Jack Ehrhardt

Going Quiet

Kingman, Arizona · By Charlie Laurel

Jack Ehrhardt and his contracting company, ACE Builders, built the first “Earthship” in Arizona for a client in Dewey in the early 1990s. An Earthship is a self-sustaining, passive solar home made from used tires packed with dirt, cans, bottles, and other discards. The home was designed by architect Michael Reynolds of Taos, New Mexico,
and features solar electric power, rainwater roof collection, and indoor graywater garden planters that filter wastewater while growing food and flowers.

Then Jack built his own Earthship home in the Cerbat Mountains above Kingman. It just made sense – environmental, economic, and common.

Jack Ehrhardt values independence. Earthships offer freedom from utility bills and mortgages, but more than that, they reflect Jack’s independent mindset. “I don’t participate in the Euro-American rituals – there is no Santa Claus and the Easter bunny doesn’t lay eggs,” he says. “That’s part of being able to see clearly. I don’t think on cue and that allows me to be pretty free.” Jack is a big man in all dimensions – huge in body and heart, with a big laugh and a readiness to take on big challenges. It’s hard not to liken his massive, yet gentle persistence to that of an ox, but his quick wit and intelligence resist such comparisons.

Several years ago Jack drove into the town of Peach Springs, Arizona, for the first time. He found the administration building for the Hualapai Tribe and asked, “Are you guys interested in energy-efficient, sustainable building?” They said “yes,” and then the council got together and three hours later Jack gave a talk. “Then they told their natural resources department to find a grant to get one of these built,” he explains. An Environmental Protection Agency “Jobs through Recycling” grant eventually got the project underway.

With the Hualapai, Jack faced the kinds of problems typical of rural areas with high unemployment and scant resources for training programs. Sometimes workers failed to show up, and the project was vandalized more than once. “It was difficult, but it was good. The experience was all beneficial – school kids came down and worked on it, they did the can walls, the bottle walls, they learned about recycling, they got to do the earth plasters. We literally got the tires from the community. Everyone was gathering tires from ravines and people’s yards, wood from dismantled buildings, windows from military reutilization. It was really a good time; it was really a good feeling. It seemed to me to be one of the best times things felt around here.”

The 1,200-square-foot Hualapai Earthship now functions as a tribal office space with seven solar-powered workstations. Jack now serves as the tribe’s Planning and Economic Development Director, and is working on developing renewable energy projects, such as a wind farm, to generate revenue and create jobs on the reservation. In 1999, Jack pulled together one of the most unusual collaborations in the field of sustainable building. He brought together the rebel architect and counterculture icon Michael Reynolds with the top brass of the Arizona Army National Guard. Colonel Doug Brown was committed to getting a 5,000-square-foot office building constructed using recycled materials – tires in particular – for the Guard’s base in Phoenix. It didn’t seem to matter that the right people for getting it done were the long-haired Reynolds and Ehrhardt, even after Jack told them about his conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War.

Jack laughs when recounting the story. “At that point they said ‘we have no labor, but we have some money for materials, and a very limited budget. And, by the way, your labor force will be Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s drug-infested, dysfunctional prisoners.’ I said, ‘Oh, bring it on! I’m the man for the job. Give me the most impossible task.’” Jack rolls his eyes and laughs: “What a circus. I had to cut the locks off the fuel depot to get fuel for the tractor, and they tried to get me arrested. I said, ‘I don’t care what you guys do, I’m gonna get this building built!’ Fortunately the colonels stood behind me, and through a long, long process we got the building built.”

As for the “drug-infested, dysfunctional” labor force, he says, “Every single prisoner learned things that they never dreamed were possible. Some of them never even worked before, they’d simply been dealing drugs, and they said ‘Wow, so you can build things like this and you can use solar energy.’ And I take a big fire hose and shoot it across the sky and it makes a prism, and I say, ‘Look guys, what you’re breathing.’ And if you can picture thirty inmates, in Arpaio’s uniforms, with their mouths open, going, ‘So we’re breathing in rainbow energy!’ I said, ‘Yes, men!’”

Jack’s building projects all become educational forums – opportunities to weave community values around sustainability. The Ehrhardt’s Earthship home in Kingman has served as the hub of a youth education summer camp focused on teaching kids about renewable energy and conservation. Jack doesn’t hesitate to get involved with local issues, such as organizing a successful campaign to prevent the construction of a toxic waste incinerator. He has also served on the local planning and zoning commission.

“If we speak from the heart, so the people sitting at the desks can feel it, then they make the right decisions,” he says. “That’s what activism is about – making life exciting and participating. Life is so much clearer and vibrant when you do that.”

Even as a family man responsible for raising two children, Jack didn’t feel the need to compromise his values for the sake of secure employment in conventional construction. But he doesn’t consider himself particularly courageous. “I don’t know if it’s a life purpose or just going calm and paying attention to something as simple as what the church was saying, and your parents taught you: to do good. And then you become an adult and throw fifty percent of it away and compromise it. I’m doing what I was taught. It’s no big deal. It doesn’t make sense not to do what we’re doing: seeking peace and doing good. I don’t know why other humans don’t feel it, or why they don’t choose to go quiet and contemplate and sense their connection to the natural environment and feel the responsibility. It’s fun to give your life choices a priority to where they make a difference toward doing something about the whole family of planet Earth and the whole cosmos that we live in.”

And with that philosophy, one man keeps his life, and his Earthships, on course.

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This is one of many stories from the Four Corners region that were printed in A New Plateau: Sustaining the Lands and Peoples of Canyon Country, edited by Peter Friederici and Rose Houk. This book was a project of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University and Renewing the Countryside, with assistance from the Museum of Northern Arizona. A New Plateau can be purchased at the Renewing the Countryside online bookstore or the Northern Arizona University bookstore, or request it at your local bookstore.