Auden Schendler Wants to Ruin the Way You Think About Modern Environmentalism

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.