Cooling Our Environment by Kalpana Sutaria

Cooling Our Environment

by Kalpana Sutaria

Genre: Nonfiction / Climate

ISBN: 9798891325418

Print Length: 230 pages

Publisher: Atmosphere Press

Reviewed by Toni Woodruff

An impassioned & informed plea to reduce carbon emissions and create a livable future

You probably already know about what the gas in our cars is doing to our planet. You might even know about the financial support big oil companies continue to provide for politicians, making it hard for those same people to enact enough change to save the planet. 

But have you stopped to think about just how much our buildings are affecting our climate? They account for more than 40% of all emissions. We’re heating, air-conditioning, and energizing our planet with resources that are actively harming it. There are alternative solutions of course, but we’ve got to use them in order for them to make a difference. Author and architect Kalpana Sutaria has produced enough solutions to spark positive change in Cooling Our Environment: An Architect’s Vision for Combating Global Warming.

Concrete. Glass. Homes designed to match their neighbors’ instead of capitalizing on natural shade and lighting. Sutaria is an architect and project manager in Austin, Texas who works on climate responsive buildings and promotes sustainable guidelines for buildings in the city—and now, she’s provided enough specific guidance and layered knowledge to show laypersons and building professionals how and why to reduce carbon emissions. 

The United States is small but mighty when it comes to its carbon emissions. We continue to pollute our air at alarming rates and are limping toward the can’t-turn-back-now moment with small changes that need to turn into big ones. This book is as much a treasure-trove of climate science as it is an essential plea to policy makers to enact important laws, guidelines, and taxes on carbon. 

Sutaria shares specific knowledge about the architecture scorching under the hot Austin sun and the buildings of her family back home—the extremely hot Ahmedabad, India. We get valuable insight on the purposeful architecture in India, and it supplements what we learn about her home here in the United States.

It’s a full-circle book—one that not only introduces problems in clear ways but provides solutions in ways that only Sutaria could have. The personal touch of Ahmedabad is what makes her expertise so specific and trustworthy—how many people in the world have this kind of knowledge? It’s time to listen up. The country needs to look beyond what it knows of itself in order to understand where to go from here.

Sutaria was brought up in Jainism, one of the world’s oldest religions and that which emphasizes non-violence and treating all things with compassion. This type of thinking isn’t required to recognize what the warming world is doing to our essential birds and insects, but it softens the lens with which we see the world in Cooling Our Environment. Sutaria comes from a place of kindness and knowledge—not much else you can ask for in a book asking you to do something so important and selfless.

There are enough specifics in here to make anyone in the building and political industries knowledgable on what is needed to build our future. Cooling Our Environment is essential reading for architects and engaging science and policy for the rest of us. You might be familiar with some of the issues and solutions already, but that’s because you need a reminder—to pick up that phone and demand the livability of our future.

Thank you for reading Toni Woodruff’s book review of Cooling Our Environment by Kalpana Sutaria! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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