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