I believe in trying to do the best we can, while still living our lives and getting out and seeing this beautiful world. 

I’m also passionate about supporting the businesses – usually small businesses that real people pour their lives into – to make better possible. 

I even built a map of sustainability-focused small businesses, which you can add to!

The tech to create this one is powered by another small business, which happens to be founded and run by women (as, coincidentally, many of the eco-minded I’ve written about). Read more about the map and the original businesses on it in this blog post.

Why I Started Tilted Map

I’ve always loved to do two things: write and travel. When I finished my Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism, I moved to China, started writing for travel magazines, and started my first, very personal, blog.

So I had already been living abroad and travel blogging for years when I went back to school in Italy for my masters in Sustainable Business & Energy.

When I finished the program, the only job I wanted was to combine the two – travel and sustainability. That’s how Tilted Map began.

More About Me (The Personal Stuff)

So far, I’ve lived abroad for five years of my life – but I grew up in the mountains of Northwest Montana, right on the border of Glacier National Park. I’ve always been a nature lover, and that’s part of why I’ve been writing about sustainability and the environment ever since I started blogging. Currently, my home base is in Boston.

I left Montana after college, with a job teaching English to 300 university students in China, a side-hustle as a freelance magazine writer… and just one word of Mandarin.

(If you want some short, fun reading, my old posts about China are some of my favorites.)

And while living in China, I met the man who would become my husband. He’s from Italy, and when we were both ready to leave China, we spent six months backpacking around New Zealand and Southeast Asia to get to know each other.

(Trust me: After living in a minivan for two months with someone, you know whether the relationship can work or not.)

So we moved to Italy together!

I studied Italian full-time for months, while fruitlessly applying for jobs, we got married in Milan, and I went to graduate school for Sustainability & Energy Management at Bocconi University.

I fell in love with a lot of aspects of Italian culture – and I love to write about cultural differences between the US and Italy, which, of course, includes a lot about food culture.

I’ve also briefly held a desk job in France (during which I time I wrote only one post about France, and it’s about toilet paper). I spent a semester studying in Spain, and some summers guiding students around Nicaragua and the Caribbean. And had healthy stints as a nomad with a backpack in between.

[My mostly-serious tips for how to move abroad are all in this post.]

Questions? Ideas?

Whether it’s a product to test, a book to read, or a destination that’s doing something uniquely sustainable, I’d love to hear what’s on your mind! I might not have the answer, but I spend a lot of time testing products, calling experts, and tracking down answers for this blog, so fire away.