The Clearing book

Andrew Todd's third book was published by Nybrogade Press in 2023.

Following The Open Circle (faber, 2001) and Common Sense (RightAngle, 2016) Andrew Todd's newest book engages with the world of trees, forests and wood.

For Frédérique Aït-Touati 'Faced with our polymorph and quicksilver crisis of habitability, this book responds with a choir of voices: personal, professional, historical and familial, with a global reach. The resulting music is something new, and something apt to equip us to face with more insight and fortitude the particular challenges of our time.'

The book was launched in parallel with Andrew Todd's translation of Marion Waller's book 'Natural Artefacts' in Copenhagen at Nybrogade Press headquarters, on a book tour of the United States organised by the Institut Francais, and at the Bartlett School in London at UCL.

From the book's précis:

Trees and forests belong on earth, we do not. We are their guests, dependent on their oxygen and their materials for our existence. We are bad guests, misunderstanding and mistreating our hosts. We are reaching the point where this mistreatment will undermine our own capacity to live. Is it too late to become good wood-guests? If not, how? What new forms of awareness must we develop? This book tries to answer these questions.

Author Andrew Todd is an architect, winner of the WAN Award for the best wooden building in the world for the Hardelot Elizabethan Theatre. Anchored by his own roots making plant-based buildings, and by the example of his forest manager father, he takes us on a journey which looks at trees and forests from a kaleidoscopic range of viewpoints: as solid matter for building shelter, as ongoing habitat for timeless tribes, as the seat of Western origin myths. The Clearing takes us to the contested, multi-layered forests of Old and New England, to the tropical rain forest (a scene of our civilisational endgame), to ultra-modern (yet animist) Japan, to harmonious and innovative wooden villages in Austria, and to the terraformed, zombie-forested Ascension Island in the middle of the Atlantic.

On the way we encounter Donald Trump, Queen Elizabeth II, Leonardo da Vinci, cutting-edge contemporary philosophers closely concerned with the forest, Charles Darwin, invisible Shinto shrines, brilliant female pygmy architects, Davy Crockett, and a fig tree and bonsai pine carrying forward the author’s own family story, framed in this book by two deaths.

The forest is everything, a totality in which we need to find ourselves, both individually and as a civilisation, against a background of loss. This book is a quest, a possible cross-section through this totality, using the pain of loss to heighten our awareness. It might orient us in forging a new relationship with our woody hosts.