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:
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 [...]
Manufactured Landscapes
For a while now, I’ve been hearing about this incredible documentary that follows Canadian landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky as he embarks on a tour through China. And though I still haven’t been able to see it (it’s not being screened in Germany yet and is only in a handful of places in the US), I [...]
The Car-free Life in Paris
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the trend toward building entire subdivisions as car-free communities here in Germany; though these neighborhoods eschew cars and roads for bikes and courtyards, they also offer a bit of storage space to house the bikes (either as covered garages or, in the single-family homes, on porches).
In larger, more [...]
Don’t Believe the Hype
First, full disclosure: Unlike Starre, I didn’t watch LiveEarth. Not on TV or in person or on the Internet. It was held, admittedly, for a good cause. But I’m not a huge fan of pop and celebrity, so something about the whole spectacle turned me off. And that’s tough to say because I try hard [...]
Car-free living
Car-free living is unbelievably easy here in Germany; the country has one of the most extensive train networks in the world. Every major city has a subway or tram line to get you in and out of the city quickly. And bike paths are laid through cities and farm fields, paving the way for a [...]
Green Summer Reads
On Earth Day (I know, I know, that was April, but better late than never), The San Francisco Chronicle compiled a list of environmental books to read. A few of the picks were what I’d consider greeny standard reading: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
It also included the new-to-me World [...]
World Views on Climate Change
In response to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that occurred in March, the Neue Zuercher Zeitung, a newspaper out of Zurich, Switzerland, asked several writers to contribute articles about their experiences with climate change. Now, Signandsight.com has posted English translations of essays by Swiss author Leo Tuor, who writes of [...]
Sevilla Solar Tower
For months, my husband has been raving about a solar tower in Sevilla, Spain, and finally, I’ve seen pictures!
Catching the Rays (c) BBC
The BBC took a tour of the power plant, one of the first of its kind, and it was exciting to see the theory in action. They also included a graphic to [...]
The World is My Playground: The Summit of the G8
G8 Protesters
Over the last year, people in Rostock, Germany have been preparing for the coming week as though there’s a hurricane brewing off the coast of the Baltic - boarding up windows and building fences and booking tickets to get out of town. And though hurricanes are a relatively new occurrence here on the Continent [...]
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