Sacred Headwaters #56: Stop Cop City
The fight against Cop City in Atlanta draws the connections between climate and ecological crisis, capital, and the police and surveillance states almost too clearly.
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Issue #56: Stop Cop City
I’m guessing this isn’t news to most readers of this newsletter, but on January 18th, Atlanta police executed Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, known in the Atlanta forest as Tortuguita. It was, at least according to Steven Donziger and a number of media outlets, the first police murder of a climate activist within the country. (As an aside, Donziger may have been the first lawyer imprisoned for pursuing a climate lawsuit in the US). That classification needs a caveat — countless Indigenous people have been killed over the last 250 years by the US government while fighting against ecocide — but the significance remains, particularly when seen as part of a global trend among liberal democracies towards criminalizing protest.
Tortuguita was killed while protecting the Welaunee or South River Forest, an urban forest that municipal staff had previously called the city’s lungs. They and others were fighting to protect the forest from the development of what’s being called “Cop City,” a massive police training facility proposed by the Atlanta Police Foundation, funded partially by the city and partially by the APF’s corporate donors, a veritable who’s who of big capital. There are also some bizarre aspects of the story involving real estate speculation and unaccountable transfers of public land.
Bringing attention to Tortuguita’s murder is reason enough to write this newsletter issue. But the Stop Cop City movement offers an almost too-obvious demonstration of the intersections between climate and ecological crisis, capital, and state surveillance and violence. Over the course of this newsletter, a publication ostensibly focused on the climate crisis, I’ve worked to draw connections between these issues and to explain how they are all closely intertwined: how capitalism, racial domination, state violence, and ecocide are all if not the same, then at least inextricably linked. The struggle against Cop City brings that all to the fore.
It also offers a window into a form of struggle that I have been coming to think may offer our best bet in the fight for a livable future. A number of the last few issues have focused on municipalism as a strategy for change; Murray Bookchin argued that radical democracy at a local level represented the only viable path towards overcoming capitalism (and averting ecological disaster). I’m partial to his argument, but my inclinations are perhaps a bit more radical: our crises aren’t just the result of a mode of production. They’re baked into the way most of us see the world, how we generate meaning. (Though to be clear, I think there’s a back-and-forth between these — I’m not dismissing the Marxist perspective entirely here).
Building a better world means building or restoring less destructive or even regenerative (though I hesitate to use the term given how rapidly it’s been coopted) ways of being in the world. But doing so is an immense challenge. Land defense movements like Stop Cop City (termed, at least in part, “Blockadia” by Naomi Klein) represent a radical frontier. They are often led by Indigenous peoples or other subaltern communities and are grounded in non-western ways of being; they are often non-hierarchically organized (sometimes by necessity as a strategy to mitigate state infiltration and surveillance); they typically practice mutual aid and challenge fundamental Eurocentric notions of work and production; and they are intrinsically anti-capitalist and oppositional. You cannot co-opt a movement that is physically blocking capitalist extraction.
They’re also, in many ways, approachable: the fight to protect Ada’itsx, or Fairy Creek, on Vancouver Island, was visited by thousands if not tens of thousands of people over its course. And everyone who visits these place-based movements is transformed, by the experience of mutual aid and autonomy, by the shared reverence for the more-than-human world, and perhaps most of all, by the in-your-face nature of the connections between racialized state violence and capitalist extraction.
These movements may not always win, and they may not always be perfect, but they hold a kind of revolutionary potential that little else seems to today. In this issue, we’ll read about Cop City, the corrupt but seemingly legal dealings leading to the current situation, and the movement fighting it. We’ll also read some analysis that situates this struggle within broader questions of the prison industrial complex and carceral state, issues we touched on in Sacred Headwaters #14, 15, and 16.
Stopping Cop City, the murder of Tortuguita, and the trees that got us here (20 minutes)
Rachel Garbus, Welcome to Hell World, Jan 26 2023. This article was published in Luke O’Neil’s newsletter (which I highly recommend); scroll down to skip his introduction and head straight to the article.
