The following interview is published for Issue 41 of Critical Resistance’s cross-wall, bi-lingual newspaper The Abolitionist. Issue 41 – with feature articles on ecological justice and prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition – printed June 25, 2024 and mailed to thousands of imprisoned people for free in jails, detention centers and prisons across the US and some internationally. Supporters outside of cages can sign up for paid subscriptions that sponsor free subscriptions for prisoners. Print editions are limited, so subscribe today to receive your own print copy while some are still available.

“The Atlanta Way”:

Driving Ecological Destruction

& Expanding the Prison Industrial Complex

By Eva Dickerson & Rehana Lerandeau

Since the introduction of the proposal in 2017 to build a $90 million facility—known as “Cop City”—which could become the largest police training center in the US if built, much attention has pointed to Atlanta, Georgia. With construction slated on top of what locals call “the lungs of Atlanta,” also known as the Weelaunee Forest, organizers have swiftly mobilized to stop the project by occupying the forest, calling in the support of the displaced Muscogee Creek Tribe, targeting contracting companies that endorse the construction of the site, and applying immense pressure on the city to cancel the project.

Organizers are not just calling for an immediate stop to the destruction of the forest and rivers that are home to hundreds of plant, animal, and neighboring human life – the campaign is also driven by a critical intervention point: To halt the expansion of militarized policing in Atlanta. The fight to Stop Cop City provides a unique perspective into the interlocking fights for environmental justice (EJ) and prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition.

Atlanta is viewed by many as the picture of “progress” that liberal cities across the US are striving towards. Home to civil rights titans like Martin Luther King Jr and John Lewis, and often referred to as “the Black Mecca,” Atlanta is recognized as an epicenter of culture, education, and wealth for the Black bourgeoisie. These conditions complicate the fight to stop Cop City. We are seeing in real time how “The Atlanta Way”— a term used to describe “the strategic partnership between Black political leadership and white economic elites that work in service of corporations and upper-class white communities to the detriment of lower-income Black and working-class communities” (to quote Micah Herskind)— is fueling the expansion of the PIC at the expense of over 381 acres of forest, critical watershed, and natural canopy. The multi-racial, multi-generational, multi-political-tendency, decentralized campaign to stop Cop City high- lights these historic tensions while also providing organizers across the US with strategies and tactics to fight back. As the severity of climate and ecological disaster hastens worldwide, the fight to stop Cop City reminds abolitionists to hold one fact clearly in our praxis: EJ is dependent on our fight to abolish the prison industrial complex (PIC).

NEOLIBERAL CARCERALITY IN THE BLACK MECCA

Living in the so-called “Black Mecca” is a radical experience of dissonance. Atlanta mythos follows the struggle of a small urban center working to cement its identity as a business and economic hub in the years following reconstruction. According to legend, thanks to the savvy maneuvering of Southern white elites and the willingness of newly freed Africans to contribute to the “birth of a new nation,” Atlanta became a capital of industry, culture, and innovation. Ostensibly because of its unique Southern character, but more obviously to avoid disruptions to capital flow, the post-Reconstruction “peace” was transformed into a governance policy where white capital aligned with Black leadership to develop a new way of being in Atlanta. Thus,“The Atlanta Way” was born and has been credited for moving Atlantans through the latter half of the twentieth century.

As class systems are enmeshed across the city and locals are pushed out for the sake of capitalist development, Atlanta has arguably become one of the most carceral cities in the US. Atlanta is the most surveilled city in the US and is also home to the notorious Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) — a deadly exchange program between Atlanta PD and the Israeli Defense Force. Fulton County (where Atlanta is located) also has a billion-dollar jail con- tract in the works, while the proposal to build Cop City has sparked an eruption of over 69 similar projects across the US. Everywhere policing, surveillance, and imprisonment are expanding while access to life affirming resources—including natural resources like the Weelanue Forest—are under attack or facing complete destruction.

Contemporary Atlanta is a cautionary example of the ways that neoliberalism in a “post-racial” city can emerge. The faces and identities of the social and political elites change, but the underlying capitalist structure remains unaltered. Make no mistake that the fight for the forest and against the expansion of policing in Atlanta is a fight in which organizers are up against a Black mayor, a Black sheriff, a predominantly Black police force, and the Black elite. The dissonance between what local leadership espouses as the great success of Atlanta and the daily lived experience of regular people is maddening, and as Atlanta “develops” with capitalist aims, it’s destroying all life in its wake.

