For 12 days, Hector the Protector kept loggers at bay as he sat in a platform 25 feet up a gum tree in northern Tasmania.

His reports of the devastation of the landscape - "for the sake of a few million pizza boxes which we'll buy back rather expensively from the Japanese mills which process the woodchips from our publically-owned forests" - were sent to the world via his website at www.nfn.org.au/up-a-tree/ which he updated daily by cellular phone.

Now only the stump of the tree remains. But Hector's legacy lives on: the website is still campaigning against the assault on Australian and Tasmanian eco-systems and other green causes have embraced the net.

"The overwhelming benefit of the web to environmental campaigners is getting relevant information out to people in an accessible form," says Mike Childs, the Friends Of the Earth toxics campaigner who has helped set up FOE's toxic watch map on the web.

"If people can see what pollutants are being released in their area, they can get angry about that and help to do something about it. Previously that information was very difficult to access."

For grassroots community-based campaigns too, the web is proving an invaluable tool. The National Association for Cleaner Kilns, which is fighting the burning of toxic chemical wastes in cement kilns, is able to link up with similar campaigns both in the UK and overseas to share information and tactics.

But one of the most significant benefits of the web is that it lets people think on a much larger scale.

"Globally the web has unified the environmental movement in a way that I only dreamed of when I first started using email over 10 years ago," says Brent Hoare, an activist from Sydney who now runs an ozone-friendly fridge company www.greenchill.org. "It has made possible the development of global days of action such as Reclaim The Streets and the World Trade Organisation protests in Seattle."

McDonald's, the multinational fast food chain, spends $2bn a year promoting its products. But its green-unfriendly aspects have been highlighted by the operators of the McSpotlight website, www.mcspotlight.org.

And it's this information-free-for-all that has been such a gift to activists the world over: www.oneworld.org and www.envirolink.com both offer a planet- and people-friendly daily news service, while the award winning www.urban75.com dishes up the latest from the squat and rave end of the environmental activist spectrum.

Innovative, sustainable environmental solutions sites abound on the web too, most notably www.london21.org from the UK, and www.sustainable.doe.gov, www.cnt.org and www.ilsr.org from the US.

To deal with the volume of environmental websites, sites such as www.ethical-junction.org are being launched specifically to guide surfers through the increasingly congested eco-cyberspace.

But not just die-hard eco-freako activists are benefitting from this information-fest. "The boost in the quantity and quality of information available is shifting power to the environmentally aware consumer," according to Rob Harrison from the Ethical Consumer.

"Consumers now have the ability to track a company's environmental and ethical record, and as a result have an increased say in how companies are directed in the future."

Aside from the benefits that the web offers environmentalists, a US report now suggests that e-commerce itself is generating massive environmental benefits.

The report from the Centre for Energy and Climate Solutions at www.cool-companies.org claims that the emerging economy created by the internet will reduce the amount of energy and materials consumed by businesses and increase overall productivity.

So while the web is delivering on many fronts environ mentally, Barry Coates from the World Development Movement doubts though whether the web can single-handedly change hearts and minds. This, he believes, can happen only through decidedly low-tech face-to-face encounters.

"If we put information on the web and ask, 'is this somehow magically going to create a constituency for the kind of issues that we think are important?', then the answer is no. What the web does do, though," says Coates, "is to give more information to the people who are already sympathetic."

David Boyle from the New Economics Foundation www.neweconomics.org is a lone voice of caution amid the clamour of web frenzy. He says: "It's just too early to know whether the web's benefits will outweigh its disadvantages. Just left to itself, it's easy to see a situation arising where the people who would really benefit from the web - those currently at the margins of society - would miss out."

The danger of the socially excluded missing out on the technological revolution has led to a number of innovations around the country, most notably the Redbricks project in inner-city Manchester. This was the first scheme in the UK to get a whole housing estate online at a minimal cost to the residents.

But Boyle says it's up to all of us to come up with new ideas of managing the web in a positive way, otherwise "it could so easily benefit wasteful, large multinationals".