The Environment : Nettle Networking : The Student Conservation Assn. puts young volunteers to work on government lands all over the country.

“It’s amazing. It’s a new frontier. But you need energy to do it,” Adam Whelchel told me when I visited him and his colleague Joy Hosokawa at Point Mugu last week.

They are volunteers in a program run by the Student Conservation Assn. and part of a team of six young scientists spending the summer working on San Nicholas Island off the Ventura coast conducting an environmental audit.

If you’re wondering what that is and why they are doing it, just try and remember the last time you balanced your checkbook.

Well, the U. S. government, the nation’s largest landowner, hasn’t been able to get a handle on its own natural inventory for decades. So these kids volunteered to help. Heretofore, when we have read in the paper that this or that bird or flower hit the “endangered” list, it may not have occurred to us that someone went out and counted that species’ members.

And then somebody else--or maybe the same person--went out and did the count again and compared the figures. That’s what Whelchel, a University of Vermont graduate, and Hosokawa, a University of Hawaii graduate, are doing on San Nicholas Island.

Their volunteer organization places 1,500 members each year on various government lands--parks, historical sites, even military bases such as Point Mugu and Camp Pendleton.

The day I visited, Hosokawa and Whelchel were working with the regular staff, counting the bird population on the mainland, though their living quarters and most of their work are on San Nicholas Island.

You might be wondering why anyone with a good education--especially in science--would work without pay to schlep around six days a week in weeds and nettles, swamps and rocks, looking for island night lizards, native island endemics and black oyster-catchers.

According to Whelchel, through the Student Conservation Assn. “you meet high-powered biologists and researchers, and even top program directors.”

We’re talking environmental career building. And we’re even talking old boy and girl network. Because in the last three decades, the association has developed into the recruiting pool for federal and state parks and other agencies looking for smart, motivated environmental talent.

According to Liz Titus, who founded the association in 1955, about half of these government facilities now have or recently had an employee who had been an association volunteer.

Paul Hauth, who graduated from Thousand Oaks High School this spring, joined the program and went to Colorado last week to build hiking trails 9,000 feet up in White River National Forest.

Before leaving, he told me he wanted “the physical thing . . . the endurance test” before starting his geography studies at Moorpark College in the fall. He’s part of the association’s pre-college program for people ages 16 to 18. Their stint is six weeks and is more physical than scientific. But no less serious.

“I’m not an environmental wacko,” said Hauth, “but I want to be doing things that keep things nice for future generations--so my grandchildren will have something to enjoy.”

Oxnard High School graduate Christine May, now a senior at Humboldt State University, is an association volunteer with the U. S. Bureau of Land Management in Colorado.

“I always wanted to work outdoors,” she said. And, pursuing her goal of a career in natural resources management, she is monitoring water quality and “inspecting for cattle use” along smaller rivers that flow into the Colorado. That means she might blow the whistle if man or beast is wrecking the place.

Not all the tales I heard of work in the Student Conservation Assn. were so earnest. One crew of 10 volunteers, doing historical excavations on a Civil War battlefield in Virginia, chose to spend their one free day a week at a local mall.

Ray Auger, supervisor of the association’s program for these teen-agers, said it created a “somewhat difficult” situation.

“Five of them were American kids who lived their lives in malls.” The other five were part of the association’s exchange program with Russia.

“They,” he said, “wanted to start living their lives in the mall.”

The deal the association made with the 10 was to let them go back to the mall on the weekend instead of on a Blue Ridge Mountains hiking trip.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised at this tale of eco-backsliding, since I have teen-agers. But Christine May, on the phone from a riverbank in Colorado, put the incident in perspective.

“They’re still young. A lot of people go through the city phase, the materialistic phase. After a while they won’t be able to stand living in the city.”

FYI

For information on Student Conservation Assn. programs, phone (510) 783-0463. High school students can volunteer for six-week summer programs. College-age students and older non-students can volunteer for five 12-week programs spaced throughout the year. Since last year, applications and enrollment went up 40%. Work sites are all over the U. S., including many in California.