By John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace USA

WASHINGTON--Given my long-standing relationship with the Ralph Nader folks, I am getting several calls a day urging me to help rally the environmental troops for Al Gore and to talk Nader into pulling out of the race. I'd sooner try to talk the mailman into giving me his truck.

Even if I wanted to I couldn't move the vote, not even if I ran naked on fire across the field during Game 5 of the World Series with a "Gore- Lieberman" sign.

I won't presume any reader wants to hear how yet another Washington, DC, gasbag thinks you should vote. It reminds me of former first lady Nancy Reagan's nagging "Just Say No" slogan and the urge it always gave me to do just the opposite.

Frankly, how I am going to vote is personal, an almost sacred ritual to me. But I run Greenpeace USA and it's natural that I keep getting two questions: What is Gore's problem with environmental voters? And, who is Greenpeace going to endorse?

Greenpeace doesn't endorse candidates. We work with and against politicians and corporations, but we don't endorse candidates. Other groups do that. It's simply not our role.

As for Gore's problems with environmental voters, it is all relative. In my experience, mainstream environmentalists support Gore, while much of the grassroots movement does not.

Only sophisticated exit polling could confirm this, but I am skeptical that many of Nader's supporters really ever were Gore supporters. Gore has chosen to run for the presidency right down the middle of the road-- dodging traffic from both directions.

(Jim Hightower, the former agricultural commissioner for Texas, said that the only things in the middle of the road are yellow lines and dead armadillos.)

To his credit, Gore was the first mainstream politician to articulate global environmental threats. In this campaign, however, Gore has highlighted environmental causes only in broad rhetorical terms and then just to expose the toxic clouds of pollutants belching from George W. Bush's domicile.

Easy stuff. You could envision the annual meeting of "Environmentalists for Bush" having trouble filling a small phone booth. And his beloved Texas is either first or vying for the lead in the categories of water and air pollution, toxic pollution and childhood asthma.

But to now complain to Nader supporters that they are hurting Gore is like blaming the Beatles for knocking Perry Como records off the charts.

Meanwhile, the polluters' last great hope, Gov. George W. Bush, is ready to go back to corporate self-regulation with a vision of "Road Warrior" movies.

Instead of blaming Nader, Gore could have won environmental votes if he had chosen to earn them. Nader's appeal is that for every problem he addresses, environmental or otherwise, he lays out a real plan that you know he will be working on long-term, regardless of the election results.

There is no devil representing the corporate line sitting on his shoulder. To attack Nader's integrity is like accusing Thomas Moore of being a moral relativist.

Instead, here are six steps Gore should have taken to connect with rank-and-file environmentalists.

* Directed the Environmental Protection Agency to close down WTI, the hazardous waste incinerator in Ohio located 400 yards from an elementary school--something candidate Gore promised in 1992 and again this October.

* Pushed the White House to veto the budget if it contains a rider from Sen. Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, to suspend all national environmental laws from applying in Alaska.

* Made the U.S. Food and Drug Administration require labeling for any products containing untested and experimental genetically modified foods.

* Stopped Clinton-Gore negotiators at the international negotiations on global warming from inserting loopholes on behalf of industry--like a provision to allow the construction of nuclear plants to count toward a solution to global warming.

* Promised to put strong economic sanctions into effect on Japan for breaking international law by continuing their scientific whaling hunt.

* Listened to and helped the scores of community activists coming to Gore rallies with pleas for help in confronting sugar companies in Florida, timber companies in the Northwest, pulp mills in the Southeast and factory trawlers along their shores.

Then he could have figured out a way to put these ideas together into a "central organizing principle," as he so persistently stated in his book "Earth in the Balance."

It's getting late for such initiatives now. Maybe all people really do care about is Social Security and getting cheap drugs--the legal kind.