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.

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.

We spend large parts of our lives inside buildings. We expect them to stay warm or cool. We expect them to be equipped with all the lighting and gadgets we need to live well and work efficiently. Energy-use is often an afterthought, until we get our utility bills.  But how would you rate the buildings you live and work in?

I am an urban animal, but part of me relishes getting my hands dirty. Houseplants in my care are doomed, but anything edible in our tiny garden has sacred status. The harvest makes the effort worth it. Gardening for most of my friends here in Switzerland is limited to balconies, but next to the required geraniums is a jungle of herbs, tomatoes and peppers. We have lost so much control over where our food comes from and these small utopias connect us to agrarian self-reliance.

 My childhood in the semi-rural fringes of suburbia was far removed from the plagues of industrialization. While uncontrolled runoff from agriculture, industry and sewers was wreaking damage to the rivers and lakes of the Northeastern United States, I was playing in our backwoods and frolicking on the broad South Jersey beaches. The oil refineries we passed on our way to the city were more fascinating than demonic. But water pollution crept slowly into my awareness.

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.

It was on June 23^rd in 1988 that the then head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen, first informed a congressional hearing in Washington DC that there was a global warming trend that could be pinned to human activities. He advised that immediate action needed to be taken to halt the certain dangerous slide towards a changed world.

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.

With the start of spring, I start to think about gardens and garbage, or rather compost. We live in an apartment, but we do have a small patch of garden out our terrace door. It is about 10 square yards (10m2), but since we’ve lived here, I have planted herbs, tomatoes, lettuce and kale and chilies (the latter two are hard to find in Switzerland). For a good garden you need compost.

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.

For those of us who have enough, our dependency on fossil fuels and other non-renewable resources is deeply embedded in the way we[1] live, in what we take for granted (water, warmth, mobility) and how we express ourselves (new, bigger, better).