The Activism of Darryl Cherney and Who Bombed Judi Bari?

By Claudette Vaughan

Abolitionist: Talk about your activism Darryl?

Darryl Cherney: I was raised in New York City . At the age of 29 I threw everything in my van and headed over to San Francisco to live there. However, on the way there I picked up a Native American Cheyenne, a practitioner in the native American church by the name of Kingfisher.

He asked me, “What do you want out of life?” I told him I wanted to learn how to live off the land and save the world. He said I go to Garberville which is a very tiny town in the heart of the Redwoods. It also happens to be the marijuana growing capital of California , if not the entire United States . It's a very counter-cultural area. It was here that I learned that the Redwoods were being clear-cut by a rapacious logging company called Maxxam.

Since I was a child I was enamored by the Redwoods so I was mortified to learn that they were being cut. It was then I decided I would I would do something about it.

In less than a year we were on a number of national prominent television shows. We did tree-sits and we engaged in civil disobedience. In one action everyone who was arrested and was sued by Pacific Lumber Company. It was clear that we had struck a chord in terms of public sentiment about these giant trees and also this villainous activity of these corporate raiders, this Maxxam company which was based in Texas – the same glorious state that brought us both George Bush's.

Back in those days Earth First! was quite the media darling. Originally Earth First! was based on a tribal model as in there's no permanent position or appointed leaders or organisation called Earth First! The philosophy of Earth First! can best be described as deep ecology and biocentrism. The basis of it is we share the planet with all other beings. We are not better than them. We are here to share the earth. Also we don't have to justify our defence of the earth. In other words we don't have to save the salmon because they feed us, or we don't have to save the trees because they provide us with shade, food or water. We say that these beings have a right to be here regardless of their benefits to human beings. For me that was a very liberating kind of philosophy.

Right up until the 1980's there's a whole folklore around mythological loggers who were heros and logging was considered a benign practice. At that time it was regarded as American as apple pie. So Earth First! was novel. We were walking into well known logging towns and saying for the first time “No” We know you've been logging for 118 years but cutting down 2000 year old Redwood trees is a bad thing. We don't want you to do it anymore. We are going to fight you non-violently. We will put up a hell of a fight to protect these trees. And so people who have been complacently living their lives all of a sudden were standing up and taking notice that the times they were a' changing.

When I showed up I came with some media background so I brought these skills into battle for the Redwoods because press skills were in short supply. People who work in the media don't tend to go to Garberfield they tend to go to New York or Los Angeles .

One other thing happened in 1987 that was significant. A mill worker named George Alexander almost had his head taken out by a log that contained a tree spike in it. This is done with a 12 inch long nail put to a tree to deter loggers from cutting it down or to break a saw blade in a saw mill should the tree be cut, thereby shutting down the operation. It's a very dangerous practice that Judi and I renounced and called for an end to. BUT in 1987 tree spiking was very much embraced by Earth First! as a tactic. Earth First! was pro- sabotage and pro-monkey-wrenching which we called ecotage.

This was long before the war on terror had its say and at this time the media thought very highly of this. George Alexander survived the tree spiking. He came out and said, “I'm against tree spiking but I'm also against clear cutting”. His company knew that the saw blade that hit the tree spike that exploded in his face was weak. It was due for replacement and he had been begging the company to replace these saw blades.

These saw blades can break under normal standards. They are huge. They may be 3ft or 4ft diameter and they are going through massive pieces of wood all day long and they suffer a great deal of stress all day with wear and tear. He said he almost didn't come in that day so when a log came with a nail in it and the saw blade hit it the saw blade exploded. He knew that the Company was slacking on its basic procedures.

He denounced his company from his hospital bed and the safety procedures for not replacing the saw blades. One of the things that Judi Bari came along and pointed out was people who work in the saw mills are potentially our allies. We have more in common with the people working in the mills and cutting down the trees than we do with the corporate executives who buy and sell these companies like they are bubble gum cards.

In 1988 I was running for Congress in the US and I needed help with some graphic designs at the Mendocino Environmental Centre. I was laying out my brochure and it was suggested that this woman called Judi Bari could help me with the layout. Right then she walked through the front door. She blazes into the room like a gust of wind and I swear to you that it was love at first sight.

She immediately comes over to help me at my request and completely trashes my run for Congress calling me a fool to think that I could facilitate change by working through the system. While she's trashing my run for Congress she's laying out my brochure for me and was doing a beautiful job at it. Judi was a graphic designer, a sign painter and a cartoonist. She had a lot of different talents.

