Like many environmental activists, the Sierra Club's Executive Director, Michael Brune, first decided to pitch in and protect the planet for selfish reasons.
"I grew up in Chadwick Beach, on the New Jersey shore," says Brune, 40. "My parents took us camping up and down the eastern seaboard. I even learned to walk at a campground in Maine.
"In the summer, as a teenager, I'd spend all day every day at the beach and in the ocean, surfing and bodysurfing." So when hypodermic needles and frothy chemical waste from nearby plants began washing up on the sand, he was disgusted. When he discovered his body covered in a rash and New Jersey beaches closed because of the dangerous contamination, he and his neighbors took action.
"I was young and politically naïve, so I simply signed a petition and hoped someone would listen. But there were a handful of community groups that took hold of the issue and wouldn't go away. I saw how they were able to inspire and organize people to work together to develop solutions -- and they prevailed. Hospital-waste dumping was banned, the chemical factory was eventually closed, and the beaches were reopened with visible and immediate improvements in water quality."
The experience impressed upon Brune the connection between loving the natural world and the responsibility to protect it.
"My first time out West was on a family trip in 1985. I was almost 14 and had never been west of the Appalachians. I still remember walking to the rim of the Grand Canyon and being blown away. The next day, we hiked to the bottom and my life was changed."
That day in the Canyon was the sort of "transforming moment in nature" that the majority of Sierra Club members say cemented their devotion to the environmental cause.
After high school, Brune -- who picked up the childhood nickname "the Count" because of his affinity for numbers -- earned dual degrees at West Chester University in Pennsylvania in Economics and Finance. After graduation, he set off with a friend on a road trip that took them through the Great Plains, the California and Oregon coasts, Mt. St. Helens, the boreal forests of Alaska and Canada, the Grand Tetons, Yosemite, and back to Grand Canyon National Park.
His priorities rearranged, Brune went to work for Greenpeace, and immediately knew he'd found his calling. With four years of grassroots organizing and campaigning under his belt, Brune moved on to the Rainforest Action Network.
"Soon after I started as a campaigner with RAN, I was taken on a tour of a rainforest in British Columbia, and we visited a beautiful, intact valley, lush with trees and slated to be clear-cut. None of us could bear to see that happen."
The logging company's biggest customer was the building-supply company Home Depot, which is headquartered in Atlanta. Following the adage, "the customer is always right," Brune led Rainforest Action Network's campaign to protect British Columbia's forests by enlisting the logging industry's top customers to lobby for their protection.
Brune unleashed his creativity. Rainforest Action Network took out ads in the Atlanta Journal Constitution targeting the corporate leadership. It urged school children to write letters. It strung banners from the company's buildings, launched protests nationwide and, according to a profile in Alameda magazine, at one point Brune, then 26, commandeered the PA system at an Atlanta store and announced: "Attention shoppers, on aisle 13 you will find wood ripped from the heart of the rainforest."
Eventually, Home Depot relented, and its change in policy helped protect more than 5 million acres of rainforest in British Columbia. Time magazine called the victory the most important environmental story of 1999.
"It's certainly true that smart businesses can do well by doing good," Brune says. "To its credit, Home Depot has kept its commitment to phase out sales of wood from endangered forests. This policy has led many of Home Depot's competitors to follow the same practice, and that has led to the protection of rainforests as far away as Chile and Indonesia."
Under Brune's leadership, Rainforest Action Network went on to win more than a dozen other key commitments from America's largest corporations, including Citi, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Kinko's, Boise, and Lowe's. And despite his strong-arm tactics, his approach usually left his adversaries feeling that they'd been treated with respect.
"We had a mantra at RAN to be hard on the issues, but soft on the people involved. That's really just another way of saying that when you take on a company about corporate responsibility, it's possible to be confrontational and collaborative at the same time," Brune says.
Brune arrives at the Sierra Club at a pivotal moment for the 118-year-old organization. Perhaps best known for protecting wild lands and -- as Ken Burns's recent PBS series America's Best Idea detailed brilliantly -- helping to create our National Parks, the Club has also plunged headlong, and with extraordinary success, into addressing one of the 21st century's most serious challenges: climate change. More than 112 new coal plants have been stopped because of Sierra Club actions, and national support for wind, solar, and other renewable energy sources is growing by the hour.
In his book, Coming Clean-- Breaking America's Addiction to Oil and Coal, (Sierra Club Books, 2008) Brune addresses global warming's causes and lays out an ambitious plan for moving America to a clean-energy economy that will generate good jobs and create a healthier planet. It also gives an inside look at how grassroots organizations can make a profound difference.
He sees leading the Sierra Club as a natural fit for the sort of far-reaching, solutions-oriented vision spelled out in Coming Clean. "The Sierra Club's motto is explore, enjoy, and protect the planet," Brune says. "It's not just about problems. This is an organization that's equally determined to protecting the planet's last, best places and to having a great time exploring and enjoying those places. A love of nature helps inspire us to do what we must to save it."
Brune and his wife Mary, cofounder of the group MOMS -- Making Our Milk Safe, live in the San Francisco Bay Area town of Alameda. These days they find their environmental fervor fueled in part by concern for their children, Olivia and Sebastian.
Michael Brune with his wife Mary and his children Olivia and Sebastian.
"For me, whether a year has been a good one or not depends in part on how many nights we've spent in a tent," he says. "My family spends a lot of time hiking and camping, in the redwoods, Yosemite, the Sierras."
When he thinks about the future, he sometimes recalls a family camping trip to Hendy Woods State Park, in northern California.
"We were all standing on a log near a little fire we had going, and Olivia, who was about two, was telling us to jump off the log and jump back on the log, on off, on off, and Mary and I, being the dutiful parents that we are, were in complete compliance.
"Keep in mind that Mary and I talk to the children a lot about what we do, the world we're working to create, telling them in terms they can understand about mining companies blowing up mountains to extract coal, and timber companies chain-sawing down forests. So at one point in the middle of our game Olivia said, 'Wait. Stay right there. The whole world is broken and I've got to fix it.'"
The toddler jumped of the log, ran to the fire, poked with a stick, and then proclaimed: "There. Everything is protected. Now let's play!"
Brune figures she'll find out soon enough that it isn't that easy. But his greatest hope is that with increasing numbers of young people drawn to passionately support environmental solutions, his own children will someday look back on what has happened to their planet as a happy story.
"I grew up listening to my parents and grandparents talking about how things used to be. We'd be driving along past a shopping mall, and they'd say, 'There used to be beautiful woods there; we used to fish in this river.'
"What we're working for is a time when Olivia and Sebastian can say to their kids, 'Check out this forest we protected. Look at all those buildings covered with solar panels. They never used to be there. Things are so much better than when I was your age.'"