This pioneering audiobook by a career industry insider and 9/11 survivor spotlights why the multitrillion-dollar US-built environment is increasingly failing. His analysis exposes policies and interests that to this very day are the root causes of vulnerability. It discusses why the green movement has fallen short in addressing sustainable building development. The audiobook extracts 30 lessons for nations aiming to build a more disaster-resilient future. Guaranteed to stir building, policy, and sustainability circles, it signals a time for change.

• There are four principles or "laws" governing disaster risk. Learn about the primary driver of increased disaster risk in recent history and its only antidote.
• Understand the workings and history of property insurance. Why it failed to anticipate the major disasters of recent decades and how government policies are driving it away from the business, while in its place taxpayers are left to hold the bag.
• Learn how a superpower invested trillions in its built environment but now finds itself the world’s leader in disaster economic losses with large part of it vulnerable to natural hazards. Understand the role played by government policies and private interests in creating a building system that to this very day underperforms. Uncover those who benefit from non-resilience and obstruct changing the status quo.
• Understand why environmentalists should embrace resilience of the built environment. Learn how green and resilient movements can better relate to and work with each other in order to achieve a more sustainable future.
• Extract lessons from US experience that can help other countries avoid similar pitfalls, as they increasingly invest in their built environment. It is not too late for the US to apply these either.

This audiobook's predictions have proven correct during the last five years and will continue so through the 21st century.

It served as inspiration for the 2018 documentary Built to Last? shown on PBS.