"WE CAN SIT HERE BEMOANING BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD OR WE CAN LEARN FROM THEIR APPEAL."

By Margot Hornblower

The president of the Sierra Club steps up to the lectern. "Hey," he greets the audience of 300 environmental leaders at a University of Oregon conference. He doffs his jacket, grins and launches into a children's song: "If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands! If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands!" The lawyers, scientists, activists and students in the auditorium, after a moment of bewilderment, burst into rhythmic applause.

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, he had overflown the Willamette National Forest, its mountaintops scalped by clear-cutting. But rather than preaching doom, he boasts of recent blockades to protect old-growth enclaves. "I hate environmentalists who are always grouchy," he explains afterward. "They forget the joy of making a difference."

The son of two 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 in 1994, and last spring his colleagues voted him in as president. His mission? Gen X-ing a 600,000-member organization with a median age of 47.

"The 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 and toxic dumps." At the student coalition, he pushed a lead-poisoning education project with materials in English, Spanish, Hmong and Vietnamese.

Gen X, 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 get all their news from MTV. We don't reach them with coffee-table picture books, fireside chats and the New York Times editorial page." Werbach hired a graffiti artist to design posters of the Statue of Liberty wearing a gas mask, and he is negotiating a celebrity-studded CD Rock the Planet. "We want to be hard-hitting," he says. "And if it's not fun, it's not worth doing."