“The broader anti-democratic push to create Cop City, and then the fact they have literally murdered a climate activist, shows that it’s all hands on deck for the forces of the prison industrial complex.” Latest episode of MovementMemos out now.
,” David Peisner offers a portrait of Tortuguita, based on extensive interviews, that conveys a foundational commitment to nonviolence. Tortuguita told Peisner that they were not moved by what some people think of as the exciting stuff in forest defense work, such as acts of sabotage or property destruction. They told Pesiner, “I’m not an adrenaline junkie.I don’t crave conflict. I’m out here because I love the forest. I love living in the woods. Being a forest hobo is pretty chill.
I will say more about Tortuguita, their death, and how we should remember them, but first, we are going to get a bit more of the backstory of the struggle they were waging when the police took their life.: So in the summer of 2021 essentially was the first time that this proposal to destroy close to 400 acres of forest land in southeast Atlanta. And to replace that, to build in that forest place, a massive police training facility that the protestors are calling Cop City.
And then the last thing I’ll say before trying to pull it all together is that Atlanta right now is also sort of the epicenter of huge development projects, enormous gentrification. People are being pushed out, new, wealthier and white people are being sort of pulled into the city through all of these different tech jobs. And of course, policing and police expansion and surveillance is central to gentrification, to the displacement of people.
It’s really important for our air quality, for preventing flooding. Of course, as climate disaster approaches and as we’re already living it, this is really crucial forest land and it’s in a majority Black area of DeKalb County. And so there are folks sort of working on the environmental side.
And that’s looked like a lot of different things. It’s also looked like organizations putting pressure on contractors and saying, just because this thing was passed at the city council level, that doesn’t mean that the project is going to go through. Contractors can be pressured to pull out of the project. There’s been various efforts to slow down the permitting process, and there’s been a lot of skepticism on behalf of DeKalb County in granting those permits.
Another aspect of this situation that has largely been bought and paid for is a media narrative that has chronically demonized protesters.: I think something really important to understand in terms of the connections between the major backers of this project and the media and various attempts to sort of manufacture consent for the project is that our paper of record in Atlanta, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution or the AJC, is owned by Cox Enterprises.
So they were working on city projects on the city farm. The Atlanta Community Press Collective has done some amazing reporting on the history of that space. And that Atlanta, the old Atlanta prison farm, the ruins are still there in that area, but it’s been an area where all of this life has grown in its wake. But it, of course, still carries all of these scars of state violence. And it’s also an area that is currently surrounded by a bunch of different carceral facilities.
And so police have been escalating the situation for quite some time now, going into the forest with guns and weapons. Using tear gas and other police equipment to go after protestors. And of course, that all escalated to the point where they’ve killed someone. And really, really tragically, about a month ago when that December raid happened, someone from the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which has been helping coordinate a lot of the legal representation for arrested and criminalized protestors.
And if this moment is showing that it’s all hands on deck for the forces of capital and policing and developers and sort of Atlanta’s corporate elite and ruling class, it also needs to be all hands on deck for people of good conscience everywhere in Atlanta, across the country, across the world. There’s already been such amazing solidarity that’s been pouring in from places all over. And I think Atlanta needs that. We need the attention and the focus.
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