Werbach is the 104-year-old organization’s first Jewish president — a fact that also shows through. The 23-year-old is using both his Jewish background and his youth to reach out to a new constituency.
Currently, the average age of Sierra Club members is 47.
With his youth and affable manner, the December graduate of Brown University has so far garnered copious publicity for the 600,000-member organization since he took office in May.
This is one freshly scrubbed twentysomething who flies in the face of the Slacker Zeitgeist: At age 8, he collected signatures to help unseat Secretary of Interior James Watt; in high school, he gave out black snowcones to dramatize the risk of oil drilling in Alaska; by college, he had started the now 30,000-strong Sierra Student Coalition.
“The most energizing thing is helping one young person somewhere feel they can make a difference,” Werbach said recently at the agency’s headquarters.
Speaking with the relaxed confidence of a guy who isn’t intimidated by close friends like “Al” (Vice President Al Gore), he tilted back in his chair and added that young people “can’t drink, they can’t drive or go to war, but they can rock the planet.”
As a child, Werbach remembers looking out the window of an airplane flying over Seattle. The ground was pock-marked because of logging in the area.
“I pasted my lips against the window as kids do and saw these weird gashes on the ground. I asked my parents `Why do they cut trees down?’ It’s a simple question. Young people should be asking questions.”
Werbach is planning to use MTV, the Internet and pop art posters by hip, young artists to encourage members of the much-maligned Generation X to start questioning their political representatives about clean air, clean water and conservation. Young people should know the Sierra Club is not only for wealthier, older environmentalists, he says. The organization has sponsored the Inner Cities Outing Program, which gives city kids a chance to go camping, and lobbied for the Clean Water Act, which fights for clean drinking water.
Werbach himself is still asking the kind of simple questions that began his own quest. For one thing, he wonders why Jewish people aren’t more involved in the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations.
The Sierra Club doesn’t ask the religion of its members, but Werbach says Jews are under-represented in its ranks.
“Shomrei adama [guardians of the earth] is a major tenet of our religion. Yet, Jews are disproportionately uninvolved [in the environmental movement]. It’s startling.”
While organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union are saturated with Jewish leadership, he says, the American environmental movement is not. Werbach contends that Jews are more concerned with funding water projects and planting trees in Israel than projects closer to home.
That’s why Werbach’s trying to get his message out to the Jewish media, hoping to entice Jews as well as young people to get involved with Sierra Club programs.
It was through his own experience at Valley Beth Shalom Day School in Encino that he came to appreciate the concept of charity through tzedakah boxes. “It made it easy to do something. I’ve never found the equal.”
His grandfather, who he says was “a pillar of the temple,” was also an inspiration. “He always instilled in me — by example, not lecture — giving. Give till it hurts. Then you give more. His ethic was that there is nothing more honorable to be doing than to be giving of yourself.”
Still, Werbach says, he has also learned to give to himself, too.
To relieve the stress of heading an agency with a $44 million annual budget, Werbach often plays guitar. As lead vocalist for the Brown Derbies, he performed around the world and recorded two compact discs. These days, however, he’s just playing for himself and whoever happens to hear music coming from his open office door.
During college, he made several films and videos, including one in which he used Barbie Dolls to explore feminism and body image.
“I find art thrilling, spending all night editing something that’s four seconds that no one will notice but you. It’s reaching out through the heart and soul, not the intellect,” Werbach says, pulling out a black three-ring binder from a desk drawer.
The binder contains his soon-to-be-published novel, written when he was in Vermont and titled “Whirled.”
That’s not a bad image to describe his own harried life. Last month, he was away from his new Noe Valley apartment for some 25 days on Sierra Club business. A quick check of his e-mail reveals that by early afternoon, he has received 227 messages as Sierra Club president and 25 to his personal address.
Self-described “Jewish guilt” will make him reply to nearly all of them, he says.
And it will take more than a little noodling on the guitar to fend off the stress of “being in a position to stop bad things that are happening. There aren’t enough hours in the day.”