The Tao of Taos

 Around the town of Taos, New Mexico, are two living areas built 1,000 years apart, constructed on similar philosophies. Their attitudes toward outsiders, however, couldn't be more different.

The Taos Pueblo was built 1,000 years ago and was a thriving settlement for centuries. Now about 100 people live there, it attracts lots of tourists and some buildings been retrofitted with electricity.

Earthship is about 15 miles west of Taos. It started in the 1970s by Michael Reynolds, as a way to incorporate the newest technology of recycling and the efficient use of energy, but really got going around 2000. There are now Earthship communities around the world, with the population at the Taos hq about the same as the Taos Pueblo.

You can visit both in the same day and admire the similarities and be appalled at the differences.

The Taos Pueblo has certain rules for visitors. You pay to get in, including a $6 per camera fee. You have to ask permission to take photos of people. There are certain places, like the kiva, a place for holding sacred ceremonies, where tourists can't go. Blue Lake similarly is off limits, although it is a bit far away. Don't feed the dogs. There are lots of mangy dogs running around.

Once you get past those, however, the Pueblo is a joy to visit, mainly because of the people who live there. When we wandered around, we got into a nice conversation with a man who was working in the front yard of one of the adobe houses. Turns out it was Curtis Sandoval, the lieutenant governor of the Pueblo, and the house had been in his family for hundreds of years. We had a great chat about what life was like, and is like, how to keep up the house. We must have talked for about 15 minutes.

At the heart of the Pueblo is the adobe -- a mixture of dirt, water and straw. That's it. It keeps houses warm in the winter and cool in the summer. You can build small houses, or multi-level houses. The material is phenomenal, which is why you see it all over the southwest.

A little farther north, in Mesa Verde in Colorado, are lots of structures made from adobe, some built under the cover of cliffs. During a tour, a Park Ranger said that a few years ago, the structures needed some work, and the "modern" engineers thought they could do better than adobe, so they used Portland cement. Now, after just a few years, the cement needs work, while some of the adobe structures have endured for 1,000 years or more.

In the Pueblo, the residents and others have little tables set up to sell jewelry, and some sell their wares in little houses. What they offer is of good quality and at reasonable prices. Volunteers give little lectures about the place, but the best stories come from the residents. All in all, it's a great place to visit.

The philosophy there is to use the materials available to build what you need, and it has worked out well. Fifteen miles away, over the famous Grand Canyon bridge, sits a newer community with a similar vision. Earthship has about the same number of residents as the Pueblo and a similar philosophy of using materials that are available. In their case, those happen to be old tires filled with dirt, old aluminum cans and glass bottles. Those make up the walls and other supporting elements of the buildings.

Combine that with water recapture, solar electricity generation and buildings mostly situated underground, and you have a recipe for a new type of lifestyle. The houses are built to be made from available materials so that mostly anyone could construct one. There are Earthship communities around the world.

The houses vary in size, and, by New Mexico standards, can be pricey -- $300k is a lot for that market. You can even stay in one overnight.

What you can't do, however, is get a feel for the place. Visitors can take a two-minute walk through the visitor's center, ending in a gift shop, of course, see a little video and look at the training building across the dirt path outside.

But you can't wander through the neighborhood. There is no "model" home, as in a normal real estate development. There are no residents to talk to about their experiences living off the grid. Outside of the inadequate visitor's center -- a blatant ripoff if there ever was one -- is a no trespassing sign.

It's just a tease. It's an intriguing tease as you drive by, but until Earthship allows people a closer look inside, it's wasting its most precious resource and losing opportunities to spread its message.