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INTERVIEW WITH EARTH FIRST! ACTIVIST DARRYL CHERNEY
6216 words
By Lori Rizzo
Half a dozen people asked me to send them this so I am posting it on the
Web. Any zine should feel free to pick this up and print it. Please send
me a copy of the issue that the article appears in. Send to Lori Rizzo,
271 East 10th Street, Box #24, New York, N.Y. 10009. Also please credit
the *Shadow*, as this is a *Shadow* reprint.
Darryl Cherney is a lifelong political activist and an
accomplished recording artist; however, he is probably best known
as one of the survivors of the bombing of fellow Earth First!
organizer Judi Bari's car in May 1990. Within a few hours of the
bombing, the FBI arrested both Cherney and Bari, alleging that it
was their own bomb which went off in the car. Judy Bari was
arrested in the hospital, and Darryl Cherney was held for five
days, although evidence from the wreck of the car proved that the
bomb had exploded directly under Judi Bari's seat. The FBI
continued to pursue these ludicrous charges, and it is for this
reason that Earth First! has brought a civil suit against the
FBI, charging them with civil rights violations. The FBI's
tactics against Bari and Cherney have also brought about an
ongoing Congressional investigation into the Cointelpro tactics
implemented by the FBI against environmental activists.
I met up with Darryl when he was in town to do a benefit for
the Zitzer Spiritual Republic in late November. We did the
interview at the Manhattan apartment where Darryl's family has
lived for over twenty-five years. Throughout our conversation, I
kept wanting to go outside because it was a really nice night,
but Darryl had to stay inside and wait for a phone call and a fax
from his lawyer. He really should get out more!
Lori: What happened the day of the bombing?
Darryl: Well, the night before, Judi and I had attended a major
planning meeting for Redwood Summer at the Seeds of Peace house
in Berkeley. 35 organizers attended, and without a doubt it was
the most important meeting we had had. At 12 noon on Thursday,
May 24, Judi and I left Oakland to head back for Seeds of Peace,
where we would pick up my van and head for University of
California at Santa Cruz, where we had a gig that night. Five
minutes into the drive, the bomb exploded under Judi's seat. Judi
knew it was a bomb right away because it ripped into her
underside, but for me it wasn't as clear. I heard a crack and
suddenly my ears were humming, like a sitar inside my head. I
didn't know it at the time, but that was my ear drums breaking
and flapping around. At first, I thought I was dead because I had
no idea what was going on. Then I thought we'd been rear ended by
a logging truck, because Judi and I had been rear ended and sent
flying through the air by a logging truck just eight months
prior, but I realized that this was much stronger than any log
truck, and besides, we were in Oakland. Finally, a couple of kids
came running up to the car shouting, "Its a bomb! Its a bomb!" I
surveyed the car for damage. Judy was calling out that her back
hurt. I just kept telling her, "I love you" over and over. Soon
after, I was taken out of the car, I presume, by paramedics. I
had a terrible feeling about leaving Judi alone and being taken
away by strangers. I remembered a slide show I'd seen about El
Salvador where I heard that people would call out their names
when the death squads came for them, so that people would know
who they were in case they wound up missing. So, instinctively, I
did the same, The paramedics were extremely rude to me. I kept
asking them to take Judi first and they told me that Judi was
already in an ambulance, which I believed to be untrue because
they couldn't have gotten her out that fast.
In the hospital, a doctor pulled the glass out of my eyes;
then these two guys in suits came in. I asked who they were and
instead of telling me, one of them showed me his card, which was
ridiculous because I could barely see anything. I knew anybody
that stupid had to be the FBI. They asked me my name. I told
them. They asked me who could have done this. I began to give
them a list, but they interrupted me and said, "Look, we can tell
if this is your bomb, so why don't you just confess and get it
over with and make it easy on all of us." I was shocked but not
surprised. I was in the middle of reading Ward Churchill's book,
"Agents of Repression," so I immediately understood that what was
happening to us had happened may times before to the Black
Panthers and the American Indian Movement. I told them I wanted
to see a lawyer, and they abruptly left.
