Auden Schendler on 'Confronting Climate Complicity'

Following the conversation, we invite you to join us for a meet-and-greet with the speakers and light refreshments.

Auden Schendler, Senior Vice President, Sustainability, Aspen One
In Conversation with: Professor Kenneth S. Corts, Vice-Dean, Research, Strategy, and Resources; Academic Director, Lee-Chin Institute for Corporate Citizenship, Rotman School of Management

Co-presented by: Michael Lee Chin Family Institute for Corporate Citizenship

A firsthand, trench-view story of the failure of the modern environmental movement—and an inspiring prescription for change.

Something's gone badly awry with environmentalism. We faithfully separate our waste into different streams, but wonder whether it really makes a difference. Global companies announce their commitment to carbon negativity while simultaneously sponsoring oil conferences. American businesses, communities, and individuals assiduously measure their carbon footprints, then implement voluntary emissions-reduction programs, all while trumpeting their do-gooderism.

The problem is, none of this—whether individual efforts or corporate sustainability tactics—will make a dent in solving the civilizational threat of climate change. We only pretend it will, at our peril.

As sustainability veteran Auden Schendler argues in this provocative, powerful book, we're living a big green lie. The hard truth is that much of the modern environmental road map could have been written by the fossil fuel industry specifically to avoid disrupting the status quo. We have become somehow complicit.

But there is another truth: while ineffective or duplicitous environmentalism has become standard practice, we all have friends and family we love and care about, whose future depends on solving the problem of climate change. Conscience tells us we have an obligation to repair the world. How can our common dreams be so at odds with our daily practice? And how might we meld our spirit and our passion to create a better future?

Schendler meets this profound contradiction head-on—with a bracing critique, moving personal stories of parenthood and service, and innovative, real-world methods to tackle climate change at the corporate, community, and individual levels.

Terrible Beauty is a unique and inspiring call for a new environmentalism, showing us that the key to saving the planet is to tap into our own humanity.

Auden Schendler is Senior Vice President of Sustainability at Aspen One, which operates ski resorts, hotels, restaurants, and retail stores. He has worked for 26 years on meaningful solutions to the climate crisis, including activism, movement building, and project demonstration. A former town councilman, air quality commissioner, Outward Bound Instructor and ambulance medic, he was named a “Climate Saver” by the EPA and a “Climate Innovator,” by Time magazine. His first book, Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution, was called “an antidote to greenwash by climatologist James Hansen. Like Walden, A Sand County Almanac, Silent Spring and The Ecology of Commerce, his new book “Terrible Beauty” tries to reset American thinking on the environmental movement, while also telling stories of family, love, beauty and the trench work of climate action.

Professor Kenneth S. Corts is Vice-Dean, Research, Strategy, and Resources and Academic Director of the Lee-Chin Institute for Corporate Citizenship at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management. He also holds the Desautels Chair in Entrepreneurship and is a professor in the Economic Analysis and Policy area.
Professor Corts has previously served in a number of other academic leadership positions at the University of Toronto, including Interim Dean at Rotman; Acting Vice-President, University Operations and Acting Vice-Provost, Academic Operations at U of T; and Director of Rotman Commerce, a role that reports to the Deans of both Rotman and the Faculty of Arts and Science. He has been a visiting professor at UCLA and INSEAD and a visiting scholar at UC-Berkeley and IESE. Before joining the Rotman School in 2003, he was an Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor in the Competition and Strategy area at Harvard Business School. He received his PhD in Economics from Princeton University in 1994.

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The event will be hosted in Classroom LL1060 at the Rotman School of Management (105 Saint George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 3E6).

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