Darryl Cherney
Earth First! Organizer and Troubador
PO Box 34, Garberville, CA 95542
email. dc@asis.com

Lectures on Forestry Activism and Successfully Suing the FBI, musical performances of original environmental songs (solo or with his band "The Chernobles"), slide shows, and Grassroots Organizing workshops.

Darryl Cherney has been an Earth First! organizer and environmental singer/songwriter for seventeen years. He recently won a $4.4 million lawsuit against the FBI and Oakland Police for civil rights violations committed against him and fellow organizer Judi Bari. The suit stemmed from a car-bomb assassination attack on the pair in Oakland, California on May 24, 1990 while they were organizing mass protests against the over-logging in a campaign called Redwood Summer. A unanimous jury-verdict determined on June 11, 2002 that FBI and Oakland Police violated the First and Fourth Amendments of the US Constitution when they falsely and deliberately blamed and arrested Bari and Cherney for bombing themselves rather than looking for the actual would-be assassin with the specific intention of stymieing their freedom of speech. In the wake of September 11 and the Patriot Act, many feel that this legal victory provides a beacon of light in the battle to protect civil rights in America.

Darryl co-founded the Headwaters Forest Campaign in 1986 and has continued to organize for forest protection in the redwoods and elsewhere since then. He has been a principle organizer of hundreds of protests involving thousands of non-violent arrests in acts of civil disobedience. He has sat in trees himself on two occasions and shares credit for protecting a number of threatened areas, including Headwaters Forest, Raven's Call, Trout Creek, and the Cahto Wilderness in Northern California. He has written countless press releases publicizing tree-sits, lawsuits, protests, the pepper spraying of activists, civil rights violations and even the book-banning of Dr. Zeus' The Lorax in Laytonville, California, securing media coverage these issues nationwide.

Darryl has also worked on litigation to enforce California's environmental protection laws, lobbied numerous times in Washington, DC and in Sacramento and Oakland, California for protection of our forests and for the civil rights of activists. He was the leading advocate to encourage federal banking regulators of the FDIC and the Office of Thrift Supervision to file $1 billion worth of court actions against the MAXXAM Corporation for its role in a failed savings and loan, connecting the dots between the banking scandals of the 1980's and the hostile takeover of Pacific Lumber Company. The possibility of a "debt-for-nature" swap emanated out of these legal proceedings, in which its was suggested by all parties that the banking debt could be traded for trees. While the court actions ultimately resulted in a paltry out of court settlement after 7 years, the company was forced to spend $40 million for its defense and was sidetracked from engaging in further corporate takeovers.

Darryl organized all four rallies to call attention to Julia Butterfly's two year marathon tree-sit in Luna., including one with Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead. He arranged for Woody Harrelson, Joan Baez and Bonnie Raitt to visit the Luna tree-sit, as well. He has continued to promote marathon tree-sits, working successfully on strategy and media with Nate Madsen's two year redwood tree sit in 1999-2000 and Remedy's ongoing 8 month tree-top vigil in a giant redwood, recently covered by the New York Times, the Today Show, and NPR. He has organized a series of Forest Aid Concerts, working with Bonnie Raitt, Graham Nash, Bob Weir, Dave Matthews and others.

Darryl's political songs are quite popular from the Earth First! campfire circuit to college audiences and he has performed and spoken nationwide. In September 2002, he released a 2-song single on Alternative Tentacles Records, "Bush It!," which is receiving airplay throughout the country. He often travels with a slide show depicting the forest protest scenes from behind the "redwood curtain." Darryl has also produced a number of albums, including a compilation of forest protection songs for EarthBeat! Records entitled If a Tree Falls and a spoken word album of selections of Judi Bari's speeches on Alternative Tentacles Records entitled Who Bombed Judi Bari?

Darryl has been at the forefront of building bridges between workers and environmentalists. He worked alongside Judi Bari in her efforts to unionize timber workers and he founded a coalition between the United Steelworkers of America and Earth First! activists in their parallel struggles against the MAXXAM corporation, which owned both Pacific Lumber and Kaiser Aluminum. He is a founding member of the Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment.

Darryl's has produced 4 albums of his own political satire: I Had to Be Born This Century, They Sure Don't Make Hippies Like They Used To, Timber! and White Tribal Music. He recently completed his fifth album, Real American.

In 1997, he founded Environmentally Sound Promotions, a non-profit with the motto "Music, Arts and Media for the Earth." He has hosted an environmental talk show and a political music program on KMUD community radio in Redway, California. He has a M.S. in Urban Education (1977) from Fordham University.