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The setting: On the bed in a shared office room, a long day after finding out that the clear cutting had begun in the Weelaunee Forest…
Q: You were just saying that you’re feeling sleepy, and how maybe that has to do with your role in this movement and your energy for the forest. Maybe your low energy has to do with how the police declared the park closed this week, you can’t get into the forest safely right now, not in the way that you’re used to being able to… Can you tell me more about your relationship with the forest and the movement?
R: I moved to the city right before the Defend the Forest/Stop Cop City movement popped off. I don’t have that much experience in this kind of movement. I’ve gone to protests, but haven’t really organized anything before this. I got way more radicalized in the Uprising of 2020, which compelled me to move back to Atlanta, where I’m from. I wanted to be doing more of this kind of stuff in my life—I didn’t know what I was doing with my life, nothing seemed fulfilling at all. I was aimlessly traveling for many years, living a very anti-capitalist life without very much of the theory or understanding to back it up. I just knew that shit was whack.
I wanted to go back to where I was raised to see how I can revisit being who I am, now. So I moved to Atlanta, and didn’t know very many people here anymore. But I did have a few friends, and we were getting really into mushroom foraging at the time. We looked on a map of Atlanta and saw this big green spot, so we went there. We parked at Intrenchment Creek Park and went into the forest looking for mushrooms. Went all through the forest, through the pine patch, got down to the river, on the floodplain, where all the box elders are growing. We found black walnuts, and found a mulberry tree. This was sometime in the summer, so there were still black walnuts on the ground and there were mulberries fruiting, and there were mushrooms fruiting…chanterelles, mostly, and some oysters. Over the years, I’ve found chanterelles, oysters, lion’s mane, shrimp of the woods, and ovoids [Psilocybe ovoideocystidiata] all near the creek there.
We crossed the creek, and we were walking deeper and deeper into the forest, and actually getting really really lost. We had no idea where we were, which was kind of scary, because it was getting dark. We went through swampy areas, it felt like we were going in circles, found the Bradford pear orchard in there. And then finally made our way back to the parking lot. I thought it was amazing to find a forest I could actually get lost in, in the city.
I think it was the next week that I went on Nextdoor.com, an app for neighborhood communication, which I joined because I thought I would get to know my neighbors that way. And then I saw that Clarence Blalock, who was running for city council at that time, posted the ad that the Atlanta Police Foundation had put out about Cop City. Blalock had some message about it like, “Look what they’re trying to do, they’re trying to destroy the South River Forest, and they’re trying to do this behind our backs, there’s been no input, no one was asked, and part of my platform that I’m running on is to get transparency on this issue.” He didn’t end up winning, but he was involved in the movement for a little while. He dropped off at some point.
But anyway, I took a screen-shot and sent it to my friend, who sent it to some other friend, who sent it to some other friends, and suddenly there was a new Signal thread organizing around this issue. There was a meeting, and then there was an info night, and everyone had done research, gave some talks, gave some background info, some history, some ecological details—and then there was the first Week of Action! It just amazed me how things got organized super fast. You know, this was not long after the Uprising. The energy was still there. It felt so disgraceful that so, so soon after Rayshard Brooks was killed and the Wendy’s burned down that they were proposing such a thing.
I didn’t really know how to organize at that point. I was watching people come up with these ideas and organizing things like info nights and the Week of Action and I was like, woah, I’d never think to do that, that’s so cool, what a great idea! And I’d try to plug in, but also, not knowing many people, there wasn’t a lot of trust yet, or relationships and connection. To this day, I feel like I’ve found that my position in the past two years is to be a friendly face to people who are new to being part of a movement, like I was. Part of my role is helping make connections between people who might have similar ideas, and having lots of conversations.
This all started out with foraging for me, so I’ve done a lot of foraging tours in the forest because that’s what connected me to the land. And so I thought, ok, this is a way to connect more people to the land, to help them realize there’s nourishment here. There’s names for all the plants that make the green wall that you see if you’re not really looking at each plant individually. We can learn to see each plant as its own being that’s alive and deserves to live. We can have reciprocal relationships with the plants, and actually receive a lot from getting to know them. The foraging walks have been really popular! The food autonomy aspect of the movement is really big for me; like hosting breakfasts in the forest that are made from foraged things from that land. That was really touching for a lot of people. What I was observing while people were eating that food, was that you don’t need property to have food autonomy. But you do need to defend the commons that exist.
