Guess who's coming to protest?

A decade ago, Karl Rappold, whose family was ranching in Montana before it was a state, would sooner spit than call himself an environmentalist.

Today he's still not about to join any greenie groups - but with gas drilling threatening to foul the crystalline waters that gush from the Rockies onto his spread, he is arm-in-arm with a coalition of ranchers and environmental groups that aim to stop the drilling.

Whether he likes it or not, Mr. Rappold is part of the new face of the American environmental movement - millions of Americans who may not call themselves environmentalists or belong to big-name green groups, but who might just sport a "What Would Jesus Drive?" bumper sticker or battle a local toxic-waste dump.

This diversification may explain a long-standing mystery: For more than a decade, polls have shown at least two-thirds of Americans consider themselves environmentalists, but membership in big mainstream environment groups has stayed flat since the early 1990s. For some organizations, like Greenpeace, it has plummeted.

But under the radar, newcomers are taking up the cause where it matters most to them: at home. Their activism has spawned a bevy of smaller, local-issue green groups whose growth is surging, according to a new analysis of Internal Revenue Service data.

For example, the number of environmental organizations with more than $1 million in annual income fell by nearly half - from 280 to 151 - during the period from 1995 to 2003, the IRS says.

Meanwhile, 4,247 smaller environmental groups (up to $1 million in income) were created - a 51 percent increase.

"What we've seen is the growth in the environmental movement shifting away from large-scale national groups," says Robert Brulle, a Drexel University sociologist who tracks environmental groups through IRS data. "In the 1980s, the sentiment grew that Washington environmental groups had been co-opted and become ineffectual. The fruit of that, today, is the growth we've seen among all these local and regional environment groups."

The fast-growing environmental justice movement that began in the 1980s, was joined in the 1990s by the relatively new 'ecoreligious' and 'ecohealth' groups, Brulle notes. These groups and those affiliated with them span demographic and racial differences and often eschew traditional labels.

Just ask Margaret Williams, who in the late 1980s realized that a toxic landfill 150 feet outside her back door, which she later dubbed "Mt. Dioxin," threatened the health of neighborhood residents.

So the retired teacher and now octogenarian great-grandmother launched a decade-long battle to get the government to evacuate hundreds of families from Pensacola, Fla. This year, the last family is finally set to move out, although the government says it doesn't have the money to move Mt. Dioxin itself.

"No, I'm not a member of any environmental group," she says. "I'm just Margaret Williams working to help people. I am concerned about our people having a clean environment to live in - and that includes air, water, and soil. I think all people are entitled to a healthy environment."

The environmental justice movement is growing swiftly. It's already increased from 300 groups in 1992 to more than 1,000 in 2000, estimates Robert Bullard, who directs the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University.

It includes nonminorities like Erin Taylor, a student at Emerson College in Boston, who resists being labeled as an environmentalist but lists environmental health, energy, recycling, and water among her causes.

"I don't like to call myself an environmentalist," she says. "I feel like the word environmentalist has been 'villainized.' I guess I really am an environmentalist, but I feel more like a humanitarian, a life- itarian."

Ms. Taylor and a handful of activists on campus are passing around petitions, raising awareness to turn lights off in the dorms, and meeting with school administrators on a plan to purchase 20 percent of campus power from "clean" sources.

But a key motivator for her is to reduce air pollution in urban communities, where power plants are often sited.

"We've got to help these people," she says of city neighborhoods where the rates of breathing-related illness are rising due to poor air quality.

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