# Terrible Beauty with Auden Shendler

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/climate-changers-1038500/terrible-beauty-with-auden-shendler
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/climate-changers-1038500/terrible-beauty-with-auden-shendler.md
Podcast: [Climate Changers](https://stenobird.com/podcast/climate-changers-1038500)
Published: 2024-11-13T10:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://climate-changers.simplecast.com/episodes/terrible-beauty-SEf81mQO
Audio file: https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/c17cb2bb-95ed-4401-905d-12be4e84a8c8/episodes/1d9239f7-e274-4963-a31d-03698256d7f0/audio/311594cc-94e5-436e-86b3-e33df8f0d355/default_tc.mp3?aid=rss_feed&feed=i2wN6ksO
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/climate-changers-1038500/episodes/terrible-beauty-with-auden-shendler
Duration seconds: 1264

## Resource

Walden (1854) defined American environmentalism. A Sand County Almanac (1949) reinvented the field of conservation. Silent Spring (1962) alerted the world to persistent environmental toxins. The Ecology of Commerce (1994) offered a new vision for sustainable economies. Into this lineage, and at the eleventh hour of global environmental struggle, comes TERRIBLE BEAUTY: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul, an expose on the failure of modern environmental movement and a roadmap for a new environmentalism in a world headed towards catastrophe. But TERRIBLE BEAUTY is less a climate polemic or environmental history and more a love letter to the world, an homage to beauty and fun, and a tribute to human aspiration and potential. Harvard Professor Naomi Oreskes called it “weirdly fun and compelling.” Perhaps the world’s leading environmentalist, Bill McKibben, said that “nobody has more credibility” on the topic of sustainable business than author Auden Schendler. Obama’s climate czar and former EPA head said that reading TERRIBLE BEAUTY was like “picking the lock on someone’s personal diary.” This isn’t your standard climate book. It starts with friends in the Utah desert chasing a dust devil, trying to get inside it. The first chapter is partly about the art of wood chopping—though it also covers topics as varied as garden gnomes, Kurt Vonnegut, and the Arab Spring. There are many Springsteen quotes, references to Jack Kerouac, and at least once mention of the band “Florence and the Machine.” Buckle up—this is a wholly different animal than any environmental book you’ve ever read. TERRIBLE BEAUTY posits that the modern environmental movement—which in recent decades has been based in free market ideologies—has failed abjectly. Carbon emissions—and the…

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## Transcript

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