The nature boy - Sierra Club President Adam Werbach

Vegetarian Times, April, 1997 by Andrea Mather

Adam Werbach is the kind of guy you would want on your next camping trip. He's got the easygoing and helpful nature that the occasion calls for, and you can easily see the 24-year-old Sierra Club president pitching a tent or tossing a frisbee with the kids. And, when the time comes for the traditional weenie roast, you could count on Adam, a committed vegetarian, to share his private stash of tofu dogs.

Last year, Sierra Club board members elected this wunderkind to the leadership of the 600,000-member conservation organization, making Adam the youngest president in the Sierra Club's 104-year history. It's a role for which the native Californian has been preparing for quite some time. "I first got involved when I was 8, carrying petitions around against James Watt [Reagan's Secretary of the Interior]," he says.

Adam got an early start on vegetarianism too. When Adam was 13, he became a vegetarian and in eighth-grade started an anti-vivisection study group. "I first got involved in vegetarianism from an animal-rights standpoint," says Adam. "It was something I could do three times a day whenever I ate and make a statement." As Adam has grown, his activism has also matured. Today, his mission at the Sierra Club extends beyond bringing young people to the environmental fold to wooing middle American voters and increasing diversity among the club's ranks. One aspect of addressing the diversity goal is an inner-city outings program that took 15,000 kids out on hikes with Sierra Club members last year.

Adam doesn't think these kids should get their lungfuls of decent air only on these trips. "If you can't breathe, you can't do anything. I went to a school in the South Bronx where two-thirds of the children have asthma inhalers and ... don't go outside during recess because the air is so bad. The school is right next to a factory that emits smoke right into these kids' lungs," he says. "Each year 64,000 people die prematurely because of bad air. Most of those people are elderly people, infants or people with immunity-deficient disorders such as people with AIDS."

To fight this threat, the Sierra Club is helping the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) pass its new clean air standards. Meanwhile, the Sierra Club estimates that industry will spend nearly $23 million fighting the proposed changes. The regulations are currently in the public comment period, and Congress is expected to review the issue this summer. "That is the type of issue environmentalists need to address," says Adam. "Contact your member of Congress and more important, write a letter to the editor of your local paper."

Adam believes strongly in these grassroot efforts and sees it as a part of a revival. "There is a new era of activism happening that still demands a lot but is also very civil. It's not a neo-hippy movement. It doesn't reject capitalism. It looks for solutions."

This philosophy goes hand in hand with what Adam sees as his role for the movement. "The contribution I can make the most is in translating simple concepts that the movement holds so dearly to the rest of the world. The environmental, progressive movement, whatever you want to call it -- we've been really weak in translating all the good ideas we have to the rest of the public," says Adam. "I believe a good idea that sits on a shelf is a useless idea."