A few hours later I was brought to the Oakland police
station where I was left alone in a smoky room for eight hours
with no food, water, or bathroom. At 11 o'clock they played good
cop and brought me a cheese sandwich and something to drink. For
the next four hours, they questioned me. I know it may sound
naive, but I went along with them because I wanted them to go out
and find the bomber. Also, they threatened to incarcerate me if I
did not answer their questions. I wanted to get out real bad, so
having nothing to hide, I talked to them. At 3 a.m., I was booked
in the Oakland City Jail, where I remained on $100,000 bail for
the next five days.
Lori: What was the extent of your injuries?
Darryl: I suffered two broken eardrums, a scratched cornea, and
lacerations over my left eye, but Judi's pelvis was shattered and
her coccyx dislocated, and she has partial paralysis in her right
leg.
Lori: There were a lot of right-wing talk radio shows trying to
whoop people up against you? Particularly about Judi weren't
there a lot of nasty things said against her?
Darryl: Exactly! Judi was targeted, we believe, not only because
she was organizing Redwood summer, but because she was at the
forefront of creating an IWW labor union at the Georgia Pacific
sawmill in Ft. Bragg, California. She is also a woman, which
added the threat to the male paradigm.
Lori: What year was Redwood Summer?
Darryl: 1990.
Lori: I remember that we got a flyer at our bookstore about it
saying it would be like a "Freedom Summer in woods".
Darryl: Actually, Freedom Summer took place actually over a
series of summers in Mississippi to register Black voters. The
tactic that they used, which was the tactic that we used, was to
recruit college students throughout the country to come and stay
a while, learn about the local culture and engage in nonviolent
activities. In Mississippi, those activities were designed to
protect the civil rights of African Americans. In the redwoods it
was to protect civil rights for redwoods because Earth First!
believes in civil rights for all species that all animals and
all plants have a right to be here for their own sake. Human
beings are hardly the most important species on the planet. That
was the basis of Redwood summer; it was to be a series of
nonviolent direct actions, and it did result in over seventy five
different direct actions over a three month period. It drew about
three thousand people into the redwood region between June and
Labor Day 1990. A testament to our nonviolence code was that
during those 3 months, there was not a single act of violence
attributed to any Earth First! member. I'd go further to say that
in the entire thirteen year history of Earth First! there has
been no violence committed by any Earth First! member against any
policeman, logger, rancher, or anybody.
Lori: Any person?
Darryl: Any person, in our entire history.
Lori: You define nonviolence as no violence against people?
Darryl: Against any life form.
Lori: I heard that they arrested you and held you while you were
in the hospital, is that true!?
Darryl: I was only in the hospital for four hours; Judi was in
the hospital for six weeks. After the bombing, Judi wasn't
allowed to have contact visits. Within two days the Oakland
police removed Judi from intensive care without her doctors'
permission and put her into the jail ward of the hospital. I
consider this the second attempt on Judi's life. It scared the
living hell out of her. The doctors were outraged and brought her
back into intensive care.
Lori: The Oakland police! What was their beef in this?
Darryl: The Oakland police and the FBI have a longstanding
working relationship that goes back at least as far as the
Panthers.
Lori: Do you really think that the FBI put the bomb in the car?
Darryl: I can't say that publicly, because, first of all, we have
a lawsuit, and second, I don't know that for a fact. What I can
say is that the FBI was very gleeful that a bomb had been placed
in our car and was very happy to accuse us publicly of being the
bombers. They also covered the tracks of the would-be assassin.
As a matter of fact, they have yet to retract their statements
about us being the only suspects of the case.
Lori: And this is the kind of stuff that you are going to bring
out through your lawsuit?
Darryl: The lawsuit is a civil rights lawsuit and it says that
the FBI and the Oakland police violated our rights of freedom of
speech and freedom of assembly by falsely arresting us and
continuing to call us suspects in order to stymie the
organization of Redwood Summer. There are also habeas corpus
violations: we are charging them with arresting us when they knew
we were innocent of the bombing. We were arrested and held
without being charged with any crime. In addition to the lawsuit,
we also have opened a Congressional investigation of the FBI's
handling of this case. The Congressional investigation is being
conducted by Don Edwards of the House Judiciary committee. He is
the same one who exposed Cointelpro actions against the Black
Panthers and later against AIM (American Indian Movement) and
CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador).