THE ECOLOGICAL IMPACTS OF COP CITY

While the Stop Cop City campaign is, at its core, an effort to challenge the advancement of policing and its immediate disastrous impacts on working class communities of color, the chosen site for the proposed project in the Weelaunee Forest has created a remarkable opportunity for PIC abolition and ecological justice fights to come together in one campaign. Since the plans for Cop City were discovered, organizers have been alerting residents— predominantly Black working-class communities— and deci- sion makers behind the project of the severe environmental impact that would result if the facility were to be completed.

Organizers from an incredibly broad range of struggles— from forest and water defense to clean air collectives and parents living in East Atlanta worried about the safety and psychological impact on their children if they are forced to hear and inhale the toxins associated with mock urban warfare— have all come together for this fight. An immense amount of legal, historical, and environmental research conducted by campaign organizers all point to the same conclusion: cutting down a forest to build a warfare facility at the height of the climate collapse will increase our susceptibility to severe weather events, divert critical funds away from life-affirming resources, and expose our residents to more contact with violent policing. Every element of the plan for Cop City poses an existential and material threat to our world.

One such threat is aimed at the South River Watershed, a major water source to Atlanta that flows through the proposed build site. Dr Jaqueline Echols, Board President of South River Watershed Alliance, and fervent opponent to the Cop City construction site, has been uplifting the combined racist and environmental implications of building Cop City on the South River. Echols argues, “The neighborhoods surrounding the South River are predominantly Black and never meet water quality standards while the Chattahoochee River, a predominantly white area further north, remains picturesque.” Prior to the Cop City proposal, the city failed to maintain the same water standards for surrounding Black neighborhoods as those in white northern neighborhoods – even in the Black Mecca. The city’s leadership seems to be saying: not only do we not care about your environment or health, but we would rid you of critical greenspace and water access entirely if it means policing you more thoroughly.

Additionally, just over a year ago the Center for Biological Diversity released a statement emphasizing the importance of the South River Forest while also condemning the Atlanta police’s murder of comrade and forest defender Tortuguita. In their statement, they highlighted that the South River Forest protects the headwaters for Georgia’s largest and most diverse watershed home to hundreds of species of wildlife, insisting that “as we seek justice for Tortuguita, we have to continue their mission to save this precious forest habitat and prevent a destructive development from further polluting a watershed that serves so many people.” The Cop City project would clear cut over 85 acres of essential forest land that protects the watershed and provides critical urban canopy over the city during continuously rising temperatures in the face of climate disaster.

Poisoning the water, razing tree cover, and creating violent noise pollution and increased contact with policing for the Weelaunee Forest’s predominantly Black and working-class neighboring communities is all Cop City promises. The campaign to stop Cop City has mobilized powerful action in opposition to these violent advances and has been effectively putting a stop to destruction while fighting for dignified and healthy life for all living beings in Atlanta.

MOVES AND COUNTER MOVES: FIGHTING TO STOP COP CITY

Over the past year alone, forest defenders have been labeled “domestic terrorists”, bail funds have been raided by militarized SWAT teams, festival goers in the public forest have been hit with “organized crime” RICO charges, and over 116,000 Atlanta residents who oppose the project have been doxed by the city. This level of repression against organizers fighting to preserve critical watersheds, forest, and the peace of Black working-class neighborhoods should be studied seriously by movements across the US. It indicates rising fascism and the resulting crackdown on dissent. It also reveals what the state is planning for our futures—we can expect a violent expansion of policing to continue sustaining racial capitalism and PIC expansion at the expense of the environment. While we need immediate, organized responses, we can see that powerful organizing has forced the state to respond through violent counter moves in a failed attempt to squash resistance. The will of the people to cancel the project is unstoppable.

The Cop City project— originally proposed by Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms as a “pick me up gift” to a disgruntled police force after the 2020 uprisings following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police— has been delayed for years. Forest defense has been one of the primary campaign tactics that supported the initial stall in the project. Anonymous forest defenders took up residence in the Weelaunee Forest, physically living in the trees themselves to obstruct destruction. Supply runs for the forest defenders, “Forest Fridays”, group meals open to the public, guided forest walks, raves, and festivals were all tactics used to build a movement that established community, built investment in the forest, and kept the land protected from destruction around the clock. Simultaneously, organizers targeted construction companies and corporate funders of the project like Reeves and Young, the Atlanta Police Foundation, Coca-Cola, Verizon, Target and others pressuring them to pull out of the project. Marches, call-in campaigns, destruction of construction equipment and cop cars, tagging facilities, and simple agitation all supported delaying and complicating the construction timeline.

