Auden Schendler spent twenty-six years running sustainability programs at Aspen One, 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.
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,” he has climbed Denali, North America’s highest peak; kayaked the Grand Canyon in winter; and twice ascended Mount Rainier’s Liberty Ridge: the first time terrified, the second competently.