At this point it is limited to this particular case, but we'd
like him to take a broader look at FBI behavior, particularly
with Leonard Peltier coming up for parole and with Geronimo Pratt
and 18 other Panthers still incarcerated.
Lori: Has the Congressional investigation uncovered any useful
information?
Darryl: Over 5000 pages of documents have been released by the
FBI thanks to Don Edwards' probe into the bombing. Judi sorted
them all out. There are many startling revelations found within
them and there are, of course, many missing documents. But here's
a few tidbits. The FBI launched an investigation of over 600
people that Judi, I, and our friends made phone calls to,
including environmentalists and our parents. Timber industry
people were questioned, but only to provide anti-environmentalist
propaganda.
Another juicy item relates to a letter that was received by
the Santa Rosa Press Democrat five days after the bombing taking
credit for the attack. A man calling himself "The Lord's Avenger"
said he bombed Judi because of her defense of an abortion clinic
in Ukiah. This was quite odd because it was a most obscure part
of her work and few people knew about it. The Lord's Avenger
listed the components of two bombs, one set off at the Louisiana
Pacific mill in Cloverdale, California, and the one in Judi's
car. Interestingly, he did this after the cops tried to pin the
Cloverdale bomb on us too! Anyway, the FBI crime lab claimed that
the Lord's Avenger bomb descriptions were accurate. The FBI then
deduced that he must be one of our friends trying to cover up for
us, or that maybe it was even me. But Lord's Avenger made some
fundamental mistakes about the bomb descriptions, and the
internal FBI documents that Congress got released for us show
that the FBI never took the letter seriously, even though they
claimed to the media that it was accurate. They even went so far
as to call the letter "bull" and then say that they supposed
they'd have to investigate the anti-abortionists. After this
remark they drew a smiley face. There are no other doodles in
5000 pages of documents, and this smiley face appears in the
middle of the paragraph like a piece of punctuation.
The documents also provide concrete evidence that a
Mendocino County Sheriff, Sergeant Satterwhite, may have written
a death threat to Judi after the bombing. Satterwhite conducted
an investigation to find out where Judi was living after she got
out of the hospital. Satterwhite's correspondence with the FBI's
San Francisco bureau shows that he was looking for Judi's
"hideout," where he believed she was building a mountaintop
"headquarters" for Earth First! After a clown-like search, he
located her place. Very shortly after this, a reward poster was
found in a Willits, California phone booth stating that the
hippies up String Creek Road have built a "hideout" for Judy
Bari. It went on to say: "We don't want a 'Headquarters' for
Forests Forever Earth First! terrorists." It then proceeded to
give the directions to her house that appeared on Sergeant
Satterwhite's reports to the FBI. The language is the same on the
Sheriff's confidential reports as it is on the death threat.
The good news is that we just won a crucial victory in the
US Court of Appeals. The FBI has tried twice to get the case
thrown out of court. The higher court ruled early January that we
have the right to sue the FBI. Their contention was that the FBI
and their agents can't be sued because everything they do falls
within the realm of police work. They lost, we won, and we're
popping the champagne corks. Yahoo!
Lori: Activists have known for years that the government is
watching them. To an extent, aren't you feeding into the
paranoia?
Darryl: I disagree with the idea that activists are already
familiar with this police oppression of activists. This is
particularly not true in the environmental movement. It may be
true of the civil rights movement and Native American movement,
who have experienced hundreds of years of oppression at the hands
of the government and corporations. The environmental movement
stems from an upper and middle class realm where people think
that they are only trying to save the pretty trees therefore
the big bad policeman won't be after them. We are not going to
get rid of the FBI until we have gotten rid capitalism, and that
is quite a job. I don't advocate the overthrow of the government,
I advocate the overthrow of the corporate state. The government
is simply a straw boss that we can go to in order to complain to
about the damage that is being done by multinational
corporations.
Lori: How do you overthrow a corporation? If you put one lumber
company out of business, won't there just be another lumber
company?
Darryl: From an environmentalist point of view, if you look at
ozone destruction, global warming, deforestation,
desertification, and combine that with economic collapse the
conclusion is that society will topple itself. Our job, as
environmental activists, is not so much to topple the corporate
state as to try to prepare society for what follows after that
as the Wobblies said, by building the new society within the
shell of the old.