So I invited myself over to her house as I was so enamored of her. It was here that I saw her books upon her wall. They were all books on Labor history. I now call it “The University of Judi Bari”. We knew that it's all interrelated and that workers and environmentalists should in no way, shape or form be fighting with each other. Environmentalism is an offspring of the original Labor Movement.

Our movement is against the corporations. Judi would be the one to really encapsulate that and then turn it into an honest campaign to bridge that gap between the workers who are employed in the resource extraction jobs and the environmentalists themselves.

Now I always knew that the loggers were not our enemy but I didn't have the skills that Judi had. She had been a bone fide union Labor organiser for 11 years. She was a Union member at the US Post Office. She led a wildcat strike where she worked at the mail centre where they utilized heavy equipment. Judi knew what it was like to work with large pieces of machinery. She melded this into her deep ecology radical environmental work. But there was another characteristic that Judi brought to the movement. She was a radical feminist. In fact one of my affectionate names for her was “Chief of the Sexist Police”. Nothing escaped her eye. She'd point out that if a man was talking to both of us that he was often only looking at me. Men were always referred to in subtle ways that men don't really see because they don't really pay attention if it doesn't affect them. However if you are a woman, especially a woman like Judi, and somebody is dismissive of you in deference to the man that is standing next to you, she notices. And she would highlight this to me every single time it happened which was quite a few times every day.

So we started organising for the Redwoods together and we also started organising a Union together as well as with many of our friends. Ultimately we worked with hundreds and hundreds of people but our core group was the Earth Firsters! There were 40-50 regulars who were there for a long period of time. We also worked for other organisations. The point is we didn't limit ourselves as radical environmentalists. We worked all angles. We filed lawsuits. We campaigned for ballot initiatives. We attended public hearings. We did it all. In those years before the bomb went off those 2 years were the most marvelous of my life. This time also represented the last of the hey-day of the old guard of Earth First!

Abolitionist: Like Dave Foreman?

DC: Yes. He resigned in 1990. In late 1989 the FBI did a raid on Earth First! and arrested the founder, Dave Foreman and 4 others on a sting operation in which the FBI decided that they, the FBI, would have a plan to blow up 3 nuclear power plants and they were going to recruit people from the Earth First! movement to do it. May I say proudly that Earth First! was and is a non-violent movement so the FBI couldn't find anybody to blow up anything. No environmentalist in their right mind would ever be thinking about releasing any amount of radioactivity into the atmosphere.

So the FBI had to compromise and they found some activists who were willing to cut down a single power line coming out of a nuclear power plant. This wouldn't do any damage to anybody. This protest wasn't even to protest against nuclear power. It was protest against the central Arizona Project which drains water from the Colorado river to power the desert state of Arizona which has far more people than should rightfully be there in the first place watering their lawns and swimming in their pools and doing other kinds of obscene things that should never take place in a desert environment. So this means that the FBI got 3 people to go out with them to the desert with the FBI's tools, with the FBI's money and even with an FBI gun that was in the back of the FBI's car so they tried to say afterwards that it was an armed activity. This was just nonsense. They took everybody out to the desert and just as the activists were going to cut the power lines they arrested everybody. Flares went up in the sky and helicopters hovered overhead. Even with 60 FBI agents covering 3 Earth Firsters! one of the Earth Firsters! walked right by them and escaped into the wilderness. That was Kate Millit by the way. She went to work the next day at Planned Parenthood and she just carried on with her life as if nothing was wrong but of course she knew she was going to jail. Then the next morning they arrested Dave Foreman who has given the FBI agent $100 from a cake sale sometime earlier. Therein presents a very important turning point in the history of Earth First! Ultimately all of them pleaded guilty to cutting down a ski condolla tower in Colorado which I think 2 or 3 of them actually did do because they blabbermouthed.

Blabbermouthing seems to be in epidemic proportions these days against the monkey-wrenching crowd. Even in 1989 activists would talk too much. They would talk about this sabotage they were doing and then they'd get caught yet today we see people actually ratting each other out which wasn't the case in 1989. These days you don't even have to send people to Guantanamo to rat out others.

Back to 1989 they managed to get all 5 activists to plead to this even though only two just did it. They did some jail time. 2 years, 3 years and the rest got probation but that really changed the face of Earth First!

