardless of if they have insurance,” said Monica Toquinto, coordinator for Ventanilla de Salud.

Being proactive includes getting flu shots or glucose testing. These are services the Mexican Consulate’s Ventanilla de Salud (Window of Health) offers for free.

“In the day-to-day, the community may not go, because of work or other things, to the Consulate. We try to bring all these services we do along with our partners to the communities,” Head Consul Patricia Pinzón said.

According to Pinzón, people are coming to the Consulate in Albuquerque not just for the Ventanilla but because they’re scared as they see more and more immigration raids nationwide and locally.

“It’s an opportunity to inform the community to let them know that they are not alone, that we are here,” Pinzón said.

The Mexican Consulate partners with University of New Mexico Health Science Services on Ventanilla de Salud. They see how the the fear of deportation or arrest is keeping people at home during a time when vaccine hesitancy is already high.

“In this particular administration, there’s even more fear among Latino populations for their relatives that are immigrants. That plays into interfacing with anywhere in the public. People have come to be afraid of what vaccines do and don’t do and we want to overcome that,” said Cosette Wheeler, executive director of Ventanilla de Salud.

Ventanilla de Salud is open Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. at the Consulate. They offer other services, like legal help, every weekday.

To learn more about services at the Consulate of Mexico in Albuquerque, click here. For information about the Ventanilla de Salud, click here.

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