Lori: I'd like to get back to something you said before about
human beings not being the most important creatures on the
planet. Can you name another species that shows concern for any
other? Why should human beings be the only species that cares
about other species?
Darryl: Its a matter of degree. All animals are born with a sense
of self-preservation, a sense of survival. But no other species
engages in extermination of other species. It is not even within
their ability to do this. The question is not whether human
beings should consider ourselves of paramount importance to
ourselves. The question is whether we do it at the expense of the
carrying capacity of the planet. We are simply one more species
on the planet; we are not more important, we are not less
important. We are simply equal in stature to all the other
animals.
Lori: But what about those people who say, "Isn't my dad's job in
the lumber mill more important than the spotted owl."
Darryl: Equality is based on biology. We are all interconnected.
You can say that I am more important than a rain forest and cut
it down, but then you cut off your own oxygen supply, your own
water supply.
Lori: But a spotted owl is not a rain forest.
Darryl: The spotted owl is merely an indicator of the health of
the forest. Earth First! has never engaged in a campaign to
protect the spotted owl. We have campaigned to protect the home
of the spotted owl. I believe that human beings are old-growth
dependant animals. The notion of biocentrism states that the
integrity of the life support systems on the planet must be our
first concern, above human concerns. It's not to say human
concerns aren't important, but without the planet we have
nothing.
Lori: I've gotta ask you this, Darryl, how does a nice boy from
New York City wind up living in the Redwoods?
Darryl: I first saw the redwoods when I was fourteen years old in
1970 when my parents drove me, my sister and my two cats on a
cross country trip. I remember looking at those trees, 350 feet
high, 15 feet wide, and I was blown away. Having lived in New
York, I never saw a single plant go through all four seasons of
change, and here I was in awe of one of the grandest species on
the planet. I went home and had a dream, a dream that I would
someday live among the redwood trees. But having grown up for my
entire life in Manhattan, I knew that the more beautiful a place
was, the more expensive the rent would be. I felt that it would
be far too expensive to live among the redwood trees. Then when I
was 26, I came out cross country on my own, and being a
provincial Manhattanite, I was astonished to learn there was life
beyond the Lincoln tunnel. I moved out west in 1985 with the
express purpose of being an activist; I wanted to learn to live
off the land. I was driving down the Oregon coast when I saw a
hitchhiker in the middle of the night. I pulled my van over and
he turned out to be a full blooded Cheyenne named Kingfisher. He
was a member of the Native American Church, a spiritual leader.
He asked me what I wanted out of life, and I said that I wanted
to learn to live off the land and to save the world. "You should
go to Garberville," he said. When we got to Garberville, I
stepped right out of my van and into the environmental office.
They were trying to save the redwoods. I asked, "What do you
mean? The redwoods are safe, aren't they?" They told me how vast
tracts of them were being clear-cut, as a matter of fact they're
cutting down the ancient trees, 2000 years of age. My dream of
living among the redwoods was shattered, and I realized that my
desire to save the world and live off the land was going to be
realized in the town of Garberville.
Lori: Your average New Yorker isn't very conscious of nature
happening around him.
Darryl: One of the things I was always phobic about as a kid were
stinging insects. Now I actually live with them; they make their
home inside my house and I don't even mind it - maybe in the
winter I'll clear out some of the nests if they get too
overpopulated. I went from being afraid of nature and wanting to
separate myself from it as much as possible to wanting to work
towards a harmony with the planet. It wasn't just a fear of
bugs, it was a fear of all things wild. We are taught that our
job as humans is to conquer nature, and that nature is bad. Oh
yeah, it's Ok to go out on a weekend to hike, but the average New
Yorker who is born and raised on the concrete doesn't have a clue
about what's really driving this planet of ours. I think that
some of my qualities as a New Yorker that made me afraid of
nature are also the same qualities that have driven me to
overcome that: you know, that Manhattan drive to get what you
want has really assisted me in being able to overcome my fears.
Judi and I are both East Coasters. Judi is from Baltimore and I'm
from New York. I grew up hanging out on the street and learned
not to be intimidated by thugs. I think we've taken that ethic to
the West Coast timber wars, where you've got corporate raider
thugs and FBI thugs who are trying to bring down the forest and
bring down redwood activists, and we're standing up to them in a
way that I think New Yorkers would be proud of.
