SCHENDLER IS UNAFRAID to sound off, no matter the occasion. In 2006, the SkiCo took heat after he wrote an antidevelopment letter to The Aspen Times, criticizing an expansion plan at the Roaring Fork Club, a private resort in nearby Basalt. After he and Robert Redford won Climate Protection Awards from the EPA in May 2007, they slammed their benefactor in High Country News. "That's right," they wrote. "We have just won a climate award from an agency that had to be sued to act on climate change." And in a business panel at the 2008 Aspen Environment Forum, he mocked corporate sustainability reports for putting a rosy spin on things. "What's on the cover?" he asked. "An elk?A mountain?We put trash on ours!"

All this boiled over in October 2007, when he was profiled in a BusinessWeek cover story. Under the headline "Little Green Lies," the magazine spotlighted him as someone loudly debunking the idea that "making a company environmentally friendly can be not just cost-effective but profitable." He sounded off about "foot-dragging colleagues" more interested in buying guest linens or a new lift than in investing in renewable energy. And while Aspen's carbon footprint was going down, he said, its energy use was still rising, albeit at a much lower rate. "Who are we kidding?" he asked. "I've succeeded in doing a lot of sexy projects, yet utterly failed in what I set out to do. How do you really green your company? It's almost f------ impossible."

The next Monday, Schendler came to work to find his office had been cleared out.

This was a prank, of course—the article had also described him as "tanned and muscular," inspiring his colleagues to paste a shot of Schendler's head onto a photo of a bodybuilder and stick it on the door. But he got a deeper message. "The BusinessWeek thing was very serious, partly because Jim Crown saw it and was like 'What the hell's going on?'"

His comments were all about credibility, he insists, and in line with his belief that self-criticism is the only road to environmental integrity. "I thought everyone understood what I was doing," he says. "Because I'm so steeped in this field, I know that honesty and transparency are the keystones."

His supervisors were a little freaked out at first. "This whole transparency thing—we thought we were being transparent. But Auden took it to another level," says Kaplan, "and as we've had more interactions with people on the forefront of the green movement, they thought it was right on the mark."

Though the company has had his back all along, Schendler toned things down. "The thing is, it did silence me," he says. "You just can't be that guy all the time, dissing the company. Nobody's going to want you around."

Of course, he still has just a few more things to say. In March, PublicAffairs will publish his first book, Getting Green Done: Hard Truths and Real Solutions from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution. It's "witty and contrarian," according to publicity materials, answering questions like "Fluorescent bulbs might be better for our atmosphere, but what do you say to the boutique hotel owner who thinks they detract from his?"

Meanwhile, Schendler is doing less lightbulb wrangling and more wider-reaching projects like the amicus brief. "It's like the sheriff in No Country for Old Men," he says. "I'm tired of the microbattle. I'm moving in a broader policy direction."

And, in a twist that has surprised even Schendler, such big-think has led this coffee-jonesing atheist to the biggest-think notion of all: religion. What he sees as our moral imperative to fight climate change has sparked in him a practical-minded new spirituality, one that only adds fuel to his eco-battle. "What if I gave you an opportunity to address poverty, clean water, disease, and pollution in one?" he asks. "If you solve climate change, you solve all these issues. It becomes this unbelievably powerful opportunity for meaning in our lives. We gotta go for it. It's in our human nature."