Not so long ago, the name Adam Werbach carried with it the environmental movement's greatest hopes for renewal. At age nine, he'd led his first environmental campaign (a petition to impeach Ronald Reagan's much loathed EPA chief, James Watt). In high school, he founded the Sierra Student Coalition and built it into a 30,000-strong force that pushed through legislation to preserve a swath of California desert. He joined the Sierra Club's board of directors while still in university, and in 1997 he became, at age 23, its youngest president ever - his face splashed across the pages of Rolling Stone as the poster boy for a reinvigorated Gen-X strain of activism.
Now, as he stands on the stage of Ottawa's Government Conference Centre, a genial 34-year-old in a dark power suit with flashes of grey at his temples, giving the closing address to the Federation of Canadian Municipalities' biannual Sustainable Communities Conference, it's difficult to reconcile that early image of the environmental wunderkind with what Mr. Werbach is today - a consultant to the world's largest retailer, a company that's been one of the green movement's most reviled enemies, that gargantuan pillar of rampant consumerism, Wal-Mart.
"Everything that people say is wrong with Wal-Mart is wrong with Wal-Mart," Mr. Werbach says afterward. "And so is the opposite. Wal-Mart is just so big." He welcomes the criticism; he came to Wal-Mart not as a public relations officer but as an external sustainability consultant through his San Francisco-based firm Act Now Productions (recently absorbed by the Publicis Groupe, the world's fifth-largest marketing conglomerate).
The truly unexpected - even revolutionary - idea contained in Mr. Werbach's speech is that Wal-Mart might be sustainability's most powerful advocate. With 4,100 stores in the U.S. and more than 300 in Canada, Wal-Mart, he notes, is the continent's largest trucking company, its most voracious consumer of electricity and - with a workforce of 1.3 million in the U.S. and 75,000 in Canada - its biggest employer.
Beginning with Mr. Werbach's voluntary in-store seminars for staff, the company could eventually pass on sustainability principles to its vast legions of customers - more than 100 million of them per week across the U.S. and about seven million each week in Canada. His belief is that changing the mindset of Wal-Mart's employees from within will have a catalytic effect on this century's newborn sustainability movement as powerful as conservation organizations like the Sierra Club had on 20th-century environmentalism.
In lieu of consciousness raising, he argues, the key to sustainability is changing how people think about the everyday products they buy - toilet paper, for instance. After all, most of us usually feel more like consumers than citizens. "People have a much closer relationship to their toilet paper than they do to their councillors," he cheekily asserts.
This rosy assessment of Wal-Mart's potential social impact clashes, however, with the prevailing wisdom of the city councillors and urban planners in his Ottawa audience. One after another, they rise to ask Mr. Werbach about Wal-Mart's role in suburban sprawl, its vampiric relationship with independent downtown merchants, its checkered labour-relations record.
He handles the queries amiably, occasionally echoing the criticisms, at all times urging the audience to demand change from their local Wal-Mart. But what he most emphasizes, both in his speech and afterwards, is the need to "make sustainability irresistible," the enormous transformative potential in introducing the idea to the masses. "That," he says, "is the great work of the next decade."
Career suicide
