 Armstrong was an environmental activist in the late 1980s, working with Greenpeace and Earth First!to curtail the logging of old growth forests in Oregon and end nuclear weapons testing in Nevada.During the 1990s, he served with the US Peace Corps in Costa Rica and worked with UNICEF in Sierra Leone, spent a year and a half at a Buddhist monastery, served in Americorps under the "I Have A Dream" program, and did community organizing in Portland, Oregon.