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 their associated superstorms, fires, and droughts—increase ever year. Yet the environmental community continues to pursue token solutions and half measures— performative actions like setting carbon targets or buying offsets—that don’t come close to a fix. They—and the “green” corporations that pledge climate salvation—are following a playbook that could have been written by the fossil fuel industry. The hard truth is that environmentalists themselves have become complicit with a carbon economy, and unless something changes, our future includes more than 4C warming over preindustrial times.
Schendler tells the story of environmentalism’s failure and America’s way out more in stories than in facts, though the book is replete with those. But, as it makes clear, the way to understand what we have to lose, and the opportunity ahead, is to understand what makes us human: teenagers playing baseball above the Lincoln tunnel in the polluted 70s; a “turtle boil” on Hatteras Island with family; or floating down the Green River with a friend twenty years your senior.
We’ve badly failed in the climate fight using technical means; our politics have lacked ambition and been co-opted by the enemy. What we need to solve climate change is a movement of people, like revolutions through the ages. The only way to get to massive social change is through the heart. TERRIBLE BEAUTY asks and answers the famous questions posed by French painter Gauguin: “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” in deeply human, inspiring, and often hilarious ways. Readers will never look at their lives the same again.
