As with many environmentalists, it was "a sense of outrage over injustices" that spurred Peter Montague's career as an environmental activist. But his outrage came, at least initially, from what he didn't know—from hunches that America's people and environment were being wronged "way before there was any kind of environmental awareness."

Now approaching age 66, Montague is celebrating his 35th year as an activist, as well as 25 years at the helm of the Environmental Research Foundation at Princeton University, and almost 20 years of running Rachel's Environmental and Health News (www.rachel.org; 888-2RACHELS), an online environmental clearinghouse named in honor of Rachel Carson, author of the 1962 landmark book, Silent Spring, which warned that toxic industrial chemicals and pesticides would cause irreparable harm to the environment and human health.

As befitting a man whose life is devoted to public disclosure of information on pollutants' effects on human and environmental health, Montague states  matter-of-factly: "I've been at this for a long time." Yet, despite a life spent cataloging environmental and political wrongs, he also states, "Do I feel optimistic? Yes, I do."

Montague's political views and future were shaped at Antioch College (1959-1960), where he met environmental scientist Sheldon Novick, who in turn introduced him to a colleague, Barry Commoner, who was starting a national scientific information movement based at Washington State University. "The idea was that, if you had a lot of education, then you had an obligation to explain complex problems so that the public could understand them and make intelligent decisions about them—in order to grease the wheels for democracy, so to speak," Montague explains.

But the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1960, and the confrontations between Castro, Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy, cemented Montague's political leanings. "It became clear to me that the people who ran the US and USSR were willing to sacrifice thousands of people's lives in this macho game of 'my missile is bigger than yours,'" he says. "I decided I had to work the rest of my life against that sort of death wish."

Yet even in the face of discovering that "the power structure is corrupt and beyond salvaging," Montague saw hope. Scientist and Citizen magazine (now published as Environment), for instance, collected baby teeth to prove to the government that radioactive fallout is harmful to human health, leading to the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty, signed by President Kennedy in 1961.

"This was a new kind of power for citizens," says Montague. "They could influence intelligent decision-making and make democracy stronger and more robust. This set the course of my life."

Montague spent 1969 working for Ralph Nader's newly formed consumer advocacy group, returning to the University of New Mexico, where he completed a PhD in American Studies in 1971, "all fired up with the idea that people could spend their lives as citizen activists trying to make the government responsible to the people."

The fruit of Montague's experience with Nader was the formation of the public interest group, New Mexico Citizens for Clean Air and Water. The group created the template for grassroots environmentalist groups, as well as Montague's career. "Our goal was to get hold of technical information and translate it into terms that anybody could understand in a timely fashion," he explains. With that same goal in mind, he founded the Environmental Research Foundation (ERF) at Princeton University in 1980, in order to provide understandable scientific information on human health and the environment.

The staff at ERF compiles information for grassroots activist groups, environmentalists, journalists, librarians, and individuals. (However, groups get first priority. "Working alone isn't most effective," says Montague. "The Lone Ranger doesn't always win.") ERF's free weekly newsletter, Rachel's Environmental and Health News, founded in 1986, covers contemporary environmental and sustainability issues. (About 200 subscribers unable to access the Internet, including the disabled and imprisoned, receive a printed version; Rachel's e-mail subscription base is 15,000.) Recent topics include rising cancer rates, the precautionary principle, and Montague's "favorite Rachel's," issues #792-795, entitled "Fiery Hell on Earth: GOD TOLD ME TO STRIKE," an examination of "the reasons the US is pursuing contradictory and seemingly self-destructive nuclear policies." Most of the information in Rachel's "never appears in the mainstream media and can only be found in medical and scientific journals that most people never see," says Montague, yet it is always "translated" into plain language.

Our greatest problem, says Montague, is environmental destruction, caused by greed-based governmental policies : "We're exceeding the capacity of the biosphere to sustain life, and it's evident that we've reached the limit to growth. The  Adam Smith idea that pursuing our own greed benefits the maximum amount of people doesn't work anymore. We've grown so much that we're going to kill the planet if we continue. We can't have perpetual growth, so capitalism in its present form has an impossible future."

Montague foresees Bush's upcoming second term as a particularly trying—and telling—time: "Republicans are under the sway of the dispensationalists, who believe the end of the world is imminent and everything will be better off after the apocalypse. Some [Republican] legislators sit on their hands. Others take active steps toward bringing on Armageddon—keep the Israeli war going, heat up the attack on Iraq, spread nuclear weapons around. In the New York Times [recently] a guy who lived through Hitler's Germany reminded us that Hitler came to power partly on the coattails of the German Christian Right. He sees the same potential for a fascist takeover in this country. These people clearly have loose moorings, but because they meet each other every week in church, they have a political infrastructure that makes them hard to beat. Many of them abhor stewardship and think it's evidence of the Antichrist, and ripping up the earth is what good Christians should do."

Despite the prevalence of doom-and-gloom scenarios, Montague sees signs of hope for the environment triumphing in the end. "We're much further ahead than we were 25 years ago. We've got a huge, successful movement to reform the economy of the Northern Hemisphere—the only thing preventing us from making those changes is that no one has stepped up and said, 'Here's another way of living.'"

In the meantime, Montague advises doing as he does: "Don't lose heart because the news is bad. Inform yourself, inform your loved ones; that's the first part of fixing a problem. Envision other ways of being on the planet. Most people are rational; I believe we'll make the cultural changes needed to prevent the scenario the dispensationalists want to see, as jarring as those changes may be. The question is, how bad will it get before that?" Remember, he says, "Nature bats last." And nature has already begun sending us "profound messages"—droughts, floods, hurricanes, the tsunami—"that we have to change the way we live."