Rob Czernik was born at Fort Campbell, Kentucky the day after Pink Floyd released their “Wish You Were Here” album. He spent the next 11 years as an Army brat, living on military bases around the world. In 1988, he spent his freshman year of high school in West Virginia, in the coal country of Boone County. He hiked his first clearcut, saw his first mountain top removal project, and witnessed first-hand the abject poverty of Appalachia. Upon returning to his mother’s hometown south of Chicago, he became politically active with a group of friends. They held a sit-in at their school against the first Gulf war, went into Chicago on the weekends to engage in Clinic Defense against Operation Rescue, and explored the forest preserves that surrounded the increasingly suburbanized, once rural community where he lived.

Attending Southern Illinois University-Carbondale to study cultural anthropology, he became active with Shawnee Earth First!. While working on campaigns to prevent the logging of Bell Smith Springs and incineration of dioxin-laced soils in Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge, he became increasingly aware of capital’s effect on ecology, and moved toward an anti-authoritarian/ecological critique.

In late summer of 1998, Rob moved to Minneapolis to work with Big Woods Earth First! on what became known as the “Minnehaha Free State”, the first urban-based U.S. anti-road occupation in history. In 1999, he spent several months on the West Coast climbing trees and helping organize for the WTO summit held in Seattle that November. In July of 2000, he helped organize against a Minneapolis meeting of the International Society of Animal Genetics, a protest which resulted in close to 100 arrests, one million dollars spent on security, and his house raided the evening of the demonstration by the FBI, DEA and Minneapolis police. He spent the next year fighting charges related to that police raid. In late 2000, he started working at the now defunct independent weekly PULSE of the Twin Cities as a writer and salesperson, while engaged in anti-biotech, anti-klan, and eco-defense related projects. He was also active with collective food distribution project Sisters’ Camelot, volunteered with the Jack Pine Community Center from from early 2007 until it’s demise, and helped found EWOK!(Earth Warriors are OK!), an eco/animal prisoner support group in November of 2006.

In late 2006, it was announced that the 2008 Republican National Convention would be held in the Twin Cities. He spent the next year and a half organizing with the RNC Welcoming Committee until his arrest on Sep 1, 2008. When not fighting the resulting charge, he continues to work with Sisters’ Camelot and EWOK!, makes his living as a chef, and yearns for the day he can abandon Babylon and foment rural, bioregionally-based community autonomy projects.