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Getting Green Done

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Getting Green Done

Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution

Public Affairs,

15 min read
10 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

The world’s citizens must curtail global warming immediately. A hard-nosed warrior in the sustainability struggle explains why and how.

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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Well Structured
  • Visionary

Recommendation

Auden Schendler serves as the sustainability director of the Aspen Skiing Company, which operates the Aspen/Snowmass resort complex in Colorado. He discusses his successes and failures in promoting sustainability to illustrate the lessons he has learned. Proving refreshingly open, Schendler criticizes his colleagues, including his previous CEO, who told Schendler he could introduce a green initiative only “over my dead body.” Schendler calls for transparency and an end to greenwashing, demanding that corporations, nonprofit organizations, and governmental bodies clarify which sustainability projects work and which do not, and pursue the ones that make a difference. getAbstract recommends this valuable guide to executives, government leaders and concerned citizens who want to take meaningful action against global warming.

Summary

Losing the World

Global warming is serious. In 2007, the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that the world’s nations must immediately institute practices to reduce greenhouse gases. Otherwise, Earth will experience a catastrophic climactic disaster. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC, said, “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late.”

Unless countries immediately curtail global warming, expect to see island nations under water, a 50% reduction in African food crops and a 5% drop in global gross domestic product (GDP). The IPCC’s November 2007 report, which 140 nations, including China and the US, endorse, documents the scientific community’s conclusion that global warming is real, ongoing, and man-made. The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Sciences and the scientific academies of every G-8 nation support this contention.

Corporate propaganda that denies global warming may be one cause of ordinary citizens’ apparent lack of concern about the environment. As writer Paul Hawken said, if you read reports on global warming and you are not anxious, you are looking at incorrect...

About the Author

Auden Schendler is the executive director of sustainability at the Aspen Skiing Company. In 2006, Time magazine chose him as a “global warming innovator.” Schendler has summited Alaska’s Mount Denali. His work has appeared in the Harvard Business Review, the Los Angeles Times and Rock and Ice magazine.

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