In this article, written shortly after Tort’s murder, Garbus explains exactly what “Cop City” is (“a new cop playground”) and why the Atlanta Police Foundation is so set on building it. It’s a good summary of everything leading up to today and presents the basic facts of the situation as well as some deeper analysis of both movement tactics and legal goings-on. Some of the more procedural events leading up to the project’s construction are really striking — it isn’t just about building a big, controversial project on city land. The land in question is outside city limits, which makes it much easier to push through without meaningful public consultation, and its construction is tied to some fishy land-transfers involving a real estate developer named Ryan Millsap. One of the events Garbus describes will be reminiscent for anyone who has participated in land defense before: police cleared protestors in order to allow Millsap’s construction crew, acting solely on his behalf (not the city’s), to start clearing trees and destroying public park infrastructure, all in spite of an ongoing lawsuit and stop work order against his land transfer. Events like this take away the abstraction: police are literally doing the work of capital, collaborating directly with the employees of major corporations to facilitate their extraction of value from the more-than-human world.
Garbus also touches on the fact that the Atlanta police are now charging protestors with domestic terrorism and on the dimensions of environmental racism embedded in this conflict.
Cop City and the Prison Industrial Complex in Atlanta (35 minutes)
Micah Herskind, Mainline, Feb 7 2022
This essay uses Cop City as a case study to demonstrate the way that the “Prison Industrial Complex” (PIC) perpetuates and expands itself. I thought this piece was great for two reasons: first, the Cop City story is of immense explanatory value for these concepts. The ties between Atlanta’s major corporations (mostly though not exclusively transnationals), its media, its police, the real estate industry, and its city bureaucrats are stunning, but they really shouldn’t be: they are just a well-researched example of how power and influence is exercised within a capitalist state. Second, the piece delves into the complexity of talking about political economy, and specifically, something like the PIC. It’s tempting to fall into the reductive trap of conceptualizing this type of system as, essentially, a conspiracy: a small group of capitalists has its interests and does whatever it has to to protect them. I’ve done it, at least rhetorically, in places in this newsletter. And it’s true, of course, but it’s also an oversimplification, and Herskind uses this case study to explain exactly how. There isn’t a cabal of wealthy police-lovers pulling the strings in Atlanta, nor is there a cabal of capitalists pulling the strings of the whole world. There are, however, self-reinforcing systems that allow that class to ensure that their interests are prioritized.
This case study brought to mind the 2020 murder of Breonna Taylor, another tragically blatant example of the same kinds of connections between the real estate industry and police violence.
I also found Herskind’s exploration of the role and agency of municipal staff and politicians interesting. As someone who has engaged with municipal politicians (including on policing issues), it always seems puzzling and infuriating in the moment when they, as Herskind puts it, “largely [fail] to acknowledge the hours of public comment they had just heard.” It’s not entirely feel fair or accurate to absolve city councillors of all responsibility, but at the same time, it is worth recognizing that decisions are often made for them by powers beyond their control — which, of course, is the perennial challenge faced by municipalist electoralism within a broader still-capitalist system.
The Battle for ‘Cop City’ (15 minutes)
Jack Crosbie, Rolling Stone, Sep 3 2022
Work is hell. The forest is beautiful. The goal of protecting what sustains us and destroying what destroys us is the most important thing.
Crosbie spent some time with Defend Atlanta Forest activists on the ground and paints a picture of what the actual place-based pieces of the movement look like. His story highlights diversity: of the people there, of their reasons for being there, and of the movement’s tactics. If you’ve never visited a place-based protest movement like this before, this article will give you an idea of the kind of community that develops and the way that these camps end up becoming self-organizing mutual aid centers. Some of the movement tactics Crosbie highlights include property damage (of Millsap’s construction gear, primarily) and more accessible approaches to inviting the broader Atlanta community in to see what’s being lost by hosting concerts, teach-ins, and tours. Sadly, there are a few lines in this article that foreshadow the violence that has since followed, including the murder of a protestor by police.
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