Adam Werbach: the youngest Sierra Club president is aiming for the Grassroots and MTV - Sierra Club, environmentalist group - Cover Story - Interview

E: The Environmental Magazine, Sept-Oct, 1997 by Anne W. Wilke

At age eight, when most of his friends were collecting baseball cards and comic books, Adam Werbach was campaigning for the Sierra Club. He gathered more than 200 signatures from his second grade classmates on petitions calling for the ousting of James Watt, then Secretary of the Interior (and supporter of mining in U.S. national forests).

In high school, Werbach (whose parents were Club members).founded and served as the first director of the Sierra Student Coalition, the national student arm of the Sierra Club. Under his leadership, its membership grew to more than 30,000 volunteers who helped to register thousands of student voters and campaign for the successful passage of the California Desert Protection Act. Then, in 1994, the 21-year-old Werbach became the youngest person elected to the Sierra Club's board of directors. He was honored as an "Environmental Hero" during the club's centennial celebration and received the Denny and Ida Wilcher Award for outstanding membership recruitment.

It seems only natural that Werbach would earn the support and trust of the 105-year-old Sierra Club's membership, and become its youngest president in May 1996, at the age of 23.

"It's time for Adam and his generation to take the torch and work to protect America's natural heritage," says David Brower, more than 60 years Werbach's senior and leader of his election campaign. "Adam has proven he has the skills, the desire and the vision to lead the charge."

Maintaining support from such stalwarts as Brower, while keeping in touch with his own generation, Werbach aims to forge a united front to fight for the environment. His plans include spreading the word through the Internet and music concerts, while also directing a majority of the club's support away from Washington and into grassroots community groups. He is trying to put fun and lightheartedness back into a movement he describes as a "civic success story."

Werbach is hard at work on a Sierra Club CD project tentatively called Rock the Planet. He's also working on his first book, Act First, Apologize Later, which relates the stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

Werbach's Gen X approach has drawn scattered criticism, particularly from baby-boomer environmentalists used to a harder edge. Some rued his endorsement of President Clinton, who is much more chainsaw-friendly than the Sierra Club's membership. Others questioned the wisdom of his call to drain Lake Powell, a popular artificial lake on the Utah/Arizona border that supplies electricity to 500,000 people. And still others wonder if the serious environmental message can survive being wrapped in MTV-style glitz.

The Sierra Club reelected Werbach as president this spring - a sign that the environmental movement, as well as more than 600,000 Sierra Club members, are starting to listen to the younger voices.

E: What are your goals as president of the Sierra Club?

WERBACH: I'm halfway there. I have a two-year project - reinvigorating the grassroots momentum and trying to focus the movement on winning, not just placing band-aids on everything. We need to create structures and processes that will lead us to solutions to fundamental environmental problems.

Another goal is really focusing on outreach. Our success will not be gauged on how good a club we are but on how well we reach out to other people outside of the club. We started out as a very exclusive organization. You needed two recommendations to be a member in the 1950s. The result of that is that we are predominantly white, our average age is 47 and we are largely urban-suburban. We don't reach out to hunters and anglers well, we don't reach out to the religious community well, and we don't reach out to young people or minorities. I sum it up by saying we need to learn to teach the way that people learn, not the way that they teach.

You're talking about a fundamental shift in the Club's makeup. How do you put that into practice?

A lot of it is teaching people the language and getting folks to change some very basic understandings. One of the first things I did was to put the focus on local action. The people that we want to put on a pedestal are the people in their backyards. They stars, not the president' of the Sierra Club, not its board of directors, not its staff. It's the volunteers who come home at 7 p.m. and spend an hour and a half working to protect the Lansdale Marsh in Rhode Island, trying to save the Red River in Kentucky, or trying to protect the air in Cleveland from LTV Steel. Those people are the heroes.

So you're putting a stronger emphasis on grassroots activism. How are you nurturing it?

We have taken 80 percent of the money we spent on direct lobbying two years ago and now spend it on community organizing and community outreach. It's environmentalists saying that instead of playing the game in Washington D.C., the game is to have people demand basic environmental rights. My agenda is very simple. I want to make sure that every child has a clean and safe environment to grow up in.