Hotseat: Bad Religion Singer Greg Graffin

The Bad Religion singer explains why Paul McCartney is a nihilist.

Greg Graffin has been singing—or yelling—for decades about a lot of the ideas in his new book, Population Wars: A New Perspective on Competition and Coexistence (Thomas Dunne Books, 320 pages, $27.99). The book’s hopeful thesis is that both organisms and ideas have a tendency to persist, and humanity’s best bet is usually to contain perceived threats rather than attempt to defeat them fully. This means changing the “war” narrative we assign to everything from diseases to foreign ideologies. A briefer synopsis, barked by Graffin’s band Bad Religion on “Recipe for Hate,” from the defining 1993 album of the same name: “Our forefathers who led the way/ Their victims are still here today.”

Graffin, who teaches evolution for nonmajors at Cornell University when he's not touring with Bad Religion, integrates doses of autobiography into his multidisciplined look at population battles. By the end of the book, it feels as if you've had a long and fascinating conversation with an engaging, if slightly nerdy, professor friend. My much shorter conversation with Graffin took place via telephone. He was driving.

WW: You argue in the book that humans need to be active stewards of their environment. I'm sorry to quote Paul McCartney here, but why we can't just "Let It Be"?

Greg Graffin: Part of the punk tradition that I never subscribed to was this idea of nihilism. Nihilism gets you nowhere. It's just saying, "Nothing matters, so why do anything?" I think the "Let It Be" route is empty. Doing nothing isn't a worldview for the future, it's the worldview of today.

"Let It Be" is nihilistic?

It's something I never understood about the hippies, yeah. That's why I was a punker and not a hippie.

It's an optimistic book. How do you like humanity's chances of finding stasis with our environment?

Prognostication, despite what you might read because it sells a lot of books, is really not the realm of science. If you're hopeful about mankind, there's plenty to be hopeful about. I've read so many doom-and-gloom scenarios that I don't think we need another one. I think that if you look at a coarse-grained view of history, you find that populations persist and they're very hard to get rid of. That, to me, is a hopeful fact.

There's a brief passage in the book where you talk about killing birds on your property. Tell me about shooting your first starling.

It felt really good. It was a very proud moment, because starlings are unusually crafty. They're a very adaptable bird. I look at them as a scourge on the continent. I try to shoot them any time I can—but I only have a BB gun.

My best friend shot a bird with a BB gun as a kid, and we felt terrible seeing it twitch around on the ground. You didn't feel guilty?

No, because they're taking the lives of the birds that they displace. But I had the same exact experience as you when I was a kid. I think almost every kid shoots a bird, and they can't believe they actually hit the thing. My friend was with me, and he put it out of its misery by plugging it in the head when it was on the ground. His sisters were close by, and they went off screaming in horror and got their mother. She came out and started yelling at us and said, "These kids are going to hell for this!" It was a major ordeal.

Do kids take your class because you're the dude from Bad Religion? Do you tell them rock-'n'-roll stories?

Well, I have office hours for that if people want to talk about it. The truth is, you'd be surprised how few students really care. Those students are pretty damn serious. I don't make judgments about it, I just know that I don't get asked a lot of questions about music.

GO: Greg Graffin's book tour (which includes a short set of songs) stops at the Hawthorne Theatre, 1507 SE 39th Ave., 233-7100, hawthornetheatre.com, on Wednesday, Sept. 23. 7 pm. $25. All ages.

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