The Teen-Ager Who Decided to Save the World : Environment: A recent Studio City high school graduate has already founded an animal-rights group and funded a national phone network of activists.

Adam Werbach, 18, has set out to change the world. “I’m not good at being bored,” he explains.

As a student at Harvard School in Studio City, Werbach founded animal rights and environmental groups and created a recycling program that is used as a model for schools throughout the country. He funded a national telephone network of student activists, ran an environmental consulting business and led workshops on the environment.

He initiated recycling, composting and energy- and water-saving programs at the summer camp where he worked as a nature specialist. He wrote the curriculum for a high school environmental ethics course and is working on a student action handbook. He was named one of the Sierra Club’s 100 “Environmental Heroes” and received the club’s “Best Volunteer” award.

Not bad for a guy who just graduated from high school.

“This is a kid who is out to save the world, and he really has the energy and the skills to do it,” says Harvard science teacher Wendy Van Norden, who worked with Werbach on a number of school projects.

To talk with Werbach is to be engulfed in bursts of ideas and whirls of plans. His parents almost have to beg him to sit down, take a break, watch television once in a while.

“He is constantly working,” says his best friend, David Sabban, 17, of Santa Monica. “We’ll go to a movie, and then he will stay up and work until 2 or 3 a.m. He is so intense that sometimes people get fed up with it.”

What spawned such passion in a kid who grew up in the San Fernando Valley suburbs? His parents say it might have been the family vacations to national parks that taught Werbach to respect nature. The beloved family pet, an ancient cat, probably contributed to his affection for animals. Or maybe he learned to love the outdoors while he and his brother, Kevin, 21, grew up in the family’s sprawling Tarzana ranch house, situated on more than an acre of land dotted with chicken coops, horse stalls and giant old trees.

“I wanted the boys to have a feeling of the outdoors,” says Adam’s father, Mel Werbach, a psychiatrist and author of health and nutrition books. “Just as a large desk encourages a student to study, open space encourages a child to give the outdoors some priority.”

Werbach’s career as an eco-activist began at age 13 when he stopped eating meat. His mother, Gail Werbach, an educational therapist, wrote off his nascent vegetarianism as “a harmless teen-age rebellion.”

But Werbach saw his meatless diet as a positive, proactive step. “Students always want to do something, but there is nothing they can do,” he says. “I saw animal rights as something I could do.” From then on, Werbach was hooked on activism--and on recruiting others to the cause.

From not eating animals to not killing them is a logical step, Werbach decided. He avoided high school biology because he refused to dissect frogs. Then, despite vehement opposition from many science teachers, he founded an animal rights study group.

“In those days my activities were centered around fighting the system,” Werbach says. “I was always trying to one-up everyone. I irritated a lot of people.”

Of course, he was only 13 or so at the time--an irritating age if ever there was one. Today the handsome, polite young man with the huge smile and neatly trimmed beard has a new game plan. “Now I work with the system. I try to seduce authority and turn enemies into allies,” he says.

According to Van Norden, he learned his lesson well. “He’s politically savvy. He knows how to schmooze.”

Werbach says the turning point in his life came when he was selected to spend a semester at The Mountain School of Milton Academy in Vermont. Situated on a 300-acre farm, the prestigious school educates students in the environment while providing a rigorous academic education.

The first Californian to attend The Mountain School, Werbach was unprepared for a freezing New England winter. He even arrived at the farm school with his bare toes peeking out of Birkenstocks. But soon he was happily rising before dawn to feed chickens, prune apple trees, shovel manure, build fences, tap trees and collect sap for maple syrup--all before his school day began. The culminating experience of the semester was spending five days alone in the woods.

“The Mountain School taught me that I knew less than I thought I did, but through work and determination, a person can do anything,” he says.

And what Werbach wants to do is involve young people in the environmental movement.

