Adam Werbach

On the day after he was elected the youngest president in the Sierra Club’s history, Adam Werbach was awakened by a 5 a.m. phone call.

“This is the White House,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “We would like you to come to Washington tomorrow and meet the president and vice president. We want to hear your vision.”

Werbach’s vision is youth--he is just 24--and he won the club’s presidency in April 1996 largely on his promise to bring more young people into an aging environmental movement. The Sierra Club has been at the center of that movement since John Muir founded the organization in 1892. Today the club has 600,000 members, an annual budget of $45 million and enough political muscle for Werbach to get audiences before President Clinton and Vice President Gore on several occasions.

Werbach, a Tarzana native, is the son of two Sierra Club members. As a high school student at the Harvard School, he founded the Sierra Student Coalition, which grew to 30,000 members under his leadership. In 1995, Werbach graduated from Brown University, and his first book, “Act Now, Apologize Later,” will be published by HarperCollins in October.

Werbach resides in San Francisco. He recently visited the Sierra Club’s Harwood Lodge on Mt. Baldy, where he spoke with The Times about the San Fernando Valley and its environment.

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Question: Having traveled to some of the world’s most beautiful places in the past year, what do you see when you return to the Valley?

Answer: I remember the first time I really left L.A. was in the 11th grade when I went to the Mountain School in Vermont for three months. The school is on this beautiful farm--there was even snow and a real springtime. Well, I remember flying back into the Burbank Airport, and when I looked out the window it looked like we were flying into a bowl of mustard gas. The amazing thing is if you go back to Burbank now, it’s much, much better. And it’s not just because the air was so bad seven years ago, it’s because it has gotten better.

Q: What hasn’t improved?

A: I also see an almost absurd level of urban sprawl. I look back at Tarzana, where I grew up--it was a great place to be young. There were still unpaved roads. In the summer you could see kids selling oranges from the remaining orchards. There were a lot of great, little restaurants and diners. Now--15 years later--there are no unpaved roads left. They subdivided all the old orchards into homes, the population has skyrocketed. There are three McDonald’s within four miles of my home.

Q: Do you feel the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area is headed in the right direction?

A: It is. Yes, there’s controversy there. But that’s good. It means there’s a real movement to protect those mountains. The first time I can remember Tarzana coming together as a community is when there was a movement to pave the unpaved part of Mulholland Drive. I saw all sorts of people coming out to protect the Santa Monicas, this place they all felt some affinity for. So, in terms of care and commitment, yes, we’re headed in the right direction. But, yes, there are also some very disturbing blips like Soka University.

Q: How do you justify spending public money to protect land that, frankly, many people have no interest in?

A: There are always two reasons why. On a personal level for most people, it’s important to protect the watersheds in the mountains because they are critical to the drinking water. The air that you and your kids breathe is directly affected by how many trees there are. In the Valley, the people who don’t want coyotes coming into their backyards and eating their kittens . . . well, then we need a home for the coyotes. If you kill the coyotes, then you better expect a mouse infestation in the Valley because the coyotes help control the rodents.

Now, let’s look at the communal side. L.A. is a metropolis that is almost full--some people would say it is more than full--and it is without escapes, or valves, to let out some of the energy the city creates. Hundreds of thousands of people use Griffith Park, the Santa Monicas, the Angeles National Forest. When I was driving here I saw a sign. It said “No Shooting” in both English and Spanish. If you come up here in the summer, the people that are using this place are not just white, yuppie campers. They are people from all socioeconomic backgrounds who want a day in the woods.

The point is the environment speaks many languages. There are some things that are universal. Beauty. Love. The wilderness.

Q: But many people aren’t quite as spiritual about the wilderness as Sierra Club members.

A: We are a very spiritual country, but the environmental movement has failed to connect spirituality with the environment. In some ways, we’ve even driven a wedge between people and the land. For example, the Christian Coalition endorsed conservative Republicans [in the 1996 elections], while the Sierra Club endorsed some Republicans, but mostly Democrats who are pro-environment. I met [former Christian Coalition leader] Ralph Reed and I asked him, “Why did you endorse some of these people? Don’t you think people destroying God’s creation are not deserving of the Christian Coalition’s endorsement?”

His answer was that the environmental movement had missed the tenor of the debate. He had a point. The environmental movement came out of the 1960s, when the hippie belief was that any structure, even the structure of your parents, was evil. The church was often the first thing that was thrown out. Those rifts have never healed, which is very, very unfortunate.

All that is a long way of answering your question. Most people can sense that there is some kind of higher spirit in a place like this. The way to get people to connect to these places is to simply get them out to see them.

Q: Or read about them. Should high school students be reading writers like John McPhee, Wallace Stegner or Edward Abbey--who have written about the environment in the West?

A: Look at [Abbey’s] “The Monkey Wrench Gang.” As ridiculous as it is, it definitely inspired a generation of people to say, “Hey, we can rethink some crazy things--maybe it was a mistake to put a dam in the Glen Canyon.” Reading about John Muir, and his amazing adventures in places unexplored, frees the soul and allows you to believe that maybe you could do a similar type of thing. I’m not sure reading “Billy Budd” does that.

Q: Let’s talk about some improvements the Valley could make to its environment. First, how do you envision the L.A. River?

A: I want to see people canoeing down it. Let’s clean it up, fix the banks, let people know a river runs through Los Angeles. The first step toward a better environment is to experience the nature you have.

Q: What about removing Rindge Dam on Malibu Creek to help in the recovery of the southern steelhead?

A: Dams will be remembered as a quirky 20th-century monument to ourselves--things that people often built because of ego rather than good sense.

Q: What about getting people out of their cars?

A: I believe in gas taxes. I also believe in charging people the real cost of their cars--make them pay for the damage their cars cause, such as global warming. We also have to make manufacturers make cars better. This is also something people, especially people in L.A., should be angry about. The technology is there to build cars that get no less than 45 miles per gallon.

Q: There are people who feel a completed Backbone Trail from Hollywood to Point Mugu, with trail camps along the way, could define L.A. much the way Disneyland does now.

A: First, it should be mentioned that more people visit Yosemite each year than Disneyland. Second, L.A. and the Valley can become a natural paradise, a place that people can think of as a green city. A city that healed itself from perhaps the worst assault on nature that humanity has ever seen. The Backbone Trail could be part of that. I travel to other cities that are near large trail systems, and people spend a lot of time lecturing me about it. These trails are a point of civic pride.

Q: Do you feel, as I do, that the most disappointing thing about the Valley is the difference between its potential and its reality?

A: The San Fernando Valley, more than any other place I have seen, is a culture that has been prepackaged and sanitized. There are very few cultural indicators left in the Valley--few things that say I’m in Tarzana or Encino, as compared to other places on the planet. The last few indicators are the natural ones. The Santa Monicas, the Santa Susanas look like nowhere else on the planet--and they’re right here, in people’s backyards. The only way we are going to re-create the sense of community that will build safer, better neighborhoods is to reconnect people to what [author and naturalist] Wendell Berry calls a sense of place. So you and your city aren’t just some blip of suburbia on a map.

Steve Hymon is a Times staff writer.