Last December, a man dressed in a Santa suit appeared at the Idaho headquarters of logging giant Boise Cascade and tried to deliver a package to the company’s chairman and chief executive officer, George J. Harad. Neatly wrapped in red holiday paper, the “gift” contained some 3,600 letters penned in the fat, tilting strokes of schoolchildren’s script. The letters asked Harad to stop logging old-growth forests. “Dear Mr. Harad,” began one of them, “Without these trees there will be no place for some typs of animals. These animals will eventually go extinked.” Harad didn’t come out to receive the letters—that task was left to a company official who smiled gamely as he found himself cast as the black hat in an orchestrated publicity stunt. But the company chief surely saw them, and he apparently wasn’t amused.

The letter-writing campaign was conceived by the Rainforest Action Network, a San Francisco–based environmental group that has had a hand in persuading other large companies, including Home Depot and Kinko’s, to stop using old-growth forest products. The group, also known by the acronym RAN, has cultivated a network of teachers, mainly in California, who are sympathetic to its cause. RAN’s staffers solicited the letters by posting a request on the group’s website and by mobilizing its teachers, asking them to encourage their students to write letters to Harad.

Boise Cascade’s public relations machinery quickly kicked into action. Company officials transcribed contact information from the letters and sent responses to each student for whom they had an address. Harad signed each letter, assuring kids that forests are “a renewable resource, which means that, while some trees are harvested to make wood products, other trees grow back to take their place.” The company also wrote to school principals.

Doug Bartels, Boise Cascade’s communications manager for timber and wood products, accused RAN of taking advantage of children. “It’s regrettable that schoolteachers would choose to involve themselves in this and be so one-sided.”

Other RAN opponents were not as measured in their response. Within a week, a lampoon appeared at a website called RANamuck, which is run by the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, a group headed by Ron Arnold, a top figure in the wise-use movement. “Here at the Rainforest Action Network,” the article began, “we have a great plan to save the rainforest. We use school kids. They make terrific messengers. And they have such impressionable young minds. They’ll follow any script we write.” Another RAN critic, a group called Frontiers of Freedom, asked the Internal Revenue Service to revoke the group’s nonprofit status. Frontiers of Freedom was founded in 1995 by former Wyoming Senator Malcolm Wallop, a friend of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Boise Cascade officials say they have nothing to do with those efforts. But the fallout from RAN’s effort left one thing clear: those handwritten letters from kids rankled the company in a way that a box full of well-reasoned, grammatically correct pleas from adults surely would not. Corporate America and conservation groups understand the obvious. They understand that the young people of today will one day call the shots on such issues.

Not all environmental organizations would condone RAN’s actions as either proper or ethical. Many groups are sensitive to the accusation that they are trying to brainwash kids. Instead of encouraging young people to take action on behalf of environmental causes (and RAN is far from the only advocacy group to do so), they offer programs and activities that they hope will instill a lifelong appreciation for the natural world.

The National Wildlife Federation, an organization that boasts a membership of 4 million, is among those that take the cautious approach. The group puts a good deal of resources into youth programs, but those efforts lack the hard edge of RAN’s actions. In cooperation with Wal-Mart, the federation sponsors schoolyard habitat programs, in which children and teachers work to create wildlife habitat at school sites. With the support of Target, the national retail chain, the federation organizes nature clubs for elementary school students. And the organization is home to perhaps the single most recognized environmental character among children: Ranger Rick. With a circulation of more than half a million, Ranger Rick magazine is among the most widely read children’s periodicals on the planet.

National Wildlife Federation leaders stress the division between their advocacy work, aimed at adults, and their youth programs, which they characterize as wholly educational. Their intention is to instill an appreciation of nature in children and then let young people come to their own conclusions.

“Our big push is to just get kids to go outside and take a look around,” says Bill Street, the federation’s director of education. “Now if a kid reads an article in Ranger Rick and falls in love with an endangered species and then tries to influence their parents, there’s nothing wrong with that. But that’s kind of where we draw the line.”

Ranger Rick wasn’t always so shy about mobilizing his minions. Twenty years ago, an issue of the magazine featured a trip down the Platte River with Ranger Rick and his friends Sammy Squirrel, Becky Hare and Zelda Possum. The group met Candy the Whooping Crane, who explained that water diversions upriver were threatening the rare birds’ habitat. The article ended with a request for contributions that would be used to buy more land to preserve as waterfowl habitat. The donations were put in a trust fund that was established after the National Wildlife Federation sued upriver water users, leading eventually to an out-of-court settlement. Hundreds of kids sent donations in an effort that became known as Pennies for the Platte.

Pat Parenteau, the former National Wildlife Federation attorney who wrote the article, recalls an exchange with a lawyer who had represented a power company in the litigation. “He really got on my case because he came home one night for dinner and his daughter said, ÔDaddy, are you helping or hurting the cranes?’ His daughter subscribed to Ranger Rick.” Although the article raised only a few hundred dollars (the amount of pocket change contained in many of the envelopes was exceeded by the cost of postage), the campaign raised the profile of the Platte preservation efforts considerably. Today an observation area in a protected area along the Platte bears a plaque dedicated to the children of North America, in recognition of the campaign.