He worked as a volunteer coordinator for the state Proposition 128 “Big Green” campaign and recruited more than 100 high school volunteers to staff offices, make phone calls and canvass neighborhoods. The comprehensive, multi-issue environmental initiative was defeated in November, but Werbach’s efforts earned him the Sierra Club’s “Vote Environment 1990 Best Volunteer Award.”

Dozens of students from all over the country call his home-based “Student Action Support Network” daily (818 345-4652), asking for help and advice in starting environmental groups and programs. He returns every call, even when he had to sell his record collection to pay the phone bill.

At Camp Alonim near Simi Valley, where he worked this summer, he led overnight camp-outs and ecology programs for hundreds of youngsters from 8 to 18 years old and taught first- and second-graders how to embark on environmental letter-writing campaigns.

“Adam motivates urban kids,” says Eddie Harwitz, Camp Alonim’s director. “He turns them on to see the beauty of an outdoor setting. He motivates them to start recycling, and then they go home to get their parents to recycle.”

As far as Werbach is concerned, youth is the ideal time to start working on the environment, but no one seems to know it. “There’s been a lot of slighting of teen-agers,” he says. “Students are told all of their lives they can’t do anything. It’s crazy. We have all these people and no one has ever taken advantage of what they can offer.”

Werbach discussed his concerns with Dick Hingson, conservation coordinator for the Sierra Club. Werbach proposed the idea of a youth outreach program, and Hingson offered his support and the use of a rustic club-owned lodge in Mt. Baldy.

“We were quite taken with Adam’s sense of purpose, his discipline, his leadership capacities and his sense of direction,” Hingson says. “He is the sort of person who attracts support from peers as well as from older people.”

Werbach planned and organized every detail of the Sierra Club High School Environmental Leadership Training Program, held in early August. He wrote, printed and distributed brochures, put together a small group of student activists and teachers to help at the event, contacted schools from San Diego to Santa Barbara, recruited students to attend and reassured parents who were nervous about sending their children to a student-run, student-staffed event.

To pay the $10,000 cost of the program, Werbach donated money he received from a high school community service award and wrote 3,000 fund-raising letters “begging” for donations. He also raised scholarships for 14 students who could not afford the $85 registration fee.

For five days in early August, 34 students, aged 13 to 17, lived and worked at the lodge while taking seminars led by Werbach and other student activists in fund raising, public speaking, letter writing, “green” consumerism, public relations and conservation.

Azizi Jones, 16, a student at Westchester High School, attended the program. “I was always interested in the environment, but I didn’t think there was anything I could do,” she says. “Now I know there’s a lot I can do.” Jones plans to join her school’s environmental club and spend after-school hours cleaning up the campus and wiping out graffiti.

Michelle Steffin, a 14-year-old sophomore at Palisades High School, says she used to be “slightly” interested in the environment “when it was convenient.” After attending the program, she says, “Now I have the push and the drive to save the Earth. I am much more of a doer. I learned that to get something done in this world, I really have to work.” Her immediate goals include working with school administrators to kick off a recycling program and recruiting students to an ecology club.

“I taught them how to be activists,” Werbach says of the program attendees. “They will go back to their schools and start groups and prove they are viable members of the community. Even if they can’t vote yet, they can work and do amazing things.”

Werbach enrolls this fall at Brown University in Rhode Island, but his legacy continues at his high school, now called Harvard-Westlake. With the approval of the school’s administration and the assistance of Van Norden, Werbach wrote the curriculum for an environmental ethics course. The school’s first student-conceived, student-created course is being taught by Van Norden.

In spite of his dedication to the environment, Werbach is quick to note that he’s not “a one-topic guy.” He was the captain of his high school varsity fencing team, and he played the lead role in a school production of “South Pacific.” He’s an accomplished guitarist and virtuoso baritone singer. “I party as much as anyone,” he claims. “I really get around.”

But he concedes that he has one gnawing concern. “I am extremely happy, but it’s scary,” he says. “It can’t get any better. And that’s my biggest worry. I’m only 18! What do I do when I’m 40? What do I do when I’m 20?”