A friend recommends www.envirolink.org, a widely used green portal, and this leads across the Atlantic to the Danish Wind Turbine Manufacturers Association, which offers detailed text on wind power in Dansk, Deutsch or English. I am glad to see that the Danes, my forebears, are hoisting a wetted finger toward non-pollutive electricity, but the download time is more than an hour, and that is too windy. Click the "back" button.

Returned from Denmark, but still on Envirolink, I stumble on controversy. It seems that last spring, Lycos, a prominent Internet search engine, promised support to Envirolink, which was started in 1991 by Josh Knauer, then a freshman at Carnegie Mellon University, and is chronically underfunded. Envirolink was to get financing, and Lycos would be allowed to look green. (So says news analysis downloaded from the New Haven Advocate newspaper. Stealing good stuff is what the Web is for.) For three months, if you clicked on "Lycos saves the planet," you reached Envirolink. Then Lycos canceled the contract. Norm Lenhart, a senior editor at something called Off-Road.com, had complained that Envirolink offered entry to such activist groups as Earth First and the Animal Liberation Front. Norm who? At what? Off-Road.com is an Internet site for fans of off-road vehicles, with ties to the anti-environmental "wise-use" movement. The website is a click away from Blue Ribbon magazine, another off-road lobbying outfit, sponsored by Honda, Yamaha, Ski-doo and Polaris, whose motto is "preserving our natural resources FOR the public instead of FROM the public."

Here is one of the back alleys in which the Web can be brilliantly educational. Will enough high school kids, rummaging for term-paper material, find this alley and see what it means? Which is, perhaps, that virtual power, not real size, is often what's important. Envirolink has few staff members and little money, but it has power, because it is an entry to 400 enviro and animal-rights websites. Off-Road.com is an unknown, except to its communicants, who are mostly Western motorheads determined to keep Forest Service logging roads open at a time when rising environmental awareness makes it clear to the wider society that they should be closed. Lycos, briefly eager to save the planet with Envirolink, is a real business with real funding. Did Lycos, which now carries the Environmental News Service in place of Envirolink, cave in to an insignificant squawk from the far reaches of Webland? Lycos execs say no, and it is true that Envirolink shows up among the search engine's top-rated enviro websites. But the conservative American Land Rights Association seems to think yes, and offers a Web address (www.lycos.com) at which Lycos may be thanked for right thinking. What's a Web crawler to believe? Well, for one thing, that Japanese car, motorcycle and snowmobile manufacturers--the power here is quite real, not virtual--are trying, through Blue Ribbon magazine and its parent, Blue Ribbon Coalition, to defeat U.S. environmental policy.