Daryl Hannah

FD: You’ve been arrested a few times for the course of your activism. Why do you think civil disobedience can be such an important tool?

DH: When you’re up against a somewhat entrenched pattern where the wealthiest industries of mankind and the wealthiest corporate interests are endangering our very ability to keep our planet livable, we have to take control back into our hands. And you can’t do that unless people get engaged and informed. So civil disobedience has served to change history many times because when people come out in force and say, “we are willing to put our bodies down on the line.”

When I went to Vietnam, ages ago before they opened it to western trade, you used to be able to go on a tour of the Cu Chi Tunnels … And it was a really interesting and really eye opening experience for me, because I of course grew up during the Vietnam War and understood it to some extent. I understood that it was somehow an unwinnable situation but I didn’t really understand. But when I went into the Cu Chi Tunnels, they take you to an area and they say “stand here and see if you can find the entrance to the tunnels” and you are looking all around and there is no way you can find an entrance, then they lift up a patch of dirt under your feet and that is the entrance to the tunnels … They had 250 miles of tunnels, 5 levels of tunnels, and you had to walk in a squat position, as they were only three or 3 ½ feet high. The bottom of the levels was under water so you had to swim, the fourth level was under water but just under your nose if you were walking in a squat position. The top three levels had various smoke chambers so they could have kitchens and schools and hospitals. This was under ground; they were living like moles. They had entrances that went straight up to the U.S. military bases … They would live in these tunnels by day and come out at night to tend to their food crops. And I am telling you this because I realized at that moment that when people are fighting for their lives like that, this isn’t an ideological war at this point, this is people fighting for their survival. This is people willing to go to that extreme … And I think that is the point that is expressed quite often in civil disobedience, is that type of feeling that we are coming out and we are going to stand against this.

FD: What do you think is the one simplest thing that people can do to make a big impact on environmental causes as an individual?

DH: This is going to sound weird, but I would say stop thinking about environmental causes as environmental causes. We are interdependent and interconnected with all other life on this planet whether it is our environment or other species. We are not able to live without them. We are not able to live without our environment. The oceans, the trees. Trees are not decorations, they are our food source, they are our oxygen source, and they are the source of our soil. The ocean also creates our oxygen. These things are not things that are outside of ourselves; they are part of the very fabric of our being able to exist. So for us to continue to separate environmental causes and humanitarian causes and animal rights, they are all one in the same. We have to understand and make that connection, which I think we all know on some profound level. We all know that we are interconnected but we need to accept it on a profound level and recognize it.