Ranger Rick editor-in-chief Gerry Bishop, who has been with the publication since 1972, says the magazine conceivably could make such a plea again if the right issue comes along. But that’s not really the current magazine’s style, he says. “We don’t do any heavy-handed preaching about environmental issues. I think we can honestly be criticized for propagandizing if we push things too far.”

Such caution is lily-livered, says Mark Berman, who works on marine conservation issues with another San Francisco environmental group, the Earth Island Institute, founded by iconic Sierra Club activist David Brower. Like RAN, the Earth Island Institute is without compunction when asking kids to help in its efforts. The group encouraged children to agitate in the dolphin-safe tuna campaign, in which a broad coalition of activists pressured tuna companies to change their practices. Why shouldn’t young people be involved in such efforts? Berman asks.

“Kids can think for themselves,” he says. “They’ve listened to the other side of these matters and they don’t agree with the other side. Kids today have a mind of their own.”

To many adults in the environmental movement, the question of what occupies kids’ minds is a particularly vexing one. Awash in consumer goods, bathed in mass marketing, they seem another species, more concerned with the price of compact disks than with the fate of rain forests. The generation gap is a chasm within the mainstream environmental movement, where the average age of dues-paying members tends toward the silver years. (The typical National Wildlife Federation member is over fifty-five. Other environmental groups have older average ages.)

Young environmental advocates take umbrage at the notion that they are empty vessels, vulnerable to whichever special interest tries to seize hold of them. They say they freely choose which causes to support. Some of the most effective advocacy work being done by kids today is through groups consisting not of older staffers with a knack for organizing, but ones comprised of and founded by kids. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of grassroots environmental groups for youths have sprung up across the nation, as well as larger ones such as the Sierra Student Coalition, the Student Environmental Action Coalition and the Public Interest Research Groups. Although many of their leaders are college age or older, most of them began their environmental activism at a tender age.

The poster child of such young believers is Adam Werbach. At age eight, Werbach was collecting signatures on street corners near his Los Angeles home for a petition that called for the ousting of James Watt, President Reagan’s secretary of the Interior. As a student at Brown University, he persuaded the Sierra Club to found the Sierra Student Coalition, whose 24,000 members range from middle schoolers to college students.

At twenty-three, Werbach began serving a two-year stint as president of the Sierra Club. His election to the post attracted extensive national media attention and more than a little condescension from older environmentalists. Now twenty-eight, creeping dangerously close to the age that served as a litmus test for young sixties radicals, Werbach recalls his early activism with a note of nostalgia.

His greatest achievement at the Sierra Club, he says, was to bring in young people. The average age of Sierra Club members dropped from forty-seven to thirty-seven during his presidency. “I still believe I was a better activist at eighteen than I am now,” Werbach says, dusting off a sound bite he used frequently at the height of his Sierra Club fame. “Eighteen-year-olds aren’t bounded by the constraints of reality. They see things clearly.”

Despite the acclaim he attracted as the youngest leader of America’s oldest grassroots organization, Werbach says his proudest career accomplishment was the founding of the Sierra Student Coalition. “Activists are born in high schools and colleges,” he says. “And increasingly they’re born in grade school, too.”

If you discount the ability of kids to take direct roles in environmental campaigns, say Werbach and other environmentalists of his generation, you ignore the fact that those years are often crucial in shaping the skills and values of leaders-to-be. World-class pianists, baseball players and painters often begin their careers as child prodigies. Why should environmental activists be different?

Perhaps, in the batch of letters delivered to Boise Cascade’s doorstep last Christmas, one bears the signature of the next Adam Werbach, or even the next David Brower.

Camilla Feibelman cut her teeth as an environmental activist when she was a high school freshman in Albuquerque. She grew up in New Mexico and each summer attended camp in the mountains near Santa Fe, where she honed an appreciation for the natural world. In 1990, when she began high school, she took note that the school had no recycling program. So she started one, founding an environmental club along with several friends. The effort was well intentioned, she says now, but not well executed.

“We didn’t have any sense of political power,” she says. “We didn’t realize that we could go to the school board or to the city council and ask them to help us. So when we graduated, the recycling program and the group just stopped.”

She learned from that experience. When she moved on to college at Columbia University in New York City, she took over a group called the Barnard-Columbia Earth Coalition. She worked with students and administrators to develop several recommendations for the university to operate in a more environmentally friendly manner. Many of those recommendations were put into place. Drawing from her high school experience, Feibelman created a structure to help train new activists. The coalition remains active.

