their hurricane plan provided for delivery of bottled water! ReallyToilets don't flush for days or weeks,
Back when I was considering building a house with my own hands as a post-retirement project, I looked into the Earthship building method, and bought and read one of the books, I think probably the first one. Earthships are a high-thermal-mass type of building, so they are not suitable for all climates. As I understand it they work best where days are hot and nights are cold, in other words a climate where the heat only has to be stored in the walls for a short time. Storing heat from summer to use in winter requires a different kind of building, and in a climate (like where I live in the maritime NW) in which the incoming solar energy is low during the winter, just when the heat is really needed, yet a different kind of house is appropriate—one with emphasis on insulation rather than storage mass. I'm not at all sure how successfully the water collection and other aspects of the system could be adapted. A different sort of building in the climate for which Earthships are intended would likely have higher energy use and so the measures used in an Earthship would not produce an adequate power supply, would not have adequate window area to produce enough solar gain to heat the house, etc etc. An Earthship in a climate for which it isn't appropriate would run into similar problems. I think in many places, urban or suburban sites with the necessary uninterrupted access to incoming sunlight might be few and far between. But for a rural site in an appropriate climate, I believe the Earthships have succeeded quite well.
I'm going by memory here, but as I recall, the area immediately inside the all-glass south wall of the Earthship is filled with raised beds and used for food production, using greywater from the house's showers, sinks, etc for irrigation. I think this would be equivalent to a semi-heated or un-heated greenhouse (depending on the exact climate the building is in) and quite a variety of food crops could be grown year round--leaf & root vegetables, peas & the cabbage family during the cool season, tomatoes, peppers and their relatives once the weather warms up, and I would guess (if self-pollinating varieties are available) even some fruits like strawberries or dwarf citrus. I think the only things that wouldn't grow in such a space are the ones that need freezing weather in the winter in order to set flowers for the next year, and you could always grow those in tubs and put them out in the winter to get their required chilling, or just plant them outdoors.
We are in deep (and cake dried) doodoo.
And rice, of all strange crops for an arid climate.