This all started with foraging for me, so I’ve done a lot of foraging tours in the forest because that’s what’s connected me to the land…We can learn to see each plant as its own being that’s alive and deserves to live. We can have reciprocal relationships with the plants, and actually receive a lot from getting to know them.
Q: How long of a time passed between you getting lost in the forest on that first mushroom foraging walk, and there being a solidified Defend the Forest/Stop Cop City movement?
R: Maybe like two weeks? And I was only in Atlanta for a month or two at that point.
Q: That’s amazing.
R: Yeah. And then it kind of just became my whole life, essentially. Me coming to Atlanta was an experiment, because I’m not usually a sedentary person. I told myself, aight I’m gonna stay here for one year. No matter what calls me, I’m gonna try to stay here and see if I can do it, see who I can be if I don’t just keep following the wind all the time. And after a year, I couldn’t imagine leaving. It’s been two and a half years now.
I don’t know if I would’ve stayed if it wasn’t for the movement. I don’t know what else I would be doing here. The people are great, but Atlanta’s going to shit. Right when I moved here, I heard about how this or that community space had just closed down—DIY spaces, cool music venues, the cool co-op workshop space. All these cool spots had gone out of business or gotten evicted. I was like, damn I missed all the cool shit! I got here and there was almost nothing going on, and I didn’t know how to meet people if there weren’t places to meet.
And now, I’m constantly meeting new people because of the movement. It’s awesome meeting people like you who come from other places, that’s so great. I feel lucky, like I’m traveling through other people. I’ve never had any elders in my life until this movement started. Now I have some older women who I go foraging with sometimes, and I’m learning a lot of skills from them, and I go to them for advice. I also otherwise never get to be around kids. Through being involved in this movement, I’ve been the closest that I could’ve ever imagined myself being a part of a utopic community—or, not utopic, but this more ideal community that is intergenerational and diverse. People coming together from lots of different backgrounds. I’ve never experienced that. During the Uprising, it was mostly young folks out in the streets. This is next level for me. It’s always felt so wrong to me: why do I not have any elders? And now, in the context of this movement, I feel like a lot of young people who became experienced in the Uprising are mentors for the older people who have never experienced a real way to exert agency over the state. This is my favorite part.
Q: Your entry point was foraging and relationships with plants and the forest. This anti-police/social movement does not just intersect with the forest movement, they’re inextricable/enmeshed. It makes me wonder about you making a lot of relationships with people in this movement through your earned connection with the forest. I wonder if you feel like you have any sense of…your community building with human people, friends and family and connections in the human community here has been because of/facilitated by the not-human.
R: That’s where I feel safe. I feel socially anxious, especially when it comes to trying to organize with other people. I feel so inexperienced, I don’t know what to do. That’s my own imposter syndrome. But when I’m doing things in nature with plants, I feel at ease. Like in Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg writes something along the lines of, “Nature held me and found no fault with me.” The forest accepts me. I can feel safe there. And when I’m talking about plants, this can carve a path for political discussions. It’s always a good starting point for me. I wouldn’t have the community that I do now if it wasn’t for the plants finding me first, or me finding them first. That’s definitely true.
When I’m walking with a new comrade in the forest, and we’re getting to know each other and maybe feeling shy, I’ll say, “Hey do you know what this plant is?” It’s one of the most satisfying things, to show a new plant to someone who wouldn’t have otherwise looked at it or thought about it. Not all of us are going to be plant people, but to see people being like, “Woah, you can eat that?” Or, “Damn, that does smell good! I wouldn’t have known!”
Q: Yeah and of course many people come into the forest initially to stop Cop City, or for the music/festival aspect, but have inadvertently spent so much time in the movement actually learning a lot about relating with the planet through being present in the forest.
R: The way I think about it a lot is, the forest is our commons. We don’t have commons anymore! We’re having less and less commons where we can just be. Learning a little bit about food sovereignty, and the history of the enclosure of the commons in the 1800s, and how that kicked off our whole dependence on these manufactured food systems… You can farm, which is intensive and kind of rough on the earth. If you’re trying to feed so many people, it’s never going to be very holistic, not on such a large scale. I find it more fulfilling, attainable, and acceptable to get just at least a degree more autonomous in my access to food through foraging.
Seeing everything that’s happened through the course of the whole movement, all the workshops, all the meetings and camping and shows, everyone agrees: we need the commons. I don’t know what we would do without it.
Q: Did you ever live in the forest?
