Adam Werbach

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Adam Werbach
Werbach in 1999.
Nationality	American
Occupation	Environmental activist
Spouse(s)	Lyn Werbach

Adam Werbach is an environmental activist who was elected as the youngest-ever national president of the Sierra Club in 1996 when he was 23 years old.^[1]

As a high school student in 1991, he founded the Sierra Student Coalition, the United States' largest student-run environmental organization. He later became the protégé of noted 20th Century environmentalist and Sierra Club Director David Brower, who hand-picked Werbach to run for the club's presidency.^[2]

In 1997, while president of the Sierra Club, Werbach wrote "Act Now, Apologize Later," a series of essays and autobiographical anecdotes published by HarperCollins. In it, he recounted the stories of the many average citizens he'd met while visiting nearly every local chapter of the Sierra Club: "From rural priests to animal trackers, from a 12-year-old girl in California to three elderly women in Georgia, from senators to surfers and from Woody Harrelson to llama riders, an incredible array of people give us a thousand reasons to be hopeful."^[2]

Werbach later formed a company, Act Now Productions, to consult to nonprofits and work with corporations that wished to green their enterprise, including clients such as Autodesk, Procter & Gamble, Cisco Systems, Columbia Records, General Mills, Sierra Club, and World Wildlife Fund. In 2006, he controversially began to work with Wal-Mart to help lead their efforts in sustainability.^[3][4] In January 2008, Act Now Productions joined the global advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi to become Saatchi & Saatchi S, which consults with large corporations to "create sustainable visions."^[5]

In late 2004, Werbach wrote and presented a speech referred to as "Is Environmentalism Dead?" (the official title was "The Death of Environmentalism and the Birth of the Commons Movement") at the Commonwealth Club of California. This widely-circulated, controversial speech suggested that advances in environmentalism had stalled, due to outdated thinking and approaches. He challenged the environmental establishment to tackle the issues differently, by linking environmental goals with other broad social and economic goals.^[6][7]

Werbach, a San Francisco resident, was appointed in 2003 by San Francisco city supervisor Chris Daly to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission while then Mayor Willie Brown was out of town.^[8] Additionally in April 2006, Werbach was elected to the six-member international board of Greenpeace.^[9]

In 2009, he distanced himself even further from the green lobby with a new book, Strategy for Sustainability, an appeal to the business world to consider long-term profitability and transparency above everything else. Environmentalism still has a role to play, he says. "Particularly a focus on reducing the carbon in the atmosphere... But that's certainly not enough to run a company on. They've tried to use it as a business framework and it doesn't work. It's too narrow a definition."^[10]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Sierra Student Coalition
• Werbach's book, "Act Now, Apologize Later," on Amazon
• Act Now Productions
• Ironweed Film Club
• Greenpeace International Board of Directors
• Interview (MP3) with Adam Werbach conducted by Michael Krasny on KQED public radio (April 7, 2008)
• Saatchi & Saatchi S