Climate change and God - A blog by Auden Schendler

Auden Schendler is Executive Director of Sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company. He is the author of Getting Green Done: Hard Truths From the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution (PublicAffairs, 2009). His writing can be found extensively on The G
Nov 12, 2009 7:05 AM ET

Climate change and God

There’s a great new book out called How the West Was Warmed (www.howthewestwaswarmed.com), about responding to climate change in the Rockies. It’s got intros and conclusions from two of the nation’s leading implementers/rock stars of the new green economy—Gov. Bill Ritter of Colorado and Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper.

It also offers readers a candy store of great essays by excellent writers and thinkers in the West, including Outside contributor/N.Y. Times journalist Florence Williams, Water and drought expert Brad Udall, and editor Beth Conover, who has been in the green trenches for 20 years.

The book includes an essay I originally wrote for Orion magazine on why solving climate change offers humanity a shot at the kind of broad meaning that humans have always yearned for. In fact, I argue, solving climate change has the ability to endow our lives with some of the oldest human desires: a life of dignity, grace, and meaning. The last time we had a shot a something that so comprehensively addressed core human needs was when the world’s great religions were created between two and four thousand years ago. Here’s an excerpt from that essay.

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