The parking lot is half full. A cardboard sign at the trailhead reads LIVING ROOM → in Magnum Sharpie, so we start up the bike path, where a trail of glow sticks hangs from the trees. A quarter mile later, sky darkening in the distance, the glow sticks veer off to the left down a footpath, which zags through logs and opens onto a clearing in the pines. People with headlamps settle onto blankets, popping cans and passing snacks. A dog in a dog-colored sweater chases a squirrel and stands there panting. There is pizza piled tall on a table. Syncopated crickets. A giggling A/V club pulls a bedsheet taut between two trees, angling a projector powered by a car battery just so.
The forest is a squiggly triangle of earth, four miles around, some five hundred acres, lying improbably verdant just outside Atlanta’s municipal limits. Bouldercrest and Constitution Roads are the triangle’s sides, Key Road its hypotenuse. The surrounding mixed industry indexes the American economy: an Amazon warehouse, a movie studio, a truck repair shop, a church, a tow yard, a dump, a pallet-sorting facility, a city water-treatment plant. Suburbs, mostly Black and middle-class, unfurl in all directions. Prison facilities—juvenile, transitional, reentry—pad the perimeter, removed from Constitution Road by checkpoints, black mesh fencing, and tornadoes of barbed wire.
Viewed from above, the forest triangle is bisected once by a flat straight strip clear-cut for power lines and then again by Intrenchment Creek. This skinny, sinuous waterway is a tributary to Georgia’s South River and swells with sewage from the upriver city whenever it rains. Intrenchment Creek also marks the property line that splits the forest in two. East of the creek is the 136-acre public-access Intrenchment Creek Park, with a parking lot and bike path and hiking trails through meadows and thickets of loblolly pine, and also a toolshed and miniature tarmac where the Atlanta RC Club flies. West of the creek is the site of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm.
For seventy years, Atlanta forced incarcerated people to work the land here, growing food for the city prison system under conditions of abuse and enslavement both brutal and banal. Since the prison closed quietly in the 1990s, its fields have lain fallow, reforesting slowly. Though it’s DeKalb County, this parcel belongs to the neighboring City of Atlanta. It is nevertheless not public property. The driveway to the old prison farm has long been fenced off. The only way in is to scrabble up the berm from Key Road. Or cross the sloping, sandy banks of the creek from the public park and trespass onto no-man’s-land.
For years, the South River Forest Coalition lobbied Atlanta to open this land to the public and make it the centerpiece of a mixed-use megaforest: a 3,500-acre patchwork of parks, preserves, cemeteries, landfills, quarries, and golf courses linked through a network of trails crisscrossing the city’s southeast suburbs. And in 2017, it seemed like a rare success for grassroots environmental activism when the Department of City Planning adopted the Coalition’s idea into their vision for the future of Atlanta. You should see the glossy, gorgeous, four-hundred-page book the city planners published unveiling their plan for a city of affluence, equality, cozy density, affordable transit, and reliable infrastructure for robust public spaces. We no longer thought optimism like this was even possible at the scale of the American metropolis. Even if the dream of the South River Forest had been downsized, the 1,200-acre South River Park was still far from nothing. The book called it “the enduring and irreplaceable green lungs of Atlanta,” “our last chance for a massive urban park,” and a cornerstone in their vision of environmental justice.
How simple things seemed back then! In 2020, local real estate magnate Ryan Millsap approached the DeKalb County Board of Commissioners with an offer to acquire forty acres of Intrenchment Creek Park in exchange for a nearby plot of denuded dirt. Three years prior, Millsap had founded Blackhall Studios across Constitution Road and now was eager to expand his already giant soundstage complex into a million square feet of movie studio. This is no longer unusual for the Atlanta outskirts. State-level tax breaks have lured the film industry here. Since 2016, Georgia has produced at least as many blockbusters as California. As part of the deal, Millsap promised to landscape the dirt pile into the public-access Michelle Obama Park.
Neighbors had already begun to organize to sue DeKalb County for violating Intrenchment Creek Park’s charter when in April 2021, Atlanta’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, announced a plan of her own. On the other side of the creek, the city would lease 150 acres of the land abandoned by the prison farm to the Atlanta Police Foundation, because the old police academy was falling apart and covered in mold. Cadets were doing their push-ups in the hallways of a community college. The lease would cost the police $10 per year for thirty years. The new training center would cost $90 million to build. But only a third of this would come from public funds, the mayor assured the taxpayers. The rest would be provided by the Atlanta Police Foundation—which is not the Atlanta Police Department, but a “private nonprofit” whose basic function is to raise corporate funds to embellish police powers.
