Teresa Coady - Rebuilding Earth: Designing Ecoconscious Habitats for Humans

Rebuilding Earth is a splendidly idiosyncratic compendium of facts; inspiring stories about emerging possibilities; good advice about how to use smart science; and goodwill to make human activity and the natural environment enriching to each other.

Teresa Coady is at her best when she is thinking like an architect, explaining how we can design, build, and operate buildings so as to improve lives while harnessing natural materials and processes in ways that are sustainable in material, human, and social terms. The joys of music and the pains of noise are equally seen as proper subjects for us all, and especially architects and designers.

The heart of this fact-laden and eminently readable book lies in designing buildings and communities that can deliver happier lives for current and future inhabitants, supported by an immense respect for the complexity of the natural environment.

John Helliwell , DPhil, coeditor of the World Happiness Report and professor emeritus, Vancouver School of Economics, University of British Columbia

Architecture has both immediate consequences and lasting implications. We celebrate spaces that move us to rapture, even as we recoil from the blight that dominates much of our urban landscapes.

Teresa Coady offers a way forwarda means to reimagine the relationship between place, nature, and the physical spaces we construct and inhabit for most of the hours of our lives. In her quest for the mythic, what she really seeks is the perfection of the authentic. Her goal is not to deny or reinvent the architectural past, but to implement the essential elements of what makes for greatness in any age. She asks fundamental questions. What kind of world do we want to inhabit and bequeath? What landscape of the imagination do we want to erect around the lives of our children, knowing full well that the shape of these structures will both hone their memories and inspire their aspirations? Rebuilding Earth is a road map of hope.

Wade Davis , author of The Serpent and the Rainbow, BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk, and professor of Anthropology, Liu Institute for Global Issues, University of British Columbia

If our civilization is to continue and flourish, we need to find ways to align human urban systems with ecological planetary systems. Coadys twelve principles of Conscious Construction outline how urban and building design can begin to address the demands for resilient and vibrant communities using both old and new methods and technologies. Rebuilding Earth offers a valuable message that needs to be adopted widely.

MARK GORGOLEWSKI PhD, MSc, Dip ARC, BSc, LEED AP, professor and chair, Department of Architectural Science, Ryerson University

Copyright 2020 by Teresa Coady. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

Published by
North Atlantic Books
Berkeley, California

Cover photos by Mares Lucian/Shutterstock.com and A_McIntyre/Shutterstock.com
Cover design by Howie Severson
Book design by Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Printed in the United States of America

Rebuilding Earth: Designing Ecoconscious Habitats for Humans is sponsored and published by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences (dba North Atlantic Books), an educational nonprofit based in Berkeley, California, that collaborates with partners to develop cross-cultural perspectives, nurture holistic views of art, science, the humanities, and healing, and seed personal and global transformation by publishing work on the relationship of body, spirit, and nature.

North Atlantic Books publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call the distributor, Penguin Random House, at 800-733-3000.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Coady, Teresa, 1956 author.

Title: Rebuilding Earth : Designing Ecoconscious Habitats for Humans / by

Teresa Coady.

Description: Berkeley, California : North Atlantic Books, 2020. | Includes

bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019037594 | ISBN 9781623174316 (trade paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Urban ecology (Sociology) | Sustainable urban

developmentPlanning. | Environmental healthPlanning. | Clean energy.

Classification: LCC HT241 .C63 2020 | DDC 307.76dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037594

This book includes recycled material and material from well-managed forests. North Atlantic Books is committed to the protection of our environment. We print on recycled paper whenever possible and partner with printers who strive to use environmentally responsible practices.

To my children Matt and Alanna

There are many people today who will tell us exactly what is wrong with the world. There are not so many with a plan to fix it. Rebuilding Earth presents such a plan with a wonderful combination of optimism and hope. It is an architects distillation of a lifetime of experience, in which Teresa Coady explains why our very nature compels us to express ourselves through our constructions. She also explains why the roads, buildings, dams, and pipelines of today are becoming obsolete and how they reflect archaic belief systems that are centuries old.

A seismic shift in how we construct is underway that will radically impact our future, and it is crucial for us to understand it if we are to enable positive change on a global scale. The timing of this book could not be more critical. Construction is accelerating. According to the UN Global Status Report 2018, humanity plans to build the equivalent of an entire New York City, every month, for the next forty years.

We have extracted more material from Earth in the past few decades than in all of previous human history, mostly for constructionand 70% of it is already back in landfills. And yet, as we prepare to engage in yet another massive reshaping of our planet, there is hope. For as we move from the Industrial to the Digital Age, humanity must once again rewrite its playbook. This time, we have a grand opportunity to create human habitats that are in sync with nature. In showing us the way forward, Coady expresses her ideas with clarity and essential commonsense reasoning.

I am encouraged to think that if we collectively choose to embrace her Twelve Principles of Conscious Construction, we will help not only ourselves but all species on Earth. In her first concept, Design for life, not machines, her poetic language paints a world as it could be. As it should be. It is a fact of biology that without water there can be no life, and Coadys second principle supports the first: Protect all waters and wetlands; discharge nothing to the oceans. Here we learn how to recognize the hidden connections between climate and environment, which will motivate us to value our dwindling freshwater supplies and protect our seas.

Our way of thinking must be realigned with nature if we are to heal our relationship with Earth. Coadys principles show us the way. As each chapter progressively unfolds, the author tackles complex technical issues, making it easy to understand how and why improvements can be readily made.

Deeply respectful and attuned to all life, Rebuilding Earth addresses vital concerns such as how forests and other eco-corridors work, the real nature of the air we breathe, and the role of our sun. We learn how to simply integrate this knowledge into our planet-shaping strategies and how to change the way we harvest materials for construction. In later chapters, Coady examines how human development and mental health are influenced by the conditions in which we dwell, and she sets out the thinking behind our best cities, showing us why they succeed. In these often surprising chapters, we read about cutting-edge research. For example, we learn that music is encoded in our genome, and how to design to support rather than suppress this instinct.