Feibelman recently completed a tenure as national director of the Sierra Student Coalition, Werbach’s group. She rejects the rap that the current generation of kids is apathetic, their passions blunted by the cascade of material goods that fell around them during the highball nineties. In fact, she says, the ethics of young environmental activists are often shaped by the very affluence their parents and grandparents lacked and by the onslaught of mass media messages they face.

“I think young people are inspired by different things than their predecessors were,” Feibelman says. “We have young people now who are branded in the beginning with corporate logos and who know firsthand how powerful corporations are.”

Not all kids, of course, feel oppressed by the dominant culture. Not all care how their Nikes were made or how many trees were cut to build their families’ 3,000-square-foot homes. Like the adult population, young people can be divided into three categories: those who are environmentally active, those who are environmentally aware and all the others. As in the adult population, the latter is the largest group.

But talk to kids—talk to those who feel strongly about environmental issues—and you’re likely to get an earful about the World Trade Organization and about the downsides of globalization. Talk to enough of these kids and you’ll hear a common theme: the individual environmental ills that attract the attention of mainstream environmental groups, ills such as global warming and species extinction, are symptoms of a broader problem—an economic system that cranks out massive amounts of consumer products and distributes them around the globe without regard to the health of ecosystems or to the people who live there.

Talk to enough of these kids and you get the impression that a genuine movement may be emerging.

Adam Werbach doesn’t have a thing to do with the Sierra Student Coalition anymore. That’s not because he’s no longer interested in the group, but because “they don’t need an old fart like me.” He says it’s crucial that young activists be given space to decide for themselves what they care about and how to go about making a difference.

The next wave of young people moving though the group Werbach founded is well represented by Nathan Wyeth, a high school junior who lives with his parents and younger brother in Chevy Chase, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. Wyeth’s interest in environmental issues was spurred by family vacations to the West, by the high meadows of Yellowstone, by the fecundity of Washington state’s Olympic National Park.

A year ago, he learned about a group of environmentally aware young people in his own backyard—the Montgomery County Student Environmental Activists. The group, which is affiliated with the Sierra Student Coalition, was founded in 1996 as part of a successful effort to protect a stand of old-growth trees that was threatened by development. Wyeth served as executive director and then took a leadership role within the Sierra Student Coalition, coordinating the group’s anti-globalization campaign. He protested at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City this spring, although he’s quick to add that the coalition “does more than summit-hop.”

Much of Wyeth’s work centers on legislative and lobbying efforts. Wyeth acknowledges that plenty of his classmates care not a whit about environmental protection or globalization. He says his school has its share of kids who have succumbed to what he calls “the Britney Spears effect”—those who plow through school uninterested in social or environmental issues. But there are more of the others than you might expect, and he considers his the most environmentally aware generation yet.

“In a lot of ways, we’re the radical ones.” Wyeth says. “We view things differently than the paid lobbyists who work in Washington. We get less bogged down in policy and see the big picture.” One person’s big picture, of course, is another person’s oversimplification. A grade school student writes to the CEO of Boise Cascade and tells him that if his company doesn’t change, there will be “global warming with sever whether and higher temptures.” The CEO responds by pointing out that his company plants more trees than it harvests each year. Over the years, as children mature, they see that other people challenge what they take as the truth and that some issues are indeed complicated—even ambiguous.

Childhood and adolescence are times when a jumble of competing interests push and pull at convictions. Perceptions change, but true conviction, even if forged at an early age, tends to endure. Werbach admits that he’s more pragmatic than he used to be, certainly more than when he stood as an eight-year-old on a Los Angeles street corner collecting signatures against James Watt. But his basic perception of things remains unchanged.

Boise Cascade is fighting back against the Rainforest Action Network, demanding that RAN retract what company officials claim are false allegations. One has to imagine that the company faces an uphill battle. Its officers rush to assure third-graders that they are not, in fact, out to make animals “extinked” as they rail against the cynicism of a grant-funded environmental group exploiting gradeschoolers in its effort to shut down logging. But RAN came through an IRS audit four years ago with its nonprofit status intact. A nationally syndicated column that lambasted Boise Cascade’s anti-RAN campaign ran in dozens of newspapers this summer, hurting the company’s efforts to tell its version of the story.

One of the people who stands in Boise Cascade’s line of fire is Tamar Hurwitz, who helped put together the letter-writing campaign against the company. Hurwitz, RAN’s education outreach coordinator, has devoted her career to environmental protection. She estimates she’s spoken to more than 125,000 schoolchildren over the years about the importance of protecting rain forests.

Looking back at her own environmental awakening, she points to an unlikely memory—the time she saw the movie Jaws. While other kids gasped in delighted terror at all the teeth gnashing, all the blood in the water, she gasped for other reasons. In her young mind, she feared the movie would prompt people to loathe sharks and perhaps to seek their destruction en masse. So she wrote a letter to one of the movie’s actors, voicing her concerns about the welfare of sharks.

She chuckles as she relates the story, as if she’s a bit embarrassed. That was a long time ago. She was nine.