About: Courtney
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Raised in rural Wisconsin, Courtney Tenz learned to appreciate the earth from her naturalist father and her city-bred, sun-loving husband. Though she swore as a child that she would never ever sleep outside during thunderstorms or get her hands in the mud as an adult, her husband’s work as a solar energy specialist had them camped out at Penn State University’s Center for Sustainability for a brief time. While she finished her Master of Fine Arts degree, she also learned the ins and outs of organic farming, composting toilets, green roofs, green machines, and, of course, solar energy.
Now based in Cologne, Germany, Courtney’s trying hard to lower her carbon footprint from 1-1/2 earths to just one and living the vegan life while her husband’s trying to save the world with energy from solar trough collectors. She spends most of her time traveling the continent in search of all things green. And she’s found it everywhere from the organic fincas of Spain to the windmill-dotted seascape of the Baltic Sea. Her writing about these adventures has appeared in German Life, Veg News, and E/The Environmental Magazine as well as other magazines. She sometimes updates her blog, Futile Diatribes, filled with futile diatribes about literature, politics, and German living.
Posts by Courtney:
Ecotopia!
Got plans to hop the pond this year? Feel an urge to make that trip a bit more sustainable? Think about dropping by Ecotopia in August, a two-week mobile extravaganza that highlights all the wonderful, earth-friendly things you can do to make your existence more sustainable. Specific deets for this year’s festivities - held in [...]
The Green Yoga Association
Last summer, totally by chance, I met David Lurey, a traveling yoga teacher who preaches the values of being a green yogi. As a member of the Green Yoga Association, Lurey travels to studios around the world and consults teachers, students, and owners alike on how to make the yoga practice more environmentally friendly.
After [...]
Nuclear Is No Option
A few months ago, I posted here a compendium of reasons why I live in Germany. Though I’d intended the post as an answer to all those who’ve asked in the past, writing it also helped me to see through the myths I’d taken too seriously (i.e. all Germans are green) and helped me better [...]
Hurricanes in Europe?
Two years ago, my husband and I were invited to a presentation by one of Germany’s top Climate Change Researchers at The Wuppertal Institute in Berlin. I forget the presenter’s name now but remember bits and pieces of what he said … mainly those things I’d never heard before.
Like that the way the climate [...]
Why I Live in Germany
People often ask why I live in Germany and I never really know what to say because the reason I came is not the reason I stay. I came because I received a grant from the Fulbright Association to do research I could have done (less well) in the US. I stay because my husband [...]
Cologne’s New Smog Control
I live in a city with its own special breed of traffic jams – traffic that gets so snarled, it has its own label: stau. Cologne, a city of 1 million people, its geography divided in two by the Rhine River, can sometimes have traffic so backed up that it’s faster to bike across the [...]
Lululemon & oqoqo in Chicago
One thing that’s driven me crazy since moving to Germany is the total lack of decent clothing for working out … and by decent, I mean that it had to fulfill at least one of my sustainability criteria: be made of organic or sustainable fabric, be recycled or secondhand, or be manufactured sweatshop-free (something that [...]
Green for All
I’ve been reading quite a bit lately about Van Jones and his Oakland-based campaign, Green For All, and I’ve got to say, I’m intrigued.
Premised on the idea that a clean-energy economy can help lift people out of poverty, Jones’ campaign advocates for the creation of what he calls green collar jobs (manual labor positions that [...]
ReJEANeration
Last month, Starre posted about E Magazine’s Eco Fashion spread (still on shelves and definitely worth the $!), which highlighted some seriously stylish new threads. Reading about all the hot fashion out there gave this hippie some hope … for years, I’ve been squeezing myself into my fashionista sister’s designer hand-me-downs because I could never [...]
Mortgaging Planet Earth
Whenever I start to feel a little cynical (depressed?) about being an environmentalist (i.e. whenever I get the urge to put on some snakeskin sneakers, wear diamonds bigger than my eyeballs, smoke CO2 cigarettes, and hop on my mahogany-furnished private jet to hurtle me and my friends around the world while drinking whiskey made from [...]
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