By Carlos Rojas
It is urgent for our species' future to understand the role of architects in today's world and transform it.
As architects we propose and decide the materials and processes that make up our habitat. We design the boldest impact on the planet: human settlements. We design and propose the most important expenditure and relevant object in families' lives: their homes. We shape relations and spaces that sustain our species, materializing and reinforcing the social and economic structures of our cultures.
The responsibility of architects is enormous. We materialize the vision of our time, suggest the use of relevant amounts of resources (around 25% of families' life investments) and solve with our pencil the most relevant relation for our species: the interaction between us and nature. 
Facing this responsibility, we, architects, have failed radically. We have rarely achieved more than the comfort of a privileged portion of the human population and have promoted a consumption economy that is destroying the web that sustains life in our planet.
In doing our job we have destroyed biodiversity and we are major contributors to the global climate crisis. Our decisions have notoriously helped to put humanity at risk. It is time to recognize our monumental mistakes.
The building of big cities that depend on oil and the indiscriminate use of concrete, steel and other industrial materials and processes is responsible for 71-76% of the global production of carbon dioxide according to a total energy use analysis.
Therefore, building big cities is not saving the planet. It is generating continuous environmental degradation by conditioning humans to an unsustainable energy use.
We have created thermic islands that increase the planet's heat and have consumed at least half of all the precious wood in ancient forests. We have sustained the invasion of fertile soils and, after industrialized agriculture, we are second in providing animals and humans with synthetic molecules that enter the continuous plasma of life, making us more susceptible than ever before to cancer.
At least 94 different synthetic molecules circulate in the bloodstreams of humans today. We have collaborated in making cancer responsible for nearly 50% of all clinical deaths in developed countries.
We, architects, have accepted the use of asbestos, formaldehydes, organic volatile compounds and metals, collaborating in the illnesses and deaths of thousands of people. We have supported in at least 100 different ways the harmful contamination of air, water and soil.
We have made concrete the second most used material on earth after water, thereby supporting a corrupt elite in accumulating money and political power in an unprecedented international scale.
We have contaminated the sea in multiple ways, among them poisoning coral reefs by allowing concrete residue to pollute the water. The reefs, a source of marine biodiversity, are now in an imminent danger of extinction.
When we build houses without solving sewage treatment issues, we take away valuable nutrients from the soil and dump them into the water, promoting the death of soil, rivers and oceans. This practice provides excessive nitrogen to the water and promotes the dispersion of diseases into vulnerable communities. 
We have supported gentrification, a name for economically-induced human displacement. If we work for commercial building companies, we are instrumental in helping it. As a result, in many large cities of the world, vulnerable populations are forced to lived near untreated water sewage runways.
By supporting the centralization of human settlements, the development of big cities, we have created concrete islands that favor big capital interests. These settlements do not make us proud anymore because we have helped to create a society with unsustainable spatial and aesthetic patterns.
We have failed in assessing the fact that urbanization as a land use strategy is incapable of preserving life in a rapidly changing environment. Urbanization as a global trend is deepening global environmental justice gaps, encouraging the abandonment of the countryside by native cultures. The land is subsequently appropriated by private corporate capital that initiates destructive projects after taking over control.
This is happening in both developed and underdeveloped nations.
The privatization of water and resources by corporate capital is an extremely violent process that we do not perceive while we are distracted in the amusement offer and status quo of big cities.
Brazil and Colombia, the two most biodiverse countries on the planet, are suffering the massive destruction of precious Amazonian ecosystems. By abandoning to design the countryside and native cultures we architects are helping to destroy the Amazon and the planet.
We have failed to recognize that big cities are extremely vulnerable and not suitable for human survival in a climate change scenario.
We have failed to tell people that big cities have become a scene of power manipulation in which architects become instruments of a destructive economic machinery. Our profession has been increasingly reduced to the miserable task of producing commercially attractive makeup architecture that is incapable of challenging or proposing the new worldview that humanity as a species at risk is clamoring for.
We are also facing the global warming crisis announced by the international scientific community on water and food provision. The human urban settlements we have created do not stand a chance of surviving but a few days because they rely on unsustainable resource importation systems.
Most world cities depend on petroleum for the import of water and food from great distances. More serious than an imminent petroleum scarcity is the fact that before petroleum reaches its peak usage, the global climate crisis will already have caused water and food shortages. This process is already under way.
We have been naive in believing that cities and industrial materials can build a sustainable world and we have taken insufficient and self-indulgent measures. Though aware of this fact, most of us architects have decided to keep our jobs within this system to sustain our families while failing to protect our human family. 
Therefore we propose:
1. Do not accept the violence implied in conventional architectural practices. Question the whole practice, the materials used, and the construction techniques. Question cities and the way in which we settle on the planet.
2. Restore the planet creating regenerative architectures, create architectures. Let's create architecture that gives back nutrients to the soil: human waste can be incorporated into soil but not into water. Architecture can also recollect, purify and reintegrate water, feeding life instead of destroying it.
3. Let's abandon the vanity of unsustainable physical shapes. There is a deeper beauty: the beauty of acting ethically.
4. Let's assume the failures of industrial habitat production and do not sell ourselves out to money created with destructive architectural services. Create new architectural services that restore the planet.
5. Assume the failure of urbanization as a suitable development paradigm able to support humanity in the long term. Promote the creative building of other possible paradigms like transition towns, ecovillages, and permacultural villages. Also, create new sustainable countryside alternatives for living.
6. Let's assume the redesign of our habitat with the honest objective of providing survival options to our species. This implies today, more than ever, that we look again to the countryside, work with organic farmers, biologists, permaculturists, forest engineers, ecology scientists, communities, and native people to create regenerative and clean settlements. This would enable us to produce organic food, eliminate massive transportation, generate clean energy, and sustain water cycles.
7. Develop regenerative, decentralized settlements, integrated into the ecosystems we need to protect. To achieve this, architects must go outside big cities to join social and environmental leaders in creating new social relations and self-government forms that integrate the care of all living systems.
8. Question the slow pace at which architecture academies are adapting their teachings to the needs of our times. Academies are validating a profession full of indefensible customs, so let's question their complicity with deeply violent processes.
9. Listen to and embrace the values of schools of thought that are free from commercial interests. It is a priority for architects to learn profound ecology and permaculture, the least violent habitat design method created by humanity. Learn bio-architecture and the integration of physical structures in the production of clean food.
10. Rather than using the most complex or quickest technologies, teach the new generation to utilize ones that use the least amount of energy possible to preserve life and diversity on the planet. Building with vegetable organic fibers and crude earth are examples of high technologies that may help develop biomimetic and regenerative architectures that are still to be explored.
Let’s together work for planet regeneration with all our strength, with all our creativity, and with our heart in our hands. This is the call of our time. Let's sing the song our creative spirit wants to hear.
It is in our hands.
CARLOS ROJAS
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Arquitecto