Save Our Snow

As Aspen Skiing Company's sustainability director, Auden Schendler knows how to stay green to keep the white stuff falling. He shares a bit from his new book Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Linew of the Sustainability Revolution

Auden Schendler, Executive Director of Sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company, has written a new book, Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution, full of anecdotes and stories about how to make business and life more eco-friendly. In this selection from a chapter titled “Aspen: A Canary in the Coal Mine and a Shining City on a Hill,” he explains how Aspen can set a sustainable example.

A World’s Fair in Progress

As a result of climate change, we need a new way of thinking, and then living, as the nation 100 years ago found with the help of the 1892 Columbia Exposition. What we need today is a World’s Fair that can help us see how we can confront global climate change and associated problems like sprawl, a decimated natural world, and our other challenges. Happily, such fairs already are under way, and Aspen is one.

This town can be both an inspiration but also a lab for new innovation. For example, the city of Aspen was one of the first municipalities to levy a carbon tax on buildings larger than 5,000 square feet. That policy experience, tested out in the Aspen world energy fair, can and will inform broader policy.

Now, town council members from all over the country come to Aspen to see the next round in the experiment: a huge number of employee housing units and a very good mass transit system; model child care; an exemplary local foundation that protects community health by looking after its citizens in a multitude of ways; a city that will soon be 80% powered by renewables; and an engaged citizenry that writes so many letters to the five local papers it drives some residents crazy.

With a place to stand, Archimedes believed he could move the world. Aspen is a place to stand. Aspen as a whole is a shining city on a hill; it is small enough to nimbly change; smart enough to know it’s onstage; and beautiful enough to inspire the world.

Aspen as Metaphor

There’s one more reason Aspen is a good model: it is a surrogate for America, a microcosm of all the problems, obstacles and opportunities faced in the battle against climate change. Aspen is very much on the front lines of climate change, and the city government knows it: that’s why they created the Canary Initiative. One of their first projects was a study that looked at the best available science to answer the question: What’s going to happen to Aspen in 50 years? In 100? The study’s findings were astonishing. Even if global greenhouse gas emissions are reduced, Aspen is projected to experience about 6°F of additional warming by 2100, making its climate similar to that of Los Alamos, New Mexico. If global emissions continue to rise as rapidly as they have been, Aspen would warm 14°F by the end of this century, meaning you can click and drag Aspen down to Amarillo, Texas.

This kind of change boggles the mind, and it hits the wallet as much as it does the environment. You could say that Aspen is a climate-based community. If you want to know whether climate change is happening in Aspen, ask the people who are intimate with the seasons. Lou Dawson, a legendary backcountry skier who has been touring in the Colorado mountains for 30 years, now says April is the new May in terms of spring snowpack…the high peaks have lost a month of winter.

Butcher the Energy Hog

Climatically, then, Aspen really is a canary in the coal mine. It will show changes and suffer consequences before most of the country, even coastal areas, due to the unique impact warming has on alpine environments. As such, it serves a role: the rest of America might learn its fate, or how to avoid it, by watching Aspen in the future.

In the present, Aspen is a good proxy for America as a whole because Aspen is, like the rest of the country, an energy hog. It’s the standard bearer for conspicuous consumption. For that reason, when I talk about sustainability and Aspen (particularly skiing) in the same sentence, I often get an “Oh, Please! If you care about sustainability, Aspen Skiing Company should just shut down. And the whole town probably ought to shut down too.” Certainly, Aspen’s lifestyle is lavish. But then, so is the entire U.S. lifestyle. You’ve heard the statistics before: we’re 5% of the world’s population, and we use 25% of the planet’s resources.

Meanwhile, a study by the Canary Initiative showed that per capita greenhouse gas emissions in Aspen were about four times the national average. To be fair, that was in part because the airport’s emissions were included in the study of the town. But nonetheless: from an energy consumption perspective, if the U.S. on average is a hog, then Aspen is Hogzilla.

So what do we do, close down Aspen, and then close down the U.S.? Because the U.S. is hugely wasteful compared to Europe, which, along with the Japanese, uses about 60% less energy per capita. And, actually, Europe is pretty bad compared to India, which is at the bottom of the energy consumption chart. Do we shut down Paris? In short, there’s no way to draw this moral energy line in the sand—which activities are O.K., and which are not.

Yes, modern Aspen emits more carbon, but we also have greater financial resources to address those carbon emissions. Aspen needs to be a model for the world, because if not us, then who?

The best thing to do would be to implement even more sustainable practices—the real ones, things that really matter and drive real change. And to do that, you need to be clear eyed about how you can make a real difference: you need to find your biggest lever, and use it.