Passacantando doesn't care who becomes president because when it comes to the environment he doesn't think it will make much difference. His new strategy for Greenpeace is to bypass the political process altogether and target corporations instead. He wants to hit them where it hurts the most: brand identity.

"Corporations spend millions of dollars on their reputations in the market," says Passacantando, his feet propped on a picnic table during a Greenpeace retreat in the forested mountains of western Maryland. "They want to be considered sexy and attractive. And we're going to go after that identity."

Passacantando is one of a new breed of environmental activists. After eight disappointing years in which the first openly environmentalist occupants of the White House did little to brake global warming or advance the cause of other ecological issues, the locus of "green" activism has shifted from the world of policy and politics to corporations -- their boardrooms and the streets outside them, and the intangible space where their images are formed.

The opposing aspects of this trend were visible this week, when Environmental Defense, a buttoned-down, lawyer-led Washington group, announced it had arranged a partnership with seven multinational corporations that promise to substantially reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

A few blocks away, at Greenpeace USA's new headquarters, militants held a welcoming party for Passacantando, the energetic new executive director of the group, which has fallen on hard times in the past several years, with declining membership and a distinctly lower public profile. Passacantando was the first person arrested at the anti-globalization protests outside the gathering of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund -- he'd chained himself to a truck. In the same vein, at Greenpeace he's promising lots of direct action against global corporations -- shareholder protests, student disinvestment campaigns, street theater.

In the closing days of a presidential campaign that pits a governor who doubts the science behind global warming against a vice president who believes it but whose record indicates he can't or won't do anything about it, many environmental activists seem increasingly indifferent to the traditional political game. Some halfheartedly support Gore, while others are lending their support to Green Party candidate Ralph Nader even though they recognize his campaign as a lost cause.

And many are simply sitting out the process entirely. When the Sierra Club endorsed Gore in July, it declared that support for him within the organization was "overwhelming." But the press release announcing the decision also revealed that while 39 of the group's chapters voted to endorse Gore and only one voted for Nader, 16 chapters did not even bother to respond to the national office's six-month effort to survey membership opinion.

The reason for that indifference, says Passacantando, is that environmentalists now recognize that politicians are often just middlemen in effecting social change.

"Given the power of the global corporations, whether on trade or environmental issues, increasingly you have to take it straight to their brand identity in the marketplace, as opposed to going to politicians who act as their surrogates at one remove," Passacantando told Salon. "They spend millions of dollars creating a brand image; they know it's possibly the most valuable thing they have. There's no point in writing your congressman if he already gave up his power to some agency called the World Trade Organization."

Although Environmental Defense's tactics and philosophy are as restrained as Greenpeace's are flamboyant, Sarah Wade, the economic analyst in the group's Washington office, agrees with Passacantando that the corporate world, rather than the political process, is the most effective current focus of activity.

"On climate change," she says, "there's just not a lot of opportunity to work with the government right now." The Republican-controlled Senate has blocked initiatives the administration has pushed, she says -- most notably the Kyoto Protocol, which calls for the United States to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2010.

This political deadlock has disgusted and frustrated many environmentalists who took Al Gore at his word when he campaigned in 1992 on a platform of radical environmentalism. At a time when the scientific consensus in support of global warming was far weaker than it is today, Gore took the Bush administration to task for failing to slow the greenhouse effect and boldly called for new taxes and government programs to stop it. His book, "Earth in the Balance," posed such a deep philosophical challenge to the American way of life that even neo-Luddite Jeremy Rifkin, the diehard opponent of genetic engineering and other new technologies, termed it "revolutionary."

But while Clinton and Gore stood their ground against attempts to overturn basic clean air and water rules, pushing for new regulations was a low priority. Giant fleets of gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles zoomed onto the highways through a loophole in car-emission standards that the administration did nothing to close. While Motor City enjoyed subsidies for developing improved engines that have yet to make it to market, solar power got less attention than it had under President Bush. And with zero support for the Kyoto treaty in the Senate, the administration ended up undermining it -- the very thing Gore had lambasted Bush the elder for doing to the earlier Rio treaty, which had set the world on the path to cutting greenhouse gases back in 1992.