Working With the Enemy

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Desk Jockey Teaming up with the country's largest employer, Werbach says, gives him a chance to change the world.

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Werbach woke up the morning of December 9, 2004, with the hangover of his life. The previous night, he had stood at a wooden lectern at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club to tell a packed room of 250 people, including the leaders of environmentalism's most influential organizations, that their movement was dead. He had become increasingly discouraged by a supposedly progressive movement that didn't know how to be progressive with its own ideas. Within the first five minutes of the hour-long, 31-page speech, he announced with the tone of someone reading last rites: "I am done calling myself an environmentalist."

In its effort to protect seal pups and redwood trees, he told his mentors, friends, and colleagues, the movement had forgotten human beings. What was needed, he said, was a new way of connecting sustainability to the aspirations of everyday people. "Make executive directors [of environmental groups] go to a red state and try to explain environmentalism to the average American. If they don't have a plan to activate the values we share [with] the majority of Americans, then they need to move on."

The next morning, Werbach was overwhelmed with the consequences of committing professional hari-kari. "I thought the speech would be cathartic," he says. "It wasn't." His phone wouldn't stop ringing, but the voices on the other end didn't want to discuss how they could reimagine environmentalism. They wanted to tell him how wrong he was. The board at Common Assets, an environmental startup he'd been running, promptly fired him, leaving Werbach, who had a newborn daughter, without his primary source of income. Even worse, he had ousted himself from the very life he had always dreamed of. "I just remember thinking, 'What am I going to do today, become a fireman?'"

Werbach had been drawn to environmental issues since elementary school. As a 7-year-old in L.A.'s San Fernando Valley, he would check the daily smog reports before T-ball practice. By 13, he had persuaded his parents to let him open a checking account so he could become a "rainbow warrior" with Greenpeace. In 1990, as a high-school student, he walked into a campaign center working to pass "Big Green," the sweeping voter initiative in California that would have promoted everything from fuel economy to open space. Werbach recruited hundreds of students to the cause. The initiative was defeated, but the morning after, his recruits were asking their accidental leader what to do next. By the time Werbach had graduated from Brown University in 1995, he had created the Sierra Student Coalition, the first national student-run environmental organization; today, it has 30,000 members.

It was this dynamism that got him recruited in 1996 for the monumental task of changing the face of the Sierra Club, the nation's largest and oldest grassroots environmental organization. "When he was hired, people were probably expecting a scruffy kid with a beard and flip-flops," says Jon Coifman, national media director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "That's certainly not what they got. He was articulate, smart, and had a real fresh take on things." Werbach quickly realized he could use his youth to his advantage and questioned the Sierra Club's every habit. Instead of focusing on policy, he set out to engage the public. During his first year in office, he toured the country giving more than 200 speeches, trying to reach young people. By the end of his second term, the average age of a Sierra Club member had come down to 37, from 47. But he felt that he was wasting time managing internal battles. And, he admits, "I was trying to push a lot of change very fast, so I think there were a lot of people frustrated with me."

After his second term, Werbach moved on to more-entrepreneurial environmental efforts: starting Act Now, cofounding the Apollo Alliance to jump-start an alternative-energy economy, and picking up the Common Assets post. Restless and impatient, he was beginning to question not the goals but the methods of mainstream environmentalism. Then, in 2004, two colleagues, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, published a controversial essay, "The Death of Environmentalism." That led Werbach to phone the head of every major environmental group and ask one question: Have you achieved your goals? "They literally laughed at the absurdity of the question," he says. But he wasn't laughing. While he was in college, he says, "I helped create the largest desert park in the country, Death Valley, and I'll proudly take my daughter there. Meanwhile global warming is going to turn the entire country into a desert."

This realization seemed so urgent that he issued his manifesto at the Commonwealth Club. In the difficult months that followed, he recalls, he thought he knew what hitting bottom was like. Then Wal-Mart called. "It felt like proof that I was wrong."