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The fundamentals are the same — it’s the tone that’s changed.
America should eat more chicken. But how many is too many?
Answering your questions on AI and energy, the economics of solar, the Green New Deal’s legacy, and more.
Whether you agree probably depends on how you define “climate movie” to begin with.
His new book, Terrible Beauty, argues that “fighting losing battles is a worthy cause.”
When I scheduled this interview with Auden Schendler back in August, I’d picked what at the time felt like an arbitrary time closer to his book’s publication date. It wasn’t until much later that I realized we’d agreed to speak exactly one week after the results of the U.S. presidential election.
Schendler, of course, didn’t write Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul knowing that President Trump would win reelection, but his book feels all the more vital given the new context of climate policy in America.
Terrible Beauty is a memoir, but it also functions as a practical roadmap to attaining climate consciousness, both for companies and for consumers — an unusual blend. In it, Schendler draws on his more than two decades of sustainability work at the Aspen Skiing Company, which owns one of the most iconic ski resorts in the world, to urge by example that we need to get uncomfortable with the big upheavals necessary to combat climate change. The modern environmental movement has failed, he argues, by focusing on the kinds of small-scale changes that have businesses touting flawed carbon credit programs and paper straws — pursuits that are complicit with fossil fuel interests.
Schendler insists that instead, we should be swinging for the fences: Companies that are serious about climate and sustainability ought to use their lobbying powers and legal teams to put pressure on the government, and parents who want a better future for their children should be getting involved in local politics, no experience required. It might be lead to awkward conversations at the water cooler or in the cereal aisle — what Schendler calls the “supermarket problem” — but when everything is at stake, you have to try, even if it means losing.
Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Do you think the stakes of your book have changed between when you began writing it and now, when it’s finally hitting shelves?
On one hand, the stakes have changed because it’s even harder to get to the climate fix than before. A major theme of the book is the idea that we’re not playing a uniquely American game of winning and losing; we’re involved in a practice and trying to make things better. We’re not going to “solve” climate change. We’ve already, you could argue, failed because it’s beyond 1.5 [degrees] Celsius warming. The stakes have changed, but the methodology is the same — and possibly more important now because we are in a long struggle that we might not see the end of in our lifetime.
Something I’ve been hearing since the election is that climate advocates need to play small ball during the Trump administration — keep moving progress forward, even in inches. This is an idea you grapple with quite directly in the book. From your perspective, what is the highest-value target an average person can take on?
To be clear, I’m not advocating for small ball — my book is a critique of modern environmentalism going all-in on small ball. It didn’t work, and that’s not surprising.
Historically, we say, I care about climate and I'm going to plug in on all the things everyone has said I’m supposed to do: recycle, drive a Prius, insulate my house, take the blame for the problem myself. And what I’m saying in Terrible Beauty is, all that hasn’t worked, and it’s actually complicit with a fossil fuel economy.
The thing you need to do is get a six-pack of beer and say, Where am I powerful? What is my power? When people do that, people who don’t appear to have power show that they do. Greta Thunberg is a great example because she was just a high school girl, and look what she did. But if you’re a business, your power is different than you think it is — it’s not cutting your carbon footprint and buying offsets. It’s wielding political power.
I’m asking people to become citizens. Being a citizen is difficult — it’s messy, it’s tricky, you get in trouble.
If somebody wants to get involved interacting with their local government, how do they get past the discomfort of what you call the supermarket problem?
The supermarket problem is one of my favorite illustrations: It’s that if a person is given a choice between being a material part of saving civilization — speaking out publicly on climate, that’s one side of the balance — then you’re going to have a really awkward encounter in the cereal aisle in the supermarket with someone who disagrees with you. Most people will say, Yeah, I really do want to save civilization, but I’d rather not have that awkward encounter.
I don’t think that’s actually the problem in public office. I think what keeps people out is the perception that they don’t know enough — that there’s some secret to being a town council person. Speaking as an ex-town council person, we had no skills at all. It was shocking how bottom of the barrel we were. There’s this mystique, and people have to get over it. The United States was created to enable citizens to govern the country, and so as a citizen, you have an obligation. People shouldn’t be scared off by that.
