Auden Schendler's new book Getting Green Done is a kind of mixture of tales from the real sustainability front, a battle cry to action, and something of a slap on the wrist of those who aren't working directly on climate change, messing around with things like schemes to cut back on plastic grocery bags, use potatoes as currency, and sticker Hummers. It's a good, fun read (something we can all use in these troubling economic times), and for those of you new to the entire climate challenge, consider this book Climate 101---your first climate course.
Schendler touches on most of the main climate topics (how fast it's happening, why it's important, what it might do to industries like his own, etc.), but he makes some excellent and very important points that have heretofore not been part of the green revolution's messaging plan.
One is the notion that this movement needs more grunts than visionaries. Every person and his/her dog is claiming to be a visionary in the green space these days--what does that really mean, especially when many of them have just arrived in this space? I can name dozens of green "gurus" who've been doing this stuff less than five years and already call themselves visionary. (Oh really?)
Auden also points out, repeatedly and quite successfully, at just how hard it is to change things from "business as usual." Even a lighting retrofit, which most of us would consider a no-brainer, becomes a lengthy, involved, mangled process as Schendler attempts one in the parking garage at the Little Nell hotel in Aspen.
Ultimately, Schendler explains, doing this stuff is so hard that those of us in the sustainability community need to share the failure stories just as much as we share the successes. That's how we'll all learn, that's how we'll all improve.
One of the things I most feared was any kind of self-righteousness. Reading the press the Aspen Skiing Company has received over the years for its green efforts has been a sort of a turn off. Mostly, because, as Schendler told me in an interview for Mountain Gazette recently, "I wasn't in charge of the message."
But Schendler's book doesn't come across as preachy, and he explains the value of shameful self-promotion, especially when that self-promotion is of the BS kind. (He relates lecturing to a crowd about getting a ski tow to run on renewable energy; they applaud, then Auden explains how lame that effort--in the big scheme of things--really was).
The most salient point, however, is the urgency of what he, and we, are up to. Climate change is thundering toward us like Heath Ledger in A Knight's Tale, and we need to start addressing it--failing and succeeding, but mostly acting-- now, if not sooner.
Cam Burns, Mountain Gazette
