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:
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 [...]
Etsy’s handmade goodies
A few weeks ago, while strolling through a farmer’s market in Amsterdam, I came upon a stall selling these purses …
I chatted with the seller for a bit and he explained the process his partner went through making these. The idea was simple, really … recycled munitions pouches from the army surplus store were made [...]
Why is Europe greener (really)?
In case you missed it, The New York Times Magazine was devoted to green architecture on Sunday. It printed several articles, including a piece by the Times’ chief architecture critic, Nicolai Ourousoff, that I found especially interesting. In it, he asks, not entirely rhetorically, Why Are They (Europe) Greener Than We (The US) Are?
The article [...]
How Good is Good Enough?
Cartoon by John Darkow
A few years back, in the middle of a cultural studies seminar that sidetracked into a tag-team Wal-Mart bash, the woman sitting next to me rolled her eyes. “This argument is so last year. Can we get over Wal-Mart already?” she said. I’m one of the few Americans left who’s never been [...]
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