During forest defense, organizers effectively worked to expand the struggle outside of Atlanta. Popular and earned media efforts emphasized that Cop City would change the idea of police militarization across the US and was not simply a local issue affecting some south Atlanta residents. Cross-country teach-ins were held, local protests were conducted at various sites of corporations and construction companies supporting the project across the US, and in cities from San Francisco to New Orleans, New York, and Chicago “Stop Cop City” was spray painted on walls and sidewalks.

Immense pressure has also been put on the city officials in Atlanta who have the power to cancel the project. Organizers and residents in the city have broken records for public comment in opposition of the Cop City project twice since the inception of the campaign. Wheat pasting and canvassing to raise awareness about the harmful proposal to city residents has made the project immensely unpopular— 98 percent of Atlantans oppose the project— which has put pressure on city council representatives and the mayor. Most recently, organizers executed a referendum campaign with the goal of moving the final decision on the project to the ballot to let the people decide. Over 116,000 signatures— more than double the number needed to achieve the referendum goals— were gathered showing strong opposition of the city to the project. The Stop Cop City movement is stronger than our enemies and has shown in action how building collective power and healthy ecosystems and rejecting the logic of racial capitalism can subvert and overpower the forces invested in seeing Cop City built.

WE MUST ABOLISH THE PIC TO ACHIEVE ECOLOGICAL JUSTICE

If we understand ecological justice as Movement Generation’s definition of “the state of balance between human communities and healthy ecosystems based on thriving, mutually beneficial relationships and participatory self-governance,” then we understand that a project like Cop City is in direct contradiction to EJ. The insistence of Atlanta’s electorate on pursuing the project despite the severe costs to the ecology of Atlanta is a demonstration of their priorities at the height of climate crisis. In the face of chaos and upheaval caused by both major weather events and social unrest (both of which are in turn a result of the unchecked racial capitalism), the city will continue to ensure the ability of those in power to extract our material and natural resources, our planetary potential, and continue to use policing and surveillance to squash dissent.

As organizers, we must fight for an approach to revolutionary change that fosters political unity and exposes the underbelly of white elite motivations enmeshed within the social structures of the city. If we don’t, the PIC will continue to recruit the “come-up class” and Black bourgeoisie of Atlanta to advance carceral and capitalistic aims and will swallow everything in its path: our people, our precious resources, and our protective landscape.

Historic conditions are manifesting in tenacious resistance to Cop City, in turn met with unimaginable repression. Though this fight is not a unique phenomenon, but a reflection of the pattern of the state and capitalism more broadly to advance and abuse the rest of us at all costs, we can look to the movement to stop Cop City not only as a tactical case study but a lesson in how directly impacted communities across the country fight together for ecological justice against institutions of mass death. As comrades on the streets and in the forests have taken up all manners of resistance— from forest occupation to construction site lockdowns and airport blockades—the call to “Stop Cop City” can be heard around the world. To achieve true ecological justice in the Black Mecca, we must abolish all manifestations of the PIC in Atlanta, end the insidious “Atlanta Way”, join forces with environmental protection movements, and —of course —stop Cop City now. What we achieve in Atlanta could certainly become a global model.

About the Authors:

Eva Dickerson:

Starseed eva (they/themme/baby girl) believes in a freer, greener future and is on a journey alongside their world-expanding friends to get there. The apple of their eye is the city of Atlanta, where they live, work, play, and experiment with the people in the city about how we might practice a more compassionate way of being together. Much of their organizing in the city is concentrated within the Ashview Heights, Vine City, West End, Bush Mountain, and now Gresham Park neighborhoods where their abolitionist ideology comes to life by way of childcare collectives, neighborhood farmers markets, community gardens, popular education campaigns, and earth-based projects.

Rehana Lerandeau:

Rehana is the National Membership Organizer for Critical Resistance (CR). Based in Atlanta, Georgia, Rehana’s roots flow from her hometown of Oakland. A previous member of CR’s Oakland chapter, Rehana supports CR members develop abolitionist projects and campaigns across our chapter regions of Oakland, Los Angeles, Portland, New York, and (newly) Kentucky. In Atlanta, Rehana is supporting the campaign to stop Cop City and the campaign to end the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE).