The Last Eco-Warrior

As he watched other ’60s activists become political insiders and dealmakers, Peter Berg held fast to one belief, even through his dying days: only radical change can save our planet.

Photos courtesy Judy Goldhaft

“I don’t want to beat it,” Peter Berg says. “I want to seduce it.”

It’s March 2011, and the ’60s radical-turned-ecological visionary is dying. A tumor has paralyzed one of his vocal chords, leaving his voice scratchy and distorted, sounding, in his words, like a gravel truck unloading. "I want to seduce it into leaving,” Berg repeats. “Get it drunk and leave it in the gas station bathroom."

Berg sits at the dining room table of his green house in Noe Hill, a steep residential neighborhood in San Francisco, sipping chai tea. He still has long silver hair despite months of chemo and radiation treatments, and wears a brown long-sleeved shirt over several layers in the chilly spring air.

He can feel the tumor pressing on his nerves, low in his throat. "It starts usually in the left scapula, in that shoulder, the left side of my chest, then the other side comes on," he says. "It can be so strong that I can't walk." Despite the pain, he refuses opiates, citing a hi…