Lori: What do New Yorkers need to understand about the planet?
Darryl: That they're living on it. That beneath that concrete is
a pulsating Mother Earth that sends up little blades of grass
through the cracks in the concrete just to remind us that she is
there. A planet from which the very fabric of our flesh has come.
The rhythms of our hearts are the same as the rhythms of the
planet. We need to take off our shoes, and we need to take off
the concrete. The jackhammer is the liberation tool of the
future, as far as I am concerned.
Lori: As an environmentalist, would you advocate disbanding the
cities?
Darryl: With our current bloated population which is both in the
United States and worldwide, it would be environmental disaster
for everyone to leave the cities and flock to the country. We
need to make our cities more livable, environmentally sane. We
need to ban the private car. We need to plant more gardens,
purify our water. Simultaneously, we need to work on population
reduction globally because our countryside is overpopulated as
much as our cities.
Lori: Before you got out of the car at the environmental office
and started organizing to save the redwoods, was there any other
place where you had tried to save the world?
Darryl: My parents fostered a sense of civic duty in me. I
volunteered for various political campaigns, mostly within the
democratic party but not exclusively. In 1980 I hooked up with
Mobilization for Survival; however, I was nothing but an envelope
stuffer. I never felt that the people there fostered an
inclusiveness that allowed people to become organizers. It didn't
matter how intelligent I was or how much organizing experience I
had. I was only regarded as another body. So I went to
California, and I walked into the EPIC (Environmental Protection
Information Center) office. I was a very fast typist, I had done
a lot of publicity for my own musical bands, and I came into an
office that not only didn't have a press list but didn't have a
typewriter. So I said to them, "You mean they're cutting down
ancient redwoods, and you don't even have a press list or a
typewriter! Maybe I'm going to get this going for you." So I was
able to plug into a group that didn't take people for granted. In
Earth First!, we define leadership as the ones who are physically
leading at any point. If you happen to be setting up the tree
platform, you're the leader of the tree sit-in. Leadership isn't
a fixed thing. Leadership is situational.
Lori: I've heard you say, "If there was one tree left in America,
the Sierra Club would save half of it." What's that all about?
Darryl: The second principle of Earth First!, after biocentrism,
is no compromise in the defense of Mother Earth. In the making of
compromises, one essentially loses the integrity of one's
position. Especially with the volume of compromises that have
already been made in the past 6000 years of patriarchal military
industrialism. We cannot compromise the ability of the planet to
sustain life. We take what we believe to be the state-of-the-art
biological positions for preserving life on this planet and state
them regardless of whether or not they are politically feasible.
Political feasibility is for the politicians, not the
environmentalists.
Lori: They say that one of the things that distinguishes Earth
First! from other environmental organizations is that you can't
send in fifteen dollars and become a member that you have to do
something.
Darryl: By not having a membership fee or any members, Earth
First! becomes a people's movement. With the Sierra Club you can
pay your fifteen bucks, sit on your ass for the rest of the year,
and still have a say in how club matters are determined. Direct
action is a marvelous tactic because you don't need a lot of
people to make a great big statement. Your statement as an
activist is made at the demonstration, at the point of
production. We don't censor anybody from talking to the press.
Earth First! has provided a vehicle for establishing a new
generation of environmental leadership in this country. Many
Earth Firsters have actually gone on to start new organizations
with much stronger "no compromise" positions. People need to be
comfortable with what they are doing.
Lori: So its people who are angry and want to do something about
it who you want to join Earth First!?
Darryl: We want the entire world to be angry and do something
about it! It's very sad to still see people drinking out of
styrofoam cups and burning fossil fuel just to go down to the
store and buy cigarettes. On the other hand, our Western society
has been inundated by the television, by the public education
system, by a whole corporate indoctrination that begins at the
point where boy babies are dressed in blue and girl babies are
dressed in pink. It goes downhill from there.
Lori: Are there a lot of your people in jail?
