Auden Schendler

Sustainability Expert

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Aspen, CO

Auden Schendler
Biography

Auden Schendler spent twenty-six years running sustainability programs at Aspen Skiing Company, which operates ski resorts, hotels, restaurants, and retail stores. He focuses on scale solutions to climate change, including clean-energy development, policy, advocacy, movement building, and activism. Some of his projects included development of small hydro-electricity, utility-scale solar, coal mine methane-to-electricity, and community organizing to replace the board of a utility. He is currently a partner in Switchback Restoration LLC, which is destroying methane leaking from a closed coal mine in Western Colorado.

Along with Protect Our Winters, where he served on the board for a decade, he is working to mobilize the outdoor industry as a political force. Previously a research associate at Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), he is author of the new book Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul (November, 2024) and Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution, which climatologist James Hansen called “an antidote to greenwash.”

He was named a “climate innovator” by Time magazine and a “climate saver” by the EPA. Auden served on Colorado’s Air Quality Control Commission, where he developed state climate policy, and between 2016 and 2020, he was elected to the town council of Basalt, Colorado.

An avid outdoorsman and "dirtbag," Auden has worked as a burger flipper, Bobcat driver, medic on a rural ambulance service, a Forest Service goose-nest island builder in Alaska, auction junk sorter, gas station attendant, Outward Bound instructor, high school English and math teacher, ski instructor, and low-income housing weatherization technician. He is currently an advisor to the nonprofit "Climate Voice," which is pressuring corporations to take meaningful positions on climate policy.

A graduate of Stuyvesant High School and Bowdoin College, he lives in Basalt, Colorado, with his family.

Auden Schendler
Featured Video

Current: Impact Minute #33: What If We Really Cared about Sustainability with Auden Schendler

Time 03:07

Auden Schendler
Featured Keynote Program

Meaningful Action on Climate Change, Rethinking Corporate Sustainability, Hope in the Climate Crisis, and Reinventing Modern Environmentalism.

Auden speaks about the climate crisis and the need to rethink modern concepts of “sustainability” in ways that drive meaningful, large scale change. His work has been covered by mainstream media as part of a broader critique of ESG investing and business practices. An expert in corporate sustainability, the impact of climate change on the outdoor industry, green building, clean energy and climate activism, Schendler calls out the broad failure of market-based sustainability solutions to move the needle on global warming. His new vision of corporate sustainability argues traditional footprint reduction and often token operational actions are not nearly enough to solve the climate crisis, and that businesses are obligated to wield power and become involved in the political process. This approach, outlined by Schendler in the NY Times and other media, focuses on movement building and high-leverage, replicable actions.

As longtime board chair of the emerging nonprofit Protect Our Winters, Schendler has helped build a nonprofit designed to function as the NRA of the climate movement, mobilizing the 40 million-strong outdoor community as a political force for climate action. He has argued that traditional environmentalism has been co-opted by the fossil fuel industry, steering businesses and individuals towards actions that avoid systemic change.

On the ground, Auden has helped pioneer innovative, replicable, and bipartisan climate projects like the Elk Creek coal mine methane-to-electricity project, developed in collaboration with Oxbow, a conglomerate owned by Bill Koch. Auden certified one of the first LEED certified buildings in the world, and helped develop all-electric employee housing structures and ground-source heat pump based commercial buildings. Using Aspen Skiing Company as a lever, Auden spent fifteen years changing the board of his coal-based regional utility, Holy Cross Energy. That co-op will achieve 100% renewable power by 2030. Aspen’s pressure on Kimberly Clark helped move the company towards more sustainable practices. Funny, energetic, and relevant to the moment, Auden’s talks are based on stories of success, failure, humanity and hope.

Auden Schendler
Featured Articles & Resources

Joy, Joylessness, and Durability in the American Project - Philadelphia Inquirer

By Auden Schendler

Sustainability Expert

Philadelphia Inquirer, Dec. 1, 2025 One day a High School English teacher at my gigantic public high school in Manhattan paused the lesson. He placed his hands shoulder-width...

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