Sustainability
10 books on architecture, health, and climate change in 2022
Our selection of essential books to navigate the current architectural landscape in a climate emergency scenario
Today, April 23, International Book Day, we share our selection of 10 essential reads for all those interested in how architecture can contribute to improving people’s well-being and the future of our planet.
1. Tu Casa Sana – Elisabet Silvestre
Tu casa sana. Guía práctica para cuidar de ti y del planeta (Your Healthy Home: A Practical Guide to Caring for Yourself and the Planet) was written by Elisabet Silvestre, a Doctor in Biology, with master’s degrees in Human Biology and Bioconstruction. Her professional work has focused on genetics and subsequently on environmental health, specifically the role of indoor environments in homes and buildings on people’s health.
She is currently a leading expert in biohabitability, a discipline that investigates and analyzes how to design, renovate, construct, and inhabit spaces that are healthy for people and the environment. She teaches this subject in various courses, master’s programs, and postgraduate studies; she is a speaker at conferences and workshops; she participates as an expert in projects and consultancies, contributing her knowledge in human biology and habitat biology; and she collaborates with health and architecture professionals.
She is the author of books such as Geobiología y biohabitabilidad: la salud a través del hábitat (Geobiology and Biohabitability: Health Through Habitat) (2006), Casa saludable (Healthy Home) (2009), and Espacio con valor ambiental (Space with Environmental Value) (2013).
In 2014, she wrote the book titled Vivir sin tóxicos: Cómo ganar bienestar y salud en tu vida cotidiana (Living Without Toxins: How to Gain Well-being and Health in Your Daily Life), a reference work in biohabitability but with a more technical character. In 2019, the same publisher, RBA, asked her to publish a more practical book, aimed at the general public with easy tips for the daily lives of residential architecture users, which is when Tu casa sana began to take shape.
In it, Silvestre shares strategies with the reader to transform their home into an ally for their health, revealing the keys to making their house a healthier place with just small changes, learning how to breathe cleaner air, eat healthier and more consciously, care for their skin with natural products, sleep well with truly restorative sleep, and reduce stress.
The author will guide us with the aim of achieving a real, conscious, and transformative change, through positive habits to live healthier, with fewer toxins, to activate the body’s self-healing and regenerative potential, and to lead a more conscious lifestyle that allows you to live every moment fully.
“Dear reader,
This book you hold in your hands began to take shape in 2019, and as it grew and matured, the health alert due to the coronavirus arrived, a situation that has made the home gain prominence. Until then, daily life usually took place inside the workplace building; little time was spent at home; in fact, the home acted more as a Morpheus. But, with the experience of confinement, the home has become a true refuge, a dwelling, but also an office, a school, or a gym.
For many, this experience has meant discovering their home, learning more about that space they live in and which, until then, they had not associated with how it can contribute to well-being, comfort, and health.
Perhaps after this experience, we need less theory about the role of housing in relation to health. Never before had we spent so much time in it, literally confined. And since the brain integrates through experience and emotion, we cannot deny that both have been very present during this period, and surely something has changed within us.
All of this can represent a before and after in the real perception of housing, in the appreciation of spaces with natural light, cross-ventilation, or access to the outdoors, even if it’s just a small balcony.
Thus, this book is born at a time when the interior space of buildings and homes is in the spotlight. Throughout six chapters, we will focus on our home, on the aspects that most affect health, on what can help us maintain our immune system more balanced and healthy – as well as the respiratory, nervous, and hormonal systems – and on fostering a home environment that promotes the body and mind’s ability to self-regulate and maintain self-care biological systems in shape.
The current situation highlights the need to apply a new, more global concept of health in relation to the quality of the indoor environment of our homes. The objective of this book is to provide options for rethinking habitable spaces, focusing on making them healthier and more sustainable to promote the health and well-being of their inhabitants and the planet. I hope it is useful to you and contributes positively to you making a real change to live in a healthier home.” [1]
2. The New Climate War – Michael E. Mann
The New Climate War. The fight to take back our planet is a work by Michael E. Mann, a renowned climate scientist and American geophysicist, who shows how fossil fuel companies have waged a campaign to deflect blame and responsibility and delay action on climate change.
Recycle. Fly less. Eat less meat. These are some of the ways we’ve been told we can slow climate change. But the overemphasis on individual behavior is the result of a more than thirty-year marketing campaign that has successfully placed the responsibility for fixing climate change squarely on the shoulders of individuals.
Fossil fuel companies have followed the lead of other industries that deflect blame. Thus, they manage to block efforts to regulate or price carbon emissions, conduct public relations campaigns aimed at discrediting viable alternatives, and have abdicated their responsibility to solve the problem they created. The result has been disastrous for our planet.
With immensely powerful vested interests aligned in defense of the fossil fuel status quo, social tipping points will not occur without the active participation of citizens everywhere to aid in collective advancement.