And I remember Dave Foreman giving a speech at this time and much to his dismay I taped it and wrote it up in the journal. What he said was that Earth First! was a social change movement. That we were just like the Black Panthers. He said that 3 different times. Up to that point Dave had been very elitist almost to a scary point. He was saying things like to be an Earth Firster! you have to have a wilderness gene. When you start to get into genetics here it starts to sound a little scary from somebody whose meant to be an environmental activist. Later on he really moved very far away from the Earth First movement and things of that nature.

Then there was another seven arrests of innocent people for tree spiking in Montana and I know that because they actually found the guilty people years later. But they took all of their possessions, their computers, their books and shoes. One of these people included a university professor named Rod Erikson. It was clear now that the FBI was coming out of the closet and coming after Earth First! This was another overlay leading up to Redwood summer and the bombing.

In the summer of 1990 the Redwood Summer campaign was a combination of Judi's work, of my work and of Earth First!s work. It was called under the following conditions. In the State of California there was going to be a ballot initiative that would ban clear cutting and protect the water Redwoods, increase stream protection and provide a worker package. Judi and I made sure that there was to be re-training in that package and loans and also re-job training for anybody who ended up being out of work as well as money for restoration. It's always been Judi's and my intention that if you want to re-train a logger or anybody that works outdoors, retrain them in another outdoor field that's also in the woods. Once again we shouldn't necessarily presume to know what a logger wants to do but it is also arrogant to assume that they can quit their job logging trees and then go ahead and work in an office. We do the best we can and we also were working with a lot of timber workers which is the whole point. By extending our hand out to workers and Judi, working in her capacity as a union organiser in the field of timber was starting to get to know what loggers were like.

In those years Judi spent an immense amount of time organising unions in various sawmills – Pacific Lumber, Georgia Pacific and Louisiana Pacific. Louisiana Pacific is perhaps the less known but in many ways the most dangerous. Judi would say the way she would meet loggers is by blockading them. You have a captive audience when you're standing in front of someone's truck or someone's tree and they are yelling at you as they're standing there looking mean with their arms folded or waving their chainsaws at us – then she'd start talking to them. The next thing you know Judi and the logger and a bunch of us are having coffee together and are attempting to find common ground.

Judi wasn't interested in finding middle ground – that sucks. It's common ground I would contend that most human beings from the Taliban in Afghanistan to the left wing liberals of Berkeley have about 98-99% of day-to-day activities in common. First thing all of us do is breath, then we eat then we also tend to have children. Most people believe in some kind of deity. We have some form of enjoyment, recreation, education for your children etc, etc. My point is people are predominantly the same but that 1% that makes us different is the spice. Wars have been fought over spices, countries have discovered and invaded over spices so let's not overlook the critical importance that 1% difference makes. The point is we are 99% the same and Judi was focused on what we have in common as opposed to what we don't have in common with loggers.

So she would get people to join the Industrial Workers of the World Union (IWW) --nicknamed the Wobblies. This was the radical Labor Union and Industrial Union founded in 1905 by the noted Labor radicals of their day. Infact, Earth First! was to the environmental movement what the Wobblies were for the Labor movement back in 1905. Here's a situation where Judi rekindled into the IWW what the Wobblies had not been for about 70 years. The reason the Wobblies has been dysfunctional for 70 years was after 15 years of radical union organising the people who were not normally being organised – the industrial workers, people of colour, women, Chinese, Mexican, African-Americans – you name it--the Wobblies were breaking ground all over the place. While this was being done the FBI was founded to destroy the Wobblies and so by bringing the Wobblies to an alliance with Earth First! organising under the IWW banner it was like a double red flag for the FBI.

So now at this point our Labor organizing was going very strong. Saw mill workers started wearing Earth First! t-shirts and they were freaking out the lumber companies. Then there was this ballot initiative to stop the clear cutting old redwoods and also to limit logging practices. This was transformational and it was a very popular ballot initiative. Judi and I together decided to create what was to be called “Redwood Summer'. This would bring college students from all over the US to northern California to do battle for the redwoods while the ballot initiative campaign is in the backdrop. We were trying to keep the trees standing in time for the initiative to pass while the lumber companies were filing a record numbers of timber harvest plans to cut them all down before the ballot initiative.