Rest in peace Rayshard Brooks still practically gleamed in white spray paint on Krog Street Tunnel. The Atlanta police had killed Brooks during a confrontation in the parking lot of a Wendy’s not far from the forest barely two weeks after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd. The nation was still reeling after the upheaval of 2020—and now the mayor of Atlanta wanted not only to give $90 million to the murderers, but to clear-cut a forest to accommodate them. At first we were less indignant than insulted by the project’s intersectional stupidity. Hadn’t the city just agreed to invest in people’s leisure, pleasure, health, and well-being? Instead, the old prison farm would become a new surveillance factory.
In May, some two hundred people showed up to an info night in the Intrenchment Creek Park parking lot. A hand-painted banner fluttered from the struts of the gazebo: DEFEND THE ATLANTA FOREST. There were zines and taglines: STOP COP CITY. NO HOLLYWOOD DYSTOPIA. FUCK THE METAVERSE, SAVE THE REAL WORLD! The orgs were there with maps and graphs. #StoptheSwap detailed the Blackhall–DeKalb deal. The South River Watershed Alliance explained how the forest soaks up stormwater and wondered what would happen to the surrounding suburbs when the hilltop became a parking lot. Save the Old Atlanta Prison Farm narrated a mini-history of the land. Before the city prison farm, it had been a slave plantation.
People mingled, ate vegan barbecue. The cumbia lasted past dark. Half the audience had never been to the forest before, but now wanted to protect or maybe even enjoy it. History has apparently already decided that the movement was started by these organizations—but do you see those young people pacing the parking lot? Ask an anarchist. They all know who painted the banners, who printed the zines, who organized the inaugural info night. Who barbecued the jackfruit, who hauled in the speakers, who gave the movement its slogans and myths and indefatigable energy. Who got neighbors and strangers together to do something more than post about it. Who transformed concerned citizens into forest defenders.
For a city mirrored in skyscapers, of fifteen-lane highways, of five million people and building ever faster, Atlanta is run like a small town, or a bloated feudal palace, royal families overseeing serfs sitting in traffic. For almost a century, a not-so-secret compact has governed the city town council–style, bequeathing positions in the power structure along dynastic lines. The roles at the table are fixed: mayor, city council, Chamber of Commerce, Coca-Cola, the police, the local news, and, uniquely and importantly in Atlanta, miscellaneous magnates of a Black business class. The biracial, bipartisan, business-friendly, media-savvy, moderate, managerial tradition the group perfected during the golden age of American capital is called the Atlanta Way. (...)
Since 1974, every mayor has been Black. Business boomed and suburbs steamrolled the countryside. Railroading begat logistics and telecommunications: Delta, UPS, IBM, AT&T. Olympic fireworks bedazzled downtown in the ’90s, while hip-hop rooted and flourished on the city’s south side, and propagated across continents. The airport ballooned into the busiest in the world. Tyler Perry redeveloped a military base into one of the largest movie studios in America. By the 2010s, the general American pattern of white supremacy looked almost upside down in Atlanta. (...)
Or was it? In a city so restlessly forward-moving, it’s hard to tell sometimes what’s truly new and what’s business as usual. General Sherman burned the city to the ground, and Atlanta has spent the century and a half since the Civil War reenacting this founding trauma. Its motto is Resurgens, its mascot the phoenix, ever resurrecting from the ash heap of history. Every city booster’s plan to make Atlanta more modern, international, or cosmopolitan has been carried out by a wrecking crew, enforcing a disorienting amnesia on its residents.
Last year, all charges against the officers were dismissed, and both were reinstated to the department with back pay. Three protesters identified by police on social media from the night the Wendy’s burned were arrested and indicted with conspiracy to commit arson. Determined to somersault out of 2020 upright and armored, the city began to stabilize. The solution, as ever: demolish and build. The bulldozers aimed for the forest. (...)
The anarchist internet has been on the scoop since the initial info night. It’s Going Down has been exulting over sabotaged construction equipment, exalting the black bloc for smashing the windows of the Atlanta Police Foundation headquarters downtown, exhorting readers to take autonomous action against Cop City’s corporate sponsors. The photos of burning bulldozers also give us that illicit little thrill, but our angle this summer is gentler. Somehow we want to defibrillate liberals into conscience and action. Not everyone in the media group agrees that the liberal establishment, Democratic machine, or NGO-industrial complex can help us stop Cop City, but we all know that no news is bad news. The problem is that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is owned by major donors to the police foundation, which ensures that the mainstream coverage is bad news, too. (...)
The following day, the city council votes ten to four to approve the lease of the land to the Atlanta Police Foundation anyway. The mayor makes a statement: It “will give us physical space to ensure that our officers and firefighters are receiving 21st-century training, rooted in respect and regard for the communities they serve.” We blink past the obvious hypocrisy, drawn instead to that watchword training, deceptively neutral, the ostensible justification of a million liberal reforms, because who could argue against training? The police after all are like dogs: best when they obey. But obey what? (...)