What is your suggestion for someone who has a corporate sustainability role and reads your book and feels inspired to pursue meaningful, large-scale change, but then runs into resistance or skepticism? How do you get the bigwigs on your side?
My experience was years and years of spoon feeding, and spoon feeding in a way that is not righteous. One approach would be, Hey, I’ve been doing these carbon footprints for five years. Obviously, we care about climate. Have we talked to the Government Affairs Department about how this company can wield power?
You have to become a trusted employee by doing your work well. Corporations are made up of human beings that have great loves and epic tragedies and they care about the world. You have to think that if you bring a reasonable offer to do something next level — and by the way, it also helps the brand — then you’re going to get some traction. Another message of the book is, you might not win, but you try again. And you try again. You try again.
Like what you’ve done with including an appendix on how to sue ExxonMobil. You couldn’t put that lawsuit into motion at Aspen Skiing Company, but now you’ve put it out into the world for someone else to try.
Right. The idea is that fighting losing battles is a worthy cause. That is how humans make progress, whether it’s a fight or an invention or a business model. You try, and it doesn’t work, and then the next person learns from your mistakes and tries, and then the next and the next. And this was true of all the great movements, like civil rights. It was a series of attempts and a series of bad losses over many, many years, and then we won more and more and more.
What, if anything, do you think corporations owe the environment?
One of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is that, historically, corporations have opposed regulations. The reality I think we’re coming into is that business is starting to say, Oh my gosh, climate actually is threatening us. It’s threatening our supply chain, our factories, our customers, everything. I’m inclined to think that businesses will start to say, actually, we need to fix this problem because it’s getting worse and worse.
What does business owe the environment? There is a long history of thought and writing that says the source of all wealth comes from the environment. I think the real question is, is business capable of acknowledging that? Can we count on business as designed to help us solve these problems?
My answer is that we don’t have a lot of tools for climate. We have the vote, we have the legal system, we have NGOs, we have government, we have faith groups, we have philanthropy. Business is pretty powerful. We should at least try to use this lever versus just saying, huh, we can’t do it.
The Aspen Skiing Company, as you acknowledge, often ends up serving the kind of clientele who disproportionately contribute to carbon emissions. How do you square that with the work that you do? Why is corporate sustainability at a luxury level still — or perhaps especially — important?
There are two ways to look at that question, which is ultimately an accusation of hypocrisy. I think one response is, if we are trying to wield power and drive change, where are the powerful people? They’re right here. Those are the rich people spraying champagne on each other. If you said, We’re just going to change our light bulbs and reduce our carbon footprint, then you’d be missing the opportunity to access power. So from one perspective, we have the obligation to see if we can lean on those people and get them conscripted into the movement. I would accept criticism that said, you’re not doing that well enough. That’s fair, but we should be trying.
But then the second piece of that is this: Should they — or we — be guilty for using fossil fuels? The short answer to that is that American citizens asked for the affordably provided services that energy gives us: mobility, heat, cold beer, hot showers. We didn’t say, can you provide that in a way that will destroy civilization? We shouldn’t feel guilty for living in a fossil fuel system we didn’t create.
Climate shouldn’t be only a story for documentaries.
Paranormal: Caught on Camera is not the kind of television show you’d typically expect to read about in a research paper. Recent episodes include “Haunted Doll Bites Child” and “UFO Takes Off in Argentina”; a critic once described it as unsuitable for viewers who have developed “some powers of critical thought.” But credit where credit is due: Caught on Camera cites “climate change” as a possible cause of increased sightings of the Loch Ness monster.
This, alas, is the kind of meager victory the climate movement is often forced to celebrate.
According to research by USC Annenberg’s Norman Lear Center, there were just 1,228 mentions of “climate change” in the nearly 200,000 hours of unscripted TV that aired in the U.S. in the six months between September 2022 and February 2023. (Fifty-eight of those mentions were on “paranormal/mystery” programs, including Caught on Camera.) The situation is even worse for scripted film and TV: Between 2016 and 2020, just 0.6% of 37,453 scripts used the words “climate change” during their runtime. While there are notable exceptions — An Inconvenient Truth won the 2007 documentary Oscar, and The Day After Tomorrow and Don’t Look Up were mainstream hits — climate mostly remains off-screen even as nearly half the population says it has affected their lives.
