I am an urbanite. I love the changing scale of buildings as much as the people and action and opportunity on city streets. Of course, the best cities are not just steel, glass, and concrete, they are interwoven with greenspace and waterways, which provide contrast to the hard, manmade surfaces. The more I learn about sustainability, I more I notice not just parks, but the green in-between spaces as well: sidewalk verges, front gardens (elusive, intriguing back gardens), empty lots, and edges left to grow wild. I find joy in unexpected shady spots and pockets of abundant excesses.

I had been meaning to write about the benefit of nature in cities, when suddenly urban greenspace became frontpage news.

When my then teen-aged son dabbled in anarchy, many of our conversations had me playing the role of capitalist defender. You know the arguments: capitalism and democracy are constructive partners that provide consumers with goods and allow hard-working entrepreneurs to thrive.  I consider myself a social democrat, but clearly my acceptance of business as usual hadn’t changed since high school. The result of our debates? My son has matured into an upstanding and productive citizen actively improving society, and I have gotten an education.

The pandemic has changed the way we use the built environment. Millions of us have had to jury-rig corners of our houses and apartments to create space for work and schooling for ourselves and our families. As a result, many articles and programs with advice for video conferencing and day-planning have popped up to help us.

There has been little discussion, though, of how these changes to how we live, work, and learn will alter the way we use and the way we should design the spaces we call home.

The last blog I published was a year ago!

At the time I was feeling hopeful because renewable energy was challenging fossil fuels, and climate justice was newsworthy. Despite political frustrations, communities seemed to have the wind behind their backs. Myriad articles, books and podcasts were published that addressed consumerism and gratuitous growth. I stopped writing because I was listening, learning and trying to synthesize the encouraging information and stories about changemakers and change

appearing from all directions.

And then we fell headfirst into the pandemic and, as we know, life changed.

Let’s be honest, climate change has hovered in our thoughts for a while now. For over a decade, the topic has confronted us in the media, in advertising, and in conversation. We wonder whether there is something we can do or should be doing. But all potential solutions seem like too little, and too late. Doing nothing doesn’t seem like an option, but deciding on an approach takes too much energy, and it takes the joy out of things we want to do.

This post has been long in writing, as I’ve been drawn away by other priorities, but also drawn to good stories. I had assumed this blog would report straightforward discoveries, instead I have found that compelling stories about our attitudes towards resource use, global warming and social change come in many forms. They are written and reported, but also conveyed through every day actions and activities. How I acquire a story can just as important as the story itself.

 Amid the noisy teeming streets and crowded sidewalks that form the gray and brick grid of lower Manhattan lie a surprising number of lush green spaces that harbor winding garden paths and leafy amphitheaters. These are the Neighborhood Gardens of the ‘Loisada’ in the Lower East Side. Started by local initiatives, often decades ago, they have been supported since 1978 by the city’s Green Thumb Project.

In his prescient 1973 treatise Small is Beautiful, E. F. Schumacher challenged society to reconsider its quest for a global, industry-driven economy. He presented the case for small-scale, locally meaningful economies, writing that “...the specific danger inherent in large-scale organization is that its natural bias and tendency favor order, at the expense of creative freedom.”

Wait, don’t throw that out - I’m taking it for lunch tomorrow!

I try hard not to throw food away. Not having a large US-size refrigerator makes it easier, as there is less chance of losing track of food in our modestly scaled Swiss fridge. But I still throw away more food than I feel good about. Bread is especially hard to keep track of (no, I can’t freeze it - my freezer is just as small).

In a recent conversation about finding positive energy stories in unexpected places, a good friend asked if I knew about Greensburg, Kansas. I didn’t, but it is a town we should all know about. Greensburg presents a compelling example of resilience, sustainability and successful community building in the face of disaster.

Every couple of months there seems to be a new label here in Switzerland, for clothing and food, for appliances and buildings, even for cities. When I go shopping I find a veritable alphabet soup of so-called “ecolabels.” Building industry journals can be even more confusing. Each country seems to have its own building label and sustainability certification in addition to individual product label.

In the spring of 1990, I spent two months driving clock-wise around the United States - from my grandfather’s house on the Jersey shore through Delaware and Maryland to the Florida panhandle and zigzagging across the South before heading up the Pacific coast and back through the northern prairie states to New England.

Every once in a while I come across an idea that makes me wonder why no one thought of it before. We were talking about the idea of “smart sharing” in a discussion group I belong to, and a friend asked, "have you heard about the mailbox stickers in Zurich?

How can we influence the larger energy market when we, as consumers, have no say over where our electricity comes from? Most communities in the United States draw their energy from large regional utilities; 70% of electricity comes from investor-owned suppliers.

Over the past year or so, changes have occurred in the climate conversation. One can almost see the layers of hype and denial rolling away to reveal a rather startled but visibly relieved public hastening to not just agree with the weary experts, but to actively start questioning the role energy plays in their lives and how it squares with their core values.

Government leaders, policy specialists and climate change experts gathered recently in Paris for the COP21 - the “Conference of the Parties” to the United Nations initiative on climate change that began 21 years ago.