The following day, the city council votes ten to four to approve the lease of the land to the Atlanta Police Foundation anyway. The mayor makes a statement: It “will give us physical space to ensure that our officers and firefighters are receiving 21st-century training, rooted in respect and regard for the communities they serve.” We blink past the obvious hypocrisy, drawn instead to that watchword training, deceptively neutral, the ostensible justification of a million liberal reforms, because who could argue against training? The police after all are like dogs: best when they obey. But obey what? (...)
Though Atlanta is the eighth-largest metro area in the country, its police foundation is the second largest, smaller only than New York’s. Dave Wilkinson, its president and CEO, spent twenty-two years in the Secret Service, was personally responsible for protecting Presidents Clinton and W. Bush, and might be the highest-paid cop in the country. In 2020, he made $407,500 plus five figures in bonuses—more than twice as much as the director of the FBI. Wilkinson lives in a small town outside Atlanta, although, to be fair, three-quarters of city cops live outside city limits too.
We hear the list of major corporations in Atlanta whose executives sit on the board of the APF so often we accidentally memorize it: Delta, Home Depot, McKesson, J. P. Morgan, Wells Fargo, UPS, Chick-fil-A, Equifax, Cushman & Wakefield, Accenture, Georgia Pacific, disappointingly Waffle House, unsurprisingly Coca-Cola—though in October, news breaks that Color Of Change, a national racial justice organization, has successfully pressured Coca-Cola off the APF board. This feels huge! Coca-Cola and Atlanta are conjoined twins, and where one goes, so goes the other. Public pressure is mounting, people keep saying to each other in the forest. We even hear people say they believe that we will win.
by A.C. Corey, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Sasha Tycko, Old Atlanta Prison Farm, Georgia. 2022
[ed. Wow. Reminds me of The Overstory by Richard Powers, which I thought was too over the top to be believable. Guess not. Here's another perspective: The Forest and Its Partisians (n+1):]
[ed. Wow. Reminds me of The Overstory by Richard Powers, which I thought was too over the top to be believable. Guess not. Here's another perspective: The Forest and Its Partisians (n+1):]
"So what is the movement “really” about, beyond the trees and the cops? Why this convergence? What is it that all these far-flung groups and individuals intuitively grasp about the importance of this particular struggle? What significance has been forced here? I don’t want Cop City to be built, and neither do my friends who live near its proposed site. I didn’t want them to cut down the forest either, and the progress they’ve made on that front is a tragedy. As worthy as both these causes are in their own right, they are not, in themselves, the reasons I care so much about the movement, nor are they the reasons why so many others do, nor are they why you should. You should care because the movement is both 2020 in miniature and a direct bridge to the mass struggles to come.
On top of its organic local base, the movement has ties and supporters across the country and across the world. Right now, that support has been spread largely through the milieus of those drawn to the flashier moments of direct confrontation. Mirroring this, the shrillest outrage and calls for crackdown are rooted in the fascoid Trumpist wing of the Republican Party and its further-right orbiters. The police and broader repressive state machinery, meanwhile, have rolled out tools of repression old and new, from age-old methods of surveillance, intimidation, physical violence, and murder to a test run of Georgia’s draconian domestic terrorism statute and the attempted prosecution of members of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund for alleged financial crimes. The further right lurks in the background, taking pictures and writing articles that DHS cribs from when they publish their extremism advisories. Somewhere in an FBI office, someone is compiling files on the various support groups the movement has inspired in cities across the country and assigning threat designations to bookstores. Insurgent left, insurgent right, repressive state: it is clear to all three types of partisan that Atlanta is a test case and a site of innovation, that the contours of any future uprisings are being shaped here. (...)
As a forest defender friend put it, “the skills we emphasize and practice in this movement should be the skills we want to take with us.” This is a very young movement, but one that’s attracted the involvement of seasoned oldheads with wisdom to spare. Thanks to that wisdom, and to the movement’s unusual vibrancy and much-vaunted “diversity of tactics,” the learning opportunities are unique and extremely valuable. Just as Atlanta has attracted veterans of Line 3, Standing Rock, and older struggles, you can be certain that alumni of this movement will be on the frontlines of whatever comes next. On the second: echoing state and federal law enforcement, the White House itself has indicated the importance of Cop City as a model for the rest of the country and—as another friend, a criminal defense attorney, observed about the unprecedented, draconian legal repression the movement has faced—“the state would love a new set of prosecutorial tools to go along with their fancy new training facility.” Fighting the development of these tools, inside and outside the courtroom, will have a direct impact on protest and repression in the years to come."