“The Architects of Disinformation and Misdirection
The origins of the ongoing climate wars lie in disinformation campaigns undertaken decades ago, when scientific findings began to clash with the agendas of powerful vested interests. These campaigns aimed to obscure public understanding of the underlying science and discredit the scientific message, often by attacking the messengers themselves—that is, the scientists whose work implied we might have a problem on our hands. Over the years, tactics were developed and refined by public relations agents employed to undermine scientifically based facts and warnings.” [2]
In his work, Mann argues that not all is lost. He draws the battle lines between people and polluters and outlines a plan to force our governments and corporations to wake up and make real change, which includes a review of the currently proposed version of the Green New Deal. [3]
3. Biophilia – E. O. Wilson
Biophilia. The Love of Nature or That Which Makes Us Human is a wonderful and unorthodox memoir by the most important and influential biologist and naturalist of our time, Edward Osborne Wilson. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, his specialty was myrmecology, the study of ants, in which he was called the world’s foremost expert. Near the date of his passing in December 2021, the first Spanish version, translated by Teresa Lanero Ladrón de Guevara, of his most important work: Biophilia, from 1984, was published. [4]
This book is not simply about biology; it is an unorthodox memoir, interwoven with fascinating observations and unexpected autobiographical anecdotes. It is also a necessary declaration of philosophical and ethical positions in a world dominated by the dizzying pace of mass species extinction and climate change. These reflections by a field biologist on the multiple meanings of wild nature illuminate the evolution and complex beauty of our endangered ecosystems and the flora, fauna, and civilization they sustain, while also revealing the personal evolution of one of the greatest scientific minds of our era.
Wilson coins and defines the concept of biophilia in these pages as “the urge to affiliate with other forms of life.” And he tells us how the millions of years during which Homo sapiens related so closely to their environment created a deep emotional need to be in intimate and constant contact with the rest of living beings, whether plants or animals.
“Modern biology has established a new way of observing the world that, coincidentally, aligns with the orientation of biophilia. In other words: in this exceptional case, instinct aligns with reason. The conclusion I present is optimistic: to the extent that we understand other organisms, we will value them more and also value ourselves more.” [5]
The satisfaction of this vital desire is as important for human beings as establishing relationships with other people. Just as we feel good when socializing, we find peace and refuge when we walk through the forest, approach the sea, contemplate a wall devoured by vines, or spend the afternoon with our dog.
Its author skillfully connects facts, history, philosophy, evolutionary biology, and his own professional or daily experiences to demonstrate the existence of this bond and the fundamental importance of preserving it. And he also proposes different ways to rekindle it, because both our existence and that of the rest of the living beings that accompany us on this planet ultimately depend on the survival of this ancestral connection.
4. The Uninhabitable Earth – David Wallace-Wells
“Those of us who live in a skyscraper in New York will also die,” thus began the interview offered by Wallace-Wells, one of the most prominent climate change journalists at the NY Times, for the launch of this indispensable book on the scenarios that await us.
Wallace-Wells is deputy editor of New York magazine, where a few years ago he published a viral article on climate change, in which he bluntly exposed the calamitous costs of doing nothing, or, perhaps more realistically and therefore more threateningly, of doing something but not enough. [6]
The Uninhabitable Earth. Life After Warming starts from the premise that our world is ending and asks: what can we do?
This chilling account of how we are precipitating the planet towards its Armageddon reveals unimaginable threats, even in our worst nightmares.
Today, rising sea levels are a cause for widespread alarm among those who have already abandoned the pernicious dream that global warming is a myth. However, it is not even the tip of the gigantic iceberg of unimaginable horrors threatening life on Earth: fires, hurricanes, droughts, floods… All these disturbing manifestations of climate change, already recurrent for millions of people, are just a preview of what is to come: famines, plagues, unbreathable air, increasingly massive migrations, economic collapse, and even global armed conflicts.
With terrifying precision and lucidity, David Wallace-Wells constructs a kaleidoscopic narrative of the consequences that our impassivity in the face of the ecological crisis will have in just one generation. Harshly emphasizing how we have failed to imagine and, above all, to promote a better future, The Uninhabitable Earth transports us to an imminent future and offers us the definitive reflection on how we have devastated our own home; all of this as a fervent and even more urgent call for change.
5. Flourish – Sarah Ichioka and Michael Pawlyn
Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency offers a fresh and compelling argument from two leading urbanists and architects, Sarah Ichioka and Michael Pawlyn, who answer the question: what does it take to restore balance to our world for the survival of future generations?
More than a manual on how to make the most of our narrow window of opportunity, this book is an invitation to imagine a different range of possibilities and a call to action to move towards a truly regenerative and cooperative way of life. It is a critical yet imaginative approach to how all of us, not just humans, can thrive in a time of intense urban growth.
The work proposes a set of regenerative design principles, drawn from natural and cultural wisdom, offering a paradigmatic plan for designers, clients, and change agents to build a prosperous future together. Its objective is to transform the way we design, manufacture, and manage our buildings, infrastructure, and communities. Thus, it goes beyond “sustainability” to explore “regenerative” practice, what it truly means, and how we can get there together.
“A growing number of people are deeply concerned about our planetary emergency and are asking how we can rise to this seemingly insurmountable challenge. We wrote this book because we believe that the necessary changes lie primarily in cultural, rather than technological, transformation, and that this must occur at the level of mindsets—the shared ideas that determine how society functions. Working in the built environment, this (broad) field is our main point of reference when defining these changes and how we might implement them. We consider these changes essential for the evolution from ‘sustainable’ to ‘regenerative’ design and development.” [7]
Throughout the book’s chapters, a series of key concepts emerge that will need to be transformed into new values and objectives towards which we must direct ourselves to implement regenerative practice and achieve a paradigm shift: from optimism-pessimism to possibilism, from “the future is inevitable” to “we can influence the future,” from the “conquest of nature” to “interconnected humans in a web of life,” from short-term to long-term perspectives, from competition to mutualism, from quantitative growth to qualitative development… [8]
The authors realize that the answer to their initial question lies in nature, from which it is possible to relearn the perspectives and tools necessary to support the flourishing of all life, forever.
