Wendy Dwyer is a lifelong activist who is going to take her commitment to recycling and fighting pollutants all the way to the grave. Literally.

She has signed up for a green burial.

“I’m going to go in… a totally biodegradable wool blanket and plant flowers on me. No chemicals. No embalming fluid …. That’s what we’re supposed to do,” says Dwyer, a registered nurse, in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

Dwyer was raised in Guilderland Center by a mother, a nursing professor, who “was a big follower of Rachel Carson and ‘Silent Spring,’” she said, referencing the 1962 book that documented the harm caused by pesticides and sparked the modern environmental movement.

Wendy’s mother, Jane Dwyer, had a large organic garden at her Depot Road home in the 1950s. She grew corn, lettuce, beans, potatoes, onions, all kinds of squash, strawberries, blueberries — “you name it; she grew it,” said Wendy Dwyer.

“She had to work that soil up from being nothing …. When she died in 2010, the soil was black. It was like gold at her house,” said her daughter.

Dwyer said of composting, including her own body upon burial, “It’s in my blood.”

Describing herself as “hard-headed and strong-willed,” Dwyer left home at 17. She lived in the old Magley’s trailer park on Guilderland’s Western Avenue, which is now owned by Crossgates Mall and slated for development as a storage facility, where she remembered the “nice people.”

Dwyer lived in a trailer right next to a reservoir. “One day I got up and the reservoir was gone. I thought I’d lost my mind. The dam had broken and the intersection at Stuyvesant Plaza was flooded — and there were carp in the road.”

One of Dwyer’s long-time causes as an activist has been, as a member of Save the Pine Bush, fighting to preserve the globally rare pine barrens. “We have this beautiful planet and we have so many beautiful species. And I can’t turn my back on that ever,” she said. “I never will. I will not. I will not be complicit. I will always resist.”

Her resistance takes a wide variety of forms. As a member of Zero Waste Capital District, she is lobbying for a bottle bill. She works with Repair Café to set up workshops — the Voorheesville library recently held one — where people learn how to fix things rather than discard them and buy new.

“I’m all over the place,” says Dwyer, describing her brain as “like a magnet in a room full of metal.”

Dwyer says she is a “minor player” in the causes she supports, setting up tents, doing the dishes.

She became active in the peace movment after the terrorists’ attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“Like everybody else on the planet, … I was … totally confused,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do. And then, about two or three days after 9/11, I said, ‘My god, there’s going to be a war …. This is crazy.’”

She went to a march in Hudson and then to a gathering at the federal building in Albany. “They were collecting blankets to send to Afghanistan.” That’s where she met Pat Beetle, who is now in her nineties, and both women are still involved in the peace movement.

They decided to organize a protest at Crossgates Mall in Guilderland — malls being the modern equivalent of the town square, except they are privately owned.

“Maybe 17 of us entered the mall from different entrances with signs on us that said, ‘Don’t attack Iraq,’ ‘May peace prevail on Earth, ‘Drop toys, not bombs,’” Dwyer recalled. “And of course, they tried to round us up.” The letter-sized signs were pinned to the protesters’ T-shirts.

Dwyer was on crutches because of knee surgery and told the security officers trying to expel her that she had lost a wingnut off her crutch, to stall her eviction.

Later, Stephen Downes, a lawyer who had learned about the group being expelled from Crossgates in December 2002, went to Crossgates and had a “Peace on Earth” T-shirt made, which he wore as he shopped on March 3, 2002. He became a cause célèbre when he refused to remove the shirt and took the case to court.

“It got international because it was being covered in Japan,” Dwyer said this week.

For several years after the original 2002 protest, Dwyer and her fellow activists led peace walks at the mall, singing John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” and the African-American spiritual “Down by the Riverside” with new words: “Gonna wear any shirt I want, down by the Crossgates Mall … Ain’t gonna study war no more.”

At the time of the protests, Dwyer told The Enterprise of the terrorists’ attacks, “This country is using it as an excuse to go to war. We don’t need to cause further terror.”

Dwyer said this week, “It was a moral imperative to resist war.”

Describing herself as always having been “a very law-abiding person,” she nevertheless decided to join a protest, lying in the road, where she knew she would be arrested.

“It was terrifying …,” she said. “They did pull us off to the jail on Morton Street and held us.”

Dwyer didn’t tell her parents about it for a long time, afraid it would upset them, but they found out “and they were proud of me for resisting and trying to just put my body on the line to say that it’s wrong.”

Dwyer went on, “So unfortunately, we couldn’t stop the invasion of Iraq. And I remember the night of Shock and Awe. I was at work and I walked past the TV set and people were cheering and I said, ‘What’s going on?’

“And the scenes were bright orange. And they said, ‘Shock and Awe’ and I went to my office. I could barely walk. My legs felt like they were going to cave in. And I went to my office and sat down and cried.”

She went on, “The rest is history. Now everybody knows there was a lot of lies there and we were just dragged into a big pack of lies. We know Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.”

Dwyer said she can get discouraged with the lack of progress that has been made. “We’re the closest we’ve ever been to total nuclear destruction,” she said, referencing the Doomsday Clock.

On the environmental front — Dwyer used the term “ecocide” — she said, “We’re destroying this planet so quickly.”

What keeps her going, Dwyer said, are “the most wonderful, amazing people that I’ve met in this journey of resisting war and trying to prevent the destruction of our environment.”

She went on, “It’s very hard to understand how people can only think of themselves or their pocketbook. You know, the military industrial complex, the fossil-fuel people …. It’s very hard to get your head up off the pillow and keep going.”

She concluded, “I’ve always had a lot of energy. It’s starting to fade now. I never give up hope, even though I can get terribly depressed. I guess I draw on the good people I work with, you know?”

Dwyer also spoke of the need for people to be informed — “so many people are misinformed, uniformed,” Dwyer said — urging others, “Stand together for planet Earth because all the species deserve it.”