If you go down to the woods today, you're part of a growing movement

So long, Greenpeace. Welcome, BBOWT (or the Berks, Bucks and Oxon Wildlife Trust). Green campaigners, long the beneficiaries of people's anxiety over the environment, are falling far behind in the scramble for membership and funding.

In a significant but little-noticed change, "soft" environment groups, whose typical attraction is to offer days out for the family at nature reserves, are shooting ahead in membership, while campaigning groups such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth (FoE) and WWF are virtually standing still.

Membership of the Wildlife Trusts, those staid-seeming county-based conservation groups, last month topped 400,000, an 85 per cent increase in seven years, giving them far more members than the Tory party, and more than Labour and the Liberal Democrats combined. In the same period, membership of Greenpeace, FoE and WWF has fallen or stagnated.

The Wildlife Trusts' success is being repeated in similar organisations. The Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust has gone from 70,000 members to 100,000 since 1995, and membership of the Woodland Trust has doubled in the past four years to 115,000.

The daddy of them all, the National Trust, has picked up no fewer than half a million extra members since 1995, taking its numbers to nearly three million. The figures appear to show a fading interest in high-profile threats to the planet such as ozone depletion and climate change, and people's renewed eagerness to protect and enjoy their own local bit of the natural world.