There was a certain amount of hype involved but my point is that everybody was genuinely freaked out at this stage. Redwood Summer was based on Freedom Summer and Freedom Summer took place 26 years earlier. These occurred in the Deep South in the United States where civil rights workers were trying to give Black people the right to vote. Black people had the theoretical right to vote but the Jim Crows and the Klu Klux Klan were standing in their way and using all kinds of intimidation practices. The civil rights activists called in people from outside the area to come in for months at a time and they called it “Freedom Summer”. This also attracted the attention of the FBI back in the 1960's. The FBI also targeted Martin Luther-King drastically. A number of assassinations took place over that period of time so once you throw that into the mix then we know for definite that the FBI was taking a really good look at Judi Bari and Earth First! in general.

It wasn't even long after the announcement of Redwood Summer that death threats began to appear and these death threats were very serious. They didn't seem to come from one place. They came from as far away as New Jersey and Washington and they came locally as well. But they had the appearance, shall we say, of a concerted campaign. It was like somebody blew a whistle and then suddenly all these death threats started piling in. May I say that in the history of Earth First! and our own personal history we don't really get that many death threats so to have about 3 dozen of them happen over a short period of time was like there was a concerted effort going on to pile these death threats up.

We suspected the FBI was behind them and the reason we did was because the FBI used death threats, intimidation tactics, writing discrediting letters and producing discrediting cartoons as well as mysterious phone calls against the civil rights workers of the 1960's. This is well documented by the US Congress. The FBI did it openly and they called it COINTELPRO. They didn't do it openly by telling the people it was happening. It was a program that had an official name COINTELPRO, which stood for Counter Intelligence Program and it targeted peaceful activists in the United States . It also targeted violent activists as well but the FBI always prefer to go after peaceful people because ultimately the FBI are cowards. They rarely go after people who shoot back.

So back to Redwood Summer. We were getting a lot of death threats. Judi and I suspected the FBI were behind it and we started to get our affairs in order. We actually expected that somebody was going to kill us and we wanted to make sure that Redwood Summer would continue. It was important for us not to back down. It would send the wrong message to other activists. Nobody appointed us to be leaders and nobody told us that we had to go on but we just did it, just like a lot of activists. We are self-motivated people but this became a very dangerous activity needless to say. All of this was having a great strain on our relationship. We were in the process of breaking up. We were lovers very intensely in love for those first two years we knew each other. I would even maintain to you that we were in love for the full nine years we knew each other from the day we met from the day she died but at the time we were at the peak of our romance and these death threats were just ripping us apart.

Judi Bari was a singer and a songwriter as a matter of fact so we used to play music together as well as being political organising partners. We had a third member of the band and his name was George Shook. We were scheduled to tour colleges and this served the purpose of being able to organise the very college kids that the FBI were claiming we were bringing to Redwood Summer. It also allowed us to get the hell out of town. The death threats were intense and we were genuinely frightened. There's no other way to put it. Personally not only were we fearing for our lives I was afraid of losing Judi. I loved her immensely and I couldn't bear the thought of life without her. We were certain that somebody was going to kill one or both of us as this was very clear to both of us that this awaited our future.

We went on this tour assuming we would be safe while on the road. We were also organising meetings. On May 23, 1990 we had a culminating meeting for Redwood Summer. We finalised our 4 major mass demonstration and our non-violence code, camping and check-in procedures etc. Everything you would need to host thousands of people coming to camp out.

The next day just before 12 noon we left the house where Judi was staying. Judi and I were in separate cars and lodging on the road at this point. I had come to rehearse with her in the morning for a show at the university. We were about to leave and I had a choice to ride back to pick up our banjo player with either Shannon in one car or Judi in her own car. So I stood between the two cars and asked, “Who shall I ride with?” and Judi said “Me”. So I gave a little salute and said, “Yes ma'am” and in I got. That's how I ended up in the car that day.

In less than 2 blocks we were coming to a stop sign and I don't remember much after that. We were following Shannon on the way back to Berkeley . Judi and I were just talking and next thing I knew reality had been completely altered. I had no life experience to be able to compare this but my head was ringing, my eyes were closed and I thought I was dead. All of a sudden the car was coming to a halt. It crossed the road and crashed into a guardrail and I remember watching the car bounce, bounce, bounce then stop. Two kids came running out of Oakland High School and they were shouting, “It's a bomb. It's a bomb”. It's then I realised what had happened to us. I had my hand over my eye and I turned to Judi and she was screaming that her back hurt. I was calling out telling her that I loved her and she was going to live then Shannon comes out of her car to see what she can do to help. I didn't know it at the time but Shannon was immediately apprehended by the police. I was taken out of the car and was arrested and Judi was taken to the hospital. When she woke up out of surgery she was handcuffed to her bed.

