Darryl Cherney Music

Cherney: As far as I can discern, the basic problem that humanity faces is a pathological fear of death. The ultimate purpose of everything we've done to damage the planet has been to make ourselves safer and more comfortable. Keep the grizzly bears away. Keep the cold weather away. I diagnose this as an inflamed survival instinct; it makes us believe we need to do more to survive than is actually necessary.

King: We see this in advertising, where something is described as a "need" when it's obviously a "want."

Cherney: Our job as activists is to guide humanity back to its connection to the earth and to itself and to all the species and ecosystems of the planet. If we really understood that we depend on the forest for our immediate survival, then we wouldn't destroy it. But people don't see this, because the damage occurs so slowly.

What's happening now, though, is that the destruction is speeding up. As it gets faster, we have an opportunity to show people how immediate the dangers really are. It's time for humanity to slip into disaster-mode mentality. When there's a flood or an earthquake—or an attack on the World Trade Center—people immediately start helping each other. Well, the planet is being destroyed as certainly and as deliberately as the World Trade Center towers were toppled. We need to fall into that disaster-mode mentality in which we forget about our differences and pitch in to help out, to rescue the world.

King: If what you're saying is true, then you could characterize the industrialized world as suicidal, particularly the government and corporate decision makers who allow massive environmental destruction to continue. How did it come to this?

Cherney: We're on a trajectory that started tens of thousands of years ago. I'm not an anthropologist, but I'm familiar with a body of thought that speaks to this. Modern human beings emerged around the equatorial belt of Africa, and our technology developed slowly. First, we harnessed fire, which enhanced our ability to feed ourselves and keep warm. Then we began moving outward from our native habitat into the colder climes, where we developed agriculture and became sedentary instead of nomadic. Eventually we would build fortresses and cities, creating a dichotomy between the city dwellers and the nomadic tribes. The two were constantly at odds with each other. Amid this conflict, the mother, honored as the source of all life, gave way to the father as the "protector" of life, relegating the female to second-class subservient status.

Judi and I had received so many
death threats
that we felt pretty certain somebody was going to make an attempt on our lives. We had no idea that we were going to be blamed for the attempt ourselves, of course.

Now we are facing a critical test. We've been given the power of creation, the godlike abilities to build cities, to forge metals, to alter entire landscapes and even the climate, to become a geological force on the planet. The question is: will we utilize that power for the good of the planet, or to destroy the very creation we've been given? I think we have the ability to turn it around, and that our quest is a spiritual one. I'm not talking about religion. I'm not talking about God. I'm talking about the human spirit. Which direction will our spirit go? Right now it's heading in the wrong direction: warfare of men against women, of humans against the earth, of one people against another. It's no surprise that activists fight among themselves; they're really just reflecting the colossal battle being fought all over the world.

But as long as there's life, there's a chance for us to pull out of this downward spiral. It's necessary to educate ourselves as to what needs to be done and to gently but firmly snap ourselves out of the hypnotized state that we are in.

King: What you're offering up here is a more deeply philosophical and spiritual approach to environmental activism than most Americans might expect from an activist whom the police once accused of bombing himself. Is there room for violence in your approach, or in the Earth First! movement? Would Earth First! ever bomb anything if the target or issue seemed appropriate?

Cherney: First of all, in the entire twenty-two-year history of Earth First! no human being has ever been injured by one of our members. We are, by nature and tradition, a nonviolent movement.

Earth First! has, however, advocated "monkeywrenching," or trying to disrupt the workings of the corporate industrial machine, a concept that emanated from Edward Abbey's book The Monkeywrench Gang, which a lot of people think of as the spiritual source of the Earth First! movement. Over the years, Earth First! has touted monkeywrenching as a viable tactic for protecting the environment and a means of displaying our overt disdain for technology. Of course, by saying that technology is not benign but is part of the problem, we were insulting the very concepts that drive Western civilization, and we made a lot of enemies, fast. But we did so knowingly.

The fact is, Earth First! has rarely done any monkeywrenching. Most of the monkeywrenching I'm aware of has been done by groups using names other than Earth First! Are these people Earth First! members? Well, we don't know unless they're caught. In the case of the Arizona Five [activists arrested by the FBI in 1989 for planning to topple power lines], only three of them were actively engaged in monkeywrenching, and only one of those three was an Earth First! member. The other two were anti-nuclear activists who specifically avoided being associated with the Earth First! movement. Earth First! founder Dave Foreman was also arrested, but he didn't do anything. He was basically convicted of giving the FBI a hundred dollars of bake sale money.

King: Foreman wrote Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching, which provides just about every conceivable recipe imaginable for destroying heavy machinery, spiking trees, desurveying roads, saving animals from hunters, and so on. In the words of FBI spy Michael Fain—who actually devised the power-line action—Foreman was an ideological rather than a criminal target, "the guy we need to pop to send a message." Foreman was basically arrested for writing a book.