Starting a Climate Film Festival, then, might seem foolish — because what would you even program? But New Yorkers are about to find out: The inaugural CFF will open Friday with a sold-out screening of the documentary Searching for Amani at the Explorer’s Club in Manhattan, with the festival’s 58 other films to be screened primarily at the Firehouse Cinema over Saturday and Sunday in a de facto kick-off to Climate Week. “Once we started digging, we found that there were an incredible number of these stories being told, but no one was really bringing them together under this rubric,” Alec Turnbull, who co-founded CFF with his wife, J. English Cook, told me.
The supply, however, is noticeably lopsided. CFF received “well over 300 submissions” during its open call for movies this past spring, according to Turnbull — enough that he and the volunteer screeners were able to winnow their broad interpretation of a “climate movie” from anything with “an environmental lens that didn’t have explicit climate themes” to movies specifically about climate.
In the end, though, unscripted documentary-style films and shorts came to dominate roughly 63% of the CFF slate. Only two of the program’s full-length features — the found-footage film Earth II and DreamWorks’ animated movie The Wild Robot — are fictional climate narratives.
This disparity might lead to the impression that there are too many climate documentaries in the world. (Seriously, how many more movies and shows can be made about regenerative farming?) While that isn’t the case — at least compared to something like the oversaturated true crime genre — documentary filmmaker might have more access to the subject than their peers in Hollywood because the medium has a “long history of addressing social issues,” Erica Lynn Rosenthal, the director of research at USC Annenberg’s Norman Lear Center, told me.
At least some mismatch is also likely due to “self-selection bias,” according to Turnbull. He told me that narrative filmmakers might not have submitted to something called the “Climate Film Festival” simply because they “don’t think about the work they’re doing as a climate story.” Another reason might just be endemic to film festivals. “Documentaries are really great for the festival circuit, for impact screenings, and for coupling with resources and workshops,” which boost their visibility even if they “don’t always make it to a broader audience” afterward, Tehya Jennett, whose short scripted horror film “Out of Plastic” is playing at CFF, told me.
According to the Norman Lear Center, however, nearly half of mainstream audiences said they want to see fictional stories that “include climate-related storylines” on screen. That’s far from trivial. “We know from decades of research that stories have the power to shift people’s hearts and minds and move them to action on a variety of topics, whether it’s health behavior or social issues,” Rosenthal said.
Sam Read, a CFF jury member and the executive director of the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, an advocacy consortium that works to reduce the entertainment industry’s environmental impact, confirmed that the demand for climate narratives “currently outstrips the supply.” But he stressed to me that what makes a climate moment in a script doesn’t have to be something preachy, moralistic, alarmist, or even terribly overt, pointing to examples like the most recent season of Hacks, which included a bottle episode about climate change, and True Detective: Night Country, with its environmental and Indigenous plotlines.
“If you’re writing a sitcom and the mom is an office worker, could you make the mom a solar panel technician?” he asked, adding: “There are ways to both help people see what a clean energy future can look like while also exploring how this is affecting communities and how people are responding to it.”
Scripted examples, though, remain relatively rare. In the Norman Lear Center’s research, just 10% of the thousands of mentions of extreme weather in film and TV shows actually made any sort of link to global warming, perhaps because producers or executives worry that referencing climate change is political and might estrange half their audience. “The idea that [climate change] is going to alienate or turn off audiences is really an outdated perception,” Rosenthal said. Still, it’s even harder to push for experimentation and risk-taking when the film industry at large is struggling. And despite how it might look at CFF, it’s the documentarians who have been hit extra hard by the post-COVID turbulence in the movie world.
Of course, none of this is to say that documentaries are any less creative, ambitious, or worthy of being in a festival slate than their scripted counterparts. In fact, the Climate Film Festival’s centerpiece, The Here Now Project, is a documentary entirely composed of found footage of real people filming weather disasters during 2021. “Two people in the film actually say, ‘This is a horror movie,’” Greg Jacobs, who co-directed the documentary with Jon Siskel, told me.
Maybe it doesn’t really matter, then, in what exact form these stories are getting told: in a world with a changing climate, truth and fiction are equally strange.
