Word: werbach
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...recent support for tough domestic clean air regulations, Clinton's most substantial pledge was to supply developing countries with $1 billion over the next five years to help reduce carbon dioxide emissions. No better than "using a squirt gun to quell a raging fire," snipped Sierra Club President Adam Werbach. "With the whole world watching, the president of the world's biggest polluter needs to do more than warn of the dire consequences of global warming." Even though the President did promise to come up with a "realistic" U.S. plan to slash emissions before December talks in Kyoto, Japan...
...Adam Werbach can be excused for a certain zany iconoclasm. After all, he is only 24--the youngest person to head the nation's largest environmental organization in its 105-year history. "We have a lot to celebrate," he tells his listeners, gathered for three days of seminars on such topics as "Dioxins, Endocrine Disruptors and Birth Defects" and "Green Politics in the U.S. and Bulgaria." The recent Brown University graduate recalls how, growing up in Los Angeles, "my T-ball practice was canceled week after week because of smog. Now the air is cleaner." The morning of his speech...
...hiking enthusiasts, Werbach first became active when he collected signatures from his second-grade classmates on a Sierra Club petition to oust Interior Secretary James Watt. "I thought it had something to do with electricity," he jokes. But by the time he reached high school, he had become a vegetarian, formed an antivivisection study group, bought a truck to recycle the school's trash and, as a senior, founded the Sierra Student Coalition. At Brown he nurtured it into a nationwide corps of 30,000 activists. He was elected to the Sierra Club's 15-member board of directors...
...environmental movement is..." Werbach pauses, searching for an epithet. "Mature," he finally says, with distaste. To appeal to Gen X, it must focus on local action, with an accent on multiculturalism. "When I started the Sierra Student Coalition, I took s___ for selling out to a white organization," Werbach says. "It is not just about Yosemite and the beauty of the wilderness. It is about cities--the air we breathe and the water we drink. When I speak in urban grade schools, their No. 1 issue is the rain forest! That is disempowering, when these communities are surrounded by incinerators...
...says Werbach, responds to aggressively hip, visual and interactive messages. Want to fight oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic Wildlife Refuge? Set up booths to sell black snow cones. Want to protest the G.O.P.'s eco-bashing? Hang Newt Gingrich pinatas, provide a bat and whack for candy. To influence policy, call out the "dorm-storming" troops--activists who knock on college doors and urge students to E-mail their legislators. "We communicate in a different way," Werbach says. "We can sit here bemoaning Beavis and Butt-head, or we can learn from their appeal. A lot of people...