into a sustainable future—natural building methods, rain catchment, greywater use and passive solar design—fostering community by sharing our skills and resources.
At Ampersand, we don’t consider ourselves consumers—every element of an ecosystem both gives and receives. We are in the process of remembering what it means to be a healthy part of an ecosystem. What responsibilities do we have to the ecosystems we participate in which allow us to live? We all have a lot to learn from the prairie dogs, the saltbush, the lichen and the dragonflies. What do we really need?

Where is your water?
We definitely need water. At our site, we use it to sustain our bodies, to wash with, to grow food with. Where can we get it in a way that doesn’t harm the land or anyone who lives on it? We’re not connected to a municipal water line. We don’t have a well or live by a stream. We’d like not to have water trucked in, either. So the first source we look to, naturally enough, is rain. We look to the skies, not to the ground. We’re able to meet our entire water needs at Ampersand by collecting rainwater. We ourselves are fed by the water, of course, and also, in more subtle ways, by the intimacy evolving from our connection with it as we collect it. Rainwater pours out of the tap into the kitchen sink. And after the sink, it flows into our garden.

What if that’s how it was everywhere? If you get a growing population, such as ours, relying on constant groundwater pumping, you’ve created an excellent way to kill our precious desert rivers. Kill the river and you eliminate the habitat and all the wildlife dependent upon it. Diverting water from faraway sources is another way to destroy natural habitats.

After nearly a decade now of collecting rainwater, here we are, looking over the land we steward, seeing that the grasses are lush, beaming with new growth, the leaves are plump, the earth is dressed in a rich carpet of life. Rain falls, the plants grow, the animals graze and hunt—life literally bursts from the Earth, nourished and encouraged by the rain.

What are your relationships?
What else do we really need? Heat. Turns out that the most sustainable source we have for heating is this local yellow-star that we call the sun. We joke because that’s so obvious—and yet it’s so obviously overlooked as a heat source. We designed our home in a way that harvests the sun’s abundant gifts, creating our own unique relationship with it. Our house warms and cools passively. We cook with the sun nearly every day in our solar ovens. Our electricity also depends on sunlight (as well as, in part, on the petroleum involved with the production and shipping of the photovoltaic panels).

We need a cooler temperature in our home during the summer, so we also have created a relationship with the Earth. Since it’s always a stable temperature (between 55 and 60 degrees), we built our house partially underground. Refrigeration really helps to preserve food longer, too; here, we harvest ice from an open-topped cistern in the winter to keep our food cold. It’s a perfect system because in the winter there is less sunlight, making it harder to run a refrigerator from the solar panels.