Darryl: There's been a tremendous amount of harassment of Earth
First! in particular and of environmental activists in general
over the past few years. There are prosecutions; I should really
call them persecutions, of Earth Firsters up in Montana on
trumped up charges of sabotage. There's been a grand jury
investigation in Idaho also concerning trumped up charges of
sabotage. There is an FBI investigation in New Mexico concerning
the alleged toppling of a power line during a storm which the FBI
is using as an excuse to question Earth Firsters within a 200
mile radius in Central New Mexico. In the Four Corners area of
Arizona/New Mexico, where the Dine tribe lives - Leroy Jackson, a
traditional Dine, and also a forest activist was murdered in
early October. He was missing for several days and his body was
found in his van. The police reported it initially as natural
causes, then they changed it to a homicide, and now they are
calling it a methadone overdose, though Jackson didn't take
methadone or any other hard drug.
I think a bigger problem is how many are being harassed, how
many are being beaten up, how many are having their houses burned
down, how many are being sued by corporations for engaging in
peaceful protest. The answer is hundreds of activists around the
country are facing that kind of persecution, and it is having an
affect on the behavior of thousands of other activists.
Lori: Early in your movement, didn't the FBI send people into
your meetings to encourage activists to cut down power lines or
whatever?
Darryl: The first FBI investigation of Earth First! began only a
year after it was founded, in 1981. The first Earth First! action
was the symbolic cracking of the Glen Canyon dam, where activists
dropped a hundred yard roll of black plastic down the center of
the dam to symbolize a giant crack. The Earth First! movement was
in some ways inspired by Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang,
in which Abbey fantasized about destroying the Glen Canyon dam
and freeing the Colorado River. So the FBI read this piece of
fiction, looked at this piece of guerilla theater and decided
that we were terrorists. In 1988, the FBI came up with a sting
operation in which they planned to topple power lines at three
different locations in the Western US and recruit Earth First!
and other environmental activists into committing this act with
FBI money, FBI material, FBI vehicles, because nobody in Earth
First! has any money or vehicles. The FBI's plan was
unfortunately followed by three activists. Five people were
indicted in total, some had absolutely nothing to do with any of
it. Nobody was convicted of trying to topple power lines because
it was clearly entrapment - the FBI can't plan an act that people
would not ordinarily commit and then entrap them into doing it.
However, some of the activists had admitted on tape to having
sabotaged some other pieces of equipment and they had to wind up
pleading guilty to that.
Lori: And these tapes were made while people were talking to
somebody they thought they could trust?
Darryl: That's correct. A fellow calling himself Michael Tate,
who was an FBI agent by the name of Michael Fain, was dating an
Earth First! activist named Peg Millet and hanging out with some
other antinuclear activists. He was also doing his best to get
Dave Foreman to give him money, telling him that he was going to
use this money for sabotage, in an effort to get him convicted of
funding the [sting] operation. Foreman was one of the five
founders of Earth First! and a primary spokesperson at the time.
What Fain discovered is that Foreman wound up having to raise
$100 at a bake sale to give to this FBI agent in order to "do
with it as he pleased, not for any specific activities." Pretty
penny ante stuff when you compare it with the hundreds of
billions embezzled in the savings and loan scandal and all of the
mafia/cia corporate-style corruption.
Lori: Was there anything that gave you the impression that you
shouldn't have trusted this guy?
Darryl: I never met Michael Fain, so I can't say. Sometimes it's
a matter of looking into someone's heart and feeling whether or
not they really care about the earth. Anybody who enters our
group and begins talking about sabotage, whether privately or
publicly, is out! If that's what they have to bring, from moment
one, then their judgement is bad, if nothing else. We look for
disruptive behavior because actually that's a more common form of
infiltration. On the other hand, pointing fingers at people
without having substantial proof can create additional divisions,
which is exactly what the FBI wants.
Lori: Did the incident with Michael Fain create a backlash within
the organization?
Darryl: There certainly has been some paranoia, and I think that
some very good people have been turned off from working within
the Earth First! organization because they had been accused of
being spies because they had short hair, or they talked with a
funny accent, or because they were an unknown person. Sometimes
I'm utterly astounded at the lack of paranoia that's exhibited,
and then sometimes I'm astounded at the volume that's exhibited.
It doesn't seem to have a rhyme or reason to it.
Lori: Where are the front lines for the planet right now?
