In 1979, as a graduate of Wesleyan College who loved languages, Madelyn was planning to attend graduate school to become a United Nations interpreter. But first she wanted to make good on a commitment to VISTA, so she began tutoring children in Newark's Ironbound district, an old-world Portuguese neighborhood bordered on three sides by railroad tracks.

She enjoyed her new life in an immigrant community of seamstresses and building tradesmen. But that Thanksgiving she happened to see her new community on the news: City officials had discovered dozens of drums holding illegally stored wastes in a warehouse near her apartment. "The Newark fire director said that Ironbound was a toxic time bomb ready to explode," recalls Hoffman.

After that, Hoffman and some of her co-workers in Ironbound began to organize. They hung small cards shaped like time bombs on doorknobs to recruit members for what became the Ironbound Committee Against Toxic Wastes. The group has had several dramatic victories, like defeating plans for an incineration ship that would have docked in Newark to burn hazardous wastes at sea. Ironbound members have also seen the dangers grow. In 1983, for example, they discovered that a Diamond Shamrock plant that had made Agent Orange during the Vietnam War had left behind the highest levels of dioxin contamination in the country, just 1,000 feet from Ironbound's farmers market.

So Madelyn established the Grass Roots Environmental Organization (GREO), which, ever since, has been instrumental in providing support to some 125 community groups on the front lines of NJ's toxic-waste wars. Those groups challenged the state's plan to build 19 new garbage incinerators, and, in the end, the state built only five.

To help get these fledgling efforts off the ground, Hoffman handled telephone inquiries, visited kitchen organizing meetings, spoke at public hearings, and recruited pro bono lawyers. She traversed the state, participating in toxic battles at virtually every exit on the New Jersey Turnpike. The movement kept growing until Earth Day 1990, when Hoffman says she felt "the first crack" in her optimism. "Monsanto, Du Pont, Dow Chemical, American Cyanamid, the companies that created the pollution, were now saying, 'We're environmentalist. You're the problem. You litter in the park on Sundays. You drive to work with only one person in the car,'" Hoffman recalls. "But corporations are the ones who emit more toxic waste into the air per square mile in New Jersey than in any other state."

After Gov. Christine Todd Whitman took office in 1994, the chemical lobby unleashed an assault on the state legislature. The industry wants to roll back pollution prevention laws, repeal water pollution fines and other measures that were passed in the early '90s, after years of public pressure. In this climate GREO funding has fallen off, hopefully temporarily so Hoffman works one day a week in the office of Genesis Farm, a center for organic biodynamic gardening near the Delaware Water Gap. She finds that work to be a spiritual respite from confrontational politics.