Join us at Inspiration Hall at 6pm, September 22 to meet Auden Schendler!

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, incuding clean-energy development, policy, advocy, movement building, and activism. Some of his projects included development of small hydro-electricity, utility-scale solar, coal mine methane-to-electricty, and community organizing to replace the board of a utility. He is currently a partner in Switchback Resotration 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 the author of the new book Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul and Getting Green Done: Hard Truths fromthe Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution, which climatologist James Hanse called "an antidote to greenwash." 

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