Darryl: The front lines are both at the point of destruction,
sometimes called the point of production, and in the ivory towers
where the corporate industrial types have set up their little
fiefdoms. At the point of destruction, you are looking at the
front lines in the redwood forests, at the strip mines, where the
overgrazing is taking place, where the toxins are being poured
out into the rivers. That is where you can witness first hand the
holocaust that is occurring to the planet as we speak and that is
where you can take the most inspiration to defend the earth. One
of our primary tactics is to take people out into threatened
areas on hikes, so that they can become more attached. The other
front line is in the big cities, where the corporate executives
are making the decisions that are destroying the planet. That's
where the city activists can be extremely helpful. Here in New
York City, for example, our campaign to protect the redwoods has
often led to protests at the New York Stock Exchange where we've
encouraged people to boycott MAXXAM stock and spread the word
throughout the floor of the exchange that MAXXAM is an
organization to shun. We've also noted that MAXXAM has a failed
savings and loan and owes the American taxpayer $548 million
according to a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation claim.
Lori: What is it about MAXXAM that you don't like?
Darryl: First of all, they're liquidating vast tracts of ancient
redwood forests as well as second growth forests to pay off a
junk bond debt. They used money from liquidating the redwood
forest and engaged in a corporate takeover of Kaiser Aluminum.
They have built a massive hotel on endangered bighorn sheep
habitat in Southern California. They've liquidated worker pension
funds at Simplicity Pattern in New York City, where retired
workers, our elders, make only $6000 per year in retirement
benefits instead of the $10,000 they were getting before MAXXAM
took over. They destroyed the Pacific Lumber Company Pension
fund. In short, MAXXAM SUXX$!
Lori: So what are you up to now?
Darryl: In August of 1993, we staged a week of outrage against
MAXXAM, calling for the jailing of its Chairman of the Board,
Charley Hurwitz. We noticed that over 1000 log trucks a day were
coming out of a tiny rural highway, Route 36. Some folks decided
to chain themselves to a log truck right at a stop sign where
Route 36 meets Highway 101. I arrived late for that action, saw
two of my friends with their necks kryptonite-locked to the
truck, one right on the trailer hitch. I was so furious about the
volume of ancient redwoods being pulled out of this one area that
I climbed on top of the truck with my guitar and started playing
songs. That kept the blockade going an additional 45 minutes or
so. They kept two of us on $5000 bail for 4 days, and then
dropped charges against everyone but me. Three weeks later, a
logger ran a chainsaw into a woman's stomach, cutting her clothes
off but fortunately pulling back before he cut her badly. The DA
refused to press charges, so we tied up the court for months with
a discriminatory prosecution motion. We lost the motion and I was
forced to cop a plea. I expect to receive 15 days community
service, time served, and 1 year's probation.
Lori: What's this I hear about Jello Biafra recording your songs?
Jello, who most people know as the lead singer from the Dead
Kennedys, has been super supportive of Judi and me. He just
teamed up with Mojo Nixon to put out a really funny, cowpunk
album of topic tunes. They recorded my song, "Where are We Gonna
Work when the Trees are Gone?," and released a CD and 45 rpm
single of a song Judi and I wrote for the same abortion clinic
demo the Lord's Avenger said he bombed Judi for. It's called
"Will the Fetus Be Aborted" and it's in the same melody to "Will
the Circle be Unbroken." It's out there already, so folks can
call their local rad radio station to request it.
Lori: What parts of the planet have been destroyed, so that they
will not be there for the next generation?
Darryl: 50% of the global rain forests, 50% of the U.S. forests,
vast amounts of mountains that have had their tops ripped off and
been filled with garbage from the cities. We're losing clean
water - 90% of America's water is polluted. We've lost thousands
and thousands of critters to extinction. We've lost the ability
to take life for granted. We've lost the innocence that you can
be born on this planet and be assured of enough resources to
carry you through. This is really the first generation that has
lived on the planet that cannot be assured that it will have a
planet to live on. By the same token, we are also the last
generation to have the honor and privilege of fighting for the
life of the planet itself.
If people want more information or would like to send a
donation for Earth First! activities, they can write to Earth
First!, c/o Darryl Cherney, PO Box 34, Garberville, CA 95542.
Donations to the lawsuit can be made out to the Redwood Summer