Abolitionist: So the FBI were on the spot. They were there. They had pre-empted themselves?

DC: We cannot prove within a shadow of a doubt that the FBI knew about the bombing in advance however I would contend to you that any rational person that looked at the behaviour of the FBI could construe complicity because it's where the evidence points. But I can't tell you that as a fact. We'll probably never know as a fact the actual intricate details. We'll probably never know who killed JFK, who really did in the World Trade Center and we may never know who bombed us but using the three cases that I present to you one can certainly get the general idea of what was going on and the complicity of the government and covert forces in various kinds of activities. So these are acts of terror with the complicity of the US government. I think it is completely safe to say that when the FBI showed up within 5 minutes of the bomb going off they told the Oakland police that we were terrorists that had bombed ourselves with our own bomb. We can safely say that the FBI covered up the tracks of the people who bombed us no matter what.

In a court of law twelve years later in a civil action we brought against the FBI and Oakland police before a jury we proved that the FBI lied about everything. So we proved that the FBI knew we were innocent and lied about it. That in itself is bad enough. Regardless of whether they put the bomb in the car or not they certainly were accomplices to the bombing.

Abolitionist: Are activists always going to be the victims of their own non-violence? We know that the FBI and governments are not only working to deconstruct the work done by eco and animal activists but they will do everything and anything in their power to destroy the movements in question. Activists do their civil disobedience and actions yet there's no follow-through.

DC: I would describe the dynamic differently than the way you presented it although the way you presented is very traditional. The thing that we are fighting is the System but the System itself is more like a matrix of Systems. I have narrowed my research down to what I would call the “Pentagon of Power” and there are five systems that control us. They are the industrial system, the military system, the religious system, the communications system and the educational system. Each of these speak for themselves but they pretty much have us surrounded. There isn't an aspect of our lives from the shoes we wear on our feet to the food we eat to even the language we speak that hasn't been poisoned in some way from this very toxic set of systems.

Sun Tsu in The Art of War would tell us that the most important component of warfare is intelligence. You need to know what it is you are fighting. I would present to you that most progressive activists in the world do not understand in my humble opinion what the hell it is that we are taking on. Therefore we look at a Us versus Them attitude. You mow down one leader, another one takes his place. So taking on individual people or even the corporations doesn't work. We have to take on the System of mindsets that allows for corporations and criminal behaviour to exist. This is my analysis but really it's a synthesize of many other people's thinking.

Abolitionist: What are your politics today in Bush's Amerika?

DC: I'm an earth warrior. I'm pledged to our mother earth and to all my sisters and brothers to offer my life and my work to make this world a better place. I suppose you'd say I'm a progressive activist but again this is an old terminology that I try and keep away from.

With regards to the Green Scare, this kind of stuff has been happening since the Romans were crucifying anybody they didn't like. This is about hostility against democratic principles. It always seems fresh and current but yes we are going through a cycle of oppression here in the US . The US is right on the cusp, if it isn't already, of becoming a totalitarian state. I would say to you that humanity is on a trajectory towards destruction and it's one of Albert Einstein's premises that ought to be guiding us to a large extent. He said our spiritual evolution needs to catch up with our technological evolution.

Abolitionist:This is not a criticism of Judi Bari’s work but in hindsight was her work as radical feminist and eco-environmentalist in attempting to bring loggers and protesters together worth the risk to her bodily self, do you think?

DC: Of course protecting ourselves should be the first order of business. We are not going to do anyone any good if we are dead. What Judi did was she completely took the seed of an idea and those fledgling efforts and blossomed it into a full-grown campaign. Even though we are pigeon-holed into our respective roles and jobs – he's a logger, he's a corporate trustee, she's a environmentalist etc – ultimately we can't escape who we are and the times we live in it's just that we have to understand that it's doesn't also have to be that way. Infact it can't continue to be this way if we are to survive. So many fundamental change is inevitable in the very near future or we're all going to die. But for me, that's an optimistic viewpoint, because I think we are going to change and make it. The ultimate goal: A quantum leap in human evolution.

Darryl Cherney's music homepage: http://www.darrylcherney.com/

On the bombing of Judi Bari and Darryl and the victorious lawsuit against the FBI. http://www.judibari.org