Darryl Cherney Music

A radical is somebody who goes out to the furthest edge of the debate in order to gain leverage with which to move the larger body of thought... The problem is that, once you're out there, you're perceived as an extremist.

Cherney: I'm saying they are not redeemable. We do need protection, but the FBI itself is a threat to national security: not because they're a bunch of thugs—which they are—but because the FBI isn't capable of solving crimes.

King: If what you say is true, it doesn't say much for the awareness level of the American people.

Cherney: When you have this many people in a country, no one can keep up with all that's going on, so it's easy for an organization to do things under cover. Me, I'm a tribalist. If you live in a village of thirty people, nobody can do anything that you don't know about. Hell, Garberville is fifteen hundred people, and even there, you pretty much know what other people are doing. But as soon as your group gets so large that you can't know everybody in it, people can do things without your knowledge. When you get to the level of a country of 275 million people, or even an agency with tens of thousands of people in it, people get information overload pretty quickly, because humans, as primates, are pretty much designed to eat bananas and bang drums around the campfire. We're not genetically designed even to conceive of 275 million people.

I would even go so far as to question how much of a blessing the printed word is. What the printed word does is take knowledge and make it into a possession, a physical entity you can hold in your hand. You take whatever you think is the truth, and you write it down, and there it stays—"the dead word," some have called it. Which is where we get the Bible from, the Koran, the Old Testament, and everything else. In the old days, religions and spiritual traditions changed as society changed. They were designed to factor in the climate, the animal life, and the seasonal changes, which are totally different at the North Pole than they are at the equator. But once you begin containing religion in a book, you get a worldwide institution based on what some desert dwellers thought in 3000 B.C., or the year one. It's got nothing to do with the bunch grass around us, or the turkey vultures, or the seasons here, the way the rain falls or doesn't fall.

So the religious texts, just like magazine articles, are the opinion or the perception of one person, instead of the collective consciousness of a whole tribe. Change and dynamics are inherent in a pagan culture, where traditions are passed along orally, with subtle but important changes from generation to generation. But in a culture with the written word, one person can write something down, and for the next millennium, millions of people will follow what one person wrote instead of everybody forming a culture collectively and dynamically over time.

Say a reporter uncovers a story and writes it down and doesn't get it right; that's still the story that gets out. Those of us who've lived the news and have watched our stories reported over and over know that 99 percent of articles don't capture the spirit, much less the truth of the event. They even get the quotes wrong. I'll give a one-hour interview to a reporter, and the next day I'll see half of one sentence of what I said. And that's the standard level of inclusion. So how can a person's spirit and intention ever manifest itself in the news?

King: The widely held perception in the media is that Earth First! is a fringe group with no real effectiveness. Is that true?

Cherney: One of the problems in the activist community is that we have no way to measure the effectiveness of our actions. A lot of that is due to the fact that our work is complicated and subjective. For example, did Earth First! save Headwaters Forest, or did Senator Dianne Feinstein save Headwaters Forest? Obviously, the people who perpetrate the dominant paradigm—the politicians and the corporate executives—will say that Congress saved Headwaters, because it passed the law that allowed Headwaters to be saved. So the people who created the campaign that led to the creation and passage of the bill are wantonly tossed into the dung heap of history, much the same way that the American socialists and Communists were discarded after Social Security and unemployment insurance became part of the American mainstream. Take the good ideas from the radicals and then whisk them into the garbage.

Cherney: A radical is somebody who goes out to the furthest edge of the debate in order to gain leverage with which to move the larger body of thought. If an ant wants to move an elephant, he has to move as far out onto the seesaw as possible. Then, through the laws of physics, he can move the great weight. That's what activists do, only in a more psychological fashion. You go as far out there as you can in order to move society. The problem is that, once you're out there, you're perceived as an extremist and society is unwilling to embrace you.

King: What would happen if the mainstream did embrace the radicals? Would the radicals then change?

Cherney: We're always going to have problems, because the world is not a perfect place, so we'll always have radicals who are trying to get at the root of the problem. Even if tomorrow everybody concurred that humanity has fouled its nest, the next challenge would be restoring and rehabilitating our damaged habitat, and that would take hundreds of years. And of course there would be battles over how to do that: Do you just slap conifers on the hillsides and hope they will grow? Do you allow the hardwoods to come up? Who gets paid for all this? How is it going to be paid for?

We've got a lot of work ahead of us. We have created so many problems for ourselves on this planet that, sadly, we're not going to be living in close harmony with nature any time soon. But if we want to survive, we need to come to grips with our relationship to nature and start to address the ailments that are making the world less livable.