Rebuilding Earth

Designing Ecoconscious Habitats for Humans

By: Teresa Coady, Christiana Figueres - introduction, Elizabeth May

Narrated by: Lisa Lindsley

A revolutionary guide to designing humane, eco-conscious homes, buildings, and cities of the future.

It is estimated that the earth's population will expand to an unprecedented nine billion people over the next century. This explosion in population is predicted to place further stress on our environment, deplete our natural resources, and lead to increases in anxiety and depression due to overcrowding. In this visionary and uplifting book, Teresa Coady offers readers new hope. Rebuilding Earth is her blueprint for designing and building the cities, buildings, and homes of tomorrow, resulting in more conscious, sustainable, and humane living. Coady shows us how we can shift from an outdated Industrial-Age framework to a more humane, Digital-Age framework. This revolutionary approach will enable communities to harness various forms of green energy and reduce the amount of material needed to build infrastructure while contributing to a healthier planet (and society). We can then experience a new sense of purpose, health, and happiness. Meaningful and lasting change, the author tells us, can only come through designing interconnected communities that are vibrant, resilient, and communal. Unlike most predictions of doom and gloom, Coady presents a refreshingly optimistic view of humanity and its future. This book will appeal to those in the construction, design and development finance industries, as well as anyone interested in improving their lives through understanding the connections between the environment and health.

Insightful

A great read to understand the fundamental reasons for sustainability and why it’s time to make changes for the real estate industries and urban planning. Love the author making hopeful suggestions with professional know how and personal observations.

This is one sloppy piece of work.

Maybe I’m the wrong audience for this book. I’m an architect and a teacher of university seminars in sustainability, and I was expecting a well-informed, insightful book with new thinking about ways to transform the built environment. This is not that book. Full disclosure: I am abandoning it about halfway through, so perhaps there is some great midpoint transformation that I’m about to miss, but I seriously doubt it. So far, the book has been scattershot, weak-to-wooly, and hasn’t presented anything in the way of guidance on green building beyond recaps of broadly-described steps that anyone in the green building world already knows we need to take. I finally decided to jump ship after listening to a meandering discussion of energy that ricocheted between descriptions of the dangers of anthropogenic climate change and inexplicably credulous parroting of pro-fossil -fuel and “safe” nuclear propaganda. The book is just a mess.

Compounding the overall problem is a narration which unironically mimics the unedited nature of the book. I found myself so frequently irritated by the narrator’s mispronunciations that I started keeping a list. Place names and proper names are a big enough problem, but the repeated mangling of such words as “potable,” “biomimetic,” “gyre,” “behemoth,” and “environs” set my teeth on edge.

I really wish this were a better book, because I have no doubt that the author is committed to improving the way we humans inhabit the earth. But, I have rarely encountered a book or an audio performance that needed a good editor more.