R: Not really because I’ve always rented housing in Atlanta, but I definitely stayed overnight in the forest. In the beginning, multiple times a week, I was there and really connecting with a lot of folks that way. When the first eviction/raid happened a lot of the forest defenders came to my house. After that I realized that this is a role I can play: I know how to connect people with resources. I have a really easy time navigating the material world and meeting own my needs. That’s where I feel I can really help.
This movement is possible, obviously, through a lot of local effort. It’s also been made possible through a lot of effort from people who’ve come here because they’re so moved by it that they come all the way from wherever, and we need to support them. Sometimes, paranoia prevents people from providing that support to others. Also, it’s takes a lot of capacity to support the movement in this way. Recently many locals are feeling burnt out from providing their homes as resources, such as laundry and showers, but for me it’s something that makes the house such a magical place. I was always so grateful for having that home because I could share it with other people.
Q: And right now the movement is in this critical moment, where people have been through a lot of shit at this point and are burnt out and need space; but also, people have been evicted from the forest and need extra resources and need extra space to sleep and be. It seems like a high-intensity time.
R: Definitely. It’s hard because we’re in a city. If people want to be involved in the campaign, they need somewhere to be. We need to find more places for people to be. At least now, when the forest is not accessible as a home.
The other day, when they closed the park and put signs and barricades up, and installed cameras and surrounded the park—I woke up in a fright. I woke up with a gasp of breath, “What’s going on what’s happening?!” That morning, I just felt like something was happening.
“Today I felt similarly anxious before I knew they were cutting down the trees. I could sense that something was happening there. It’s like how sometimes you can feel a person, you just have a feeling about them and so you call them and it turns out something’s going wrong. I feel like I have that kind of certain relationship with the forest. Probably a lot of us do.”
Today I felt similarly anxious before I knew they were cutting down the trees. I could sense that something was happening there. It’s like how sometimes you can feel a person, you just have a feeling about them and so you call them and it turns out something’s going wrong. I feel like I have that kind of certain relationship with the forest. Probably a lot of us do.
It’s so hard. They’re tearing down trees. Those are my friends.
Q: Of course, and especially after you’ve been working so hard for so long trying to protect your friends from getting cut down. That’s been your life for over two years. I’m sorry.
R: Yeah. I mean, I’ve gained some new friends from it too. Ryan Millsap just needs to touch some grass! If he went on a foraging tour, I wonder what he would think.
The last house I lived in in Atlanta was this very old house that was falling apart. It was really affordable rent, in east Atlanta. It was a dingy old house, the windows couldn’t even open, but I chose to live there because the back yard had this giant, giant fig tree. All summer I was eating figs, it was an amazing blessing. And a mulberry tree too, and honeysuckle. I would forage from my yard all the time.
I drove by there the other day, just to see it again. They had remodeled the whole house, it was totally flipped. New windows, new paint, new porch—and then I drove around the back, and my heart fell when I realized, they tore down the fig tree. They razed the yard completely. All the edible things I used to pick and love, they completely scraped it down to the clay. That’s what they do when they renovate a place, “clean slate”. I feel like they must not have known that was a fig tree, because they planted little saplings of new fruit trees. It’s like, “Oh look! We planted new fruit trees just for you and your new home!” Or, if they knew it was a fig tree—I dunno. They must not have known, because that’s gotta be good for your property value? They’re just so disconnected from who this plant is, who this tree is, and what the tree has to offer.
Q: There’s not really any room in the timeframe of the market for plants to get to live on their own terms, to be alive for the sake of living. They need to make the house look like it’s been newly made in order to keep up with the pace of the market.
R: Right, to disguise its history. But it’s actually a historic Atlanta home, and the tree had been growing there for a long, long time.
Q: Yeah, I do wonder what would happen if Ryan Millsap would just touch some grass…
R: It reminds me of—when the police terrorize people, they are blocking out any thoughts about how those are people with lives, with kids and parents. Whatever helps them execute their job better. And I think it’s the same with people who operate the machinery to tear down the trees, they don’t realize that the trees are beings with history, who have been there and seen so many things. The trees have seen so much history, and have seen so many different people walk this land, and serve a role in the ecosystem and in the world. These people are disconnected to that, or they suppress any thoughts about that that comes up, because it would interfere with their work, or morality.
Capitalism relies on people being disconnected from each other and from nature. It all started when land was stolen.
Q: That reminds me that I wanted to ask, have you been around for any of the activities with the Mvskoke delegation here?
R: Yeah. I helped to plan the Stomp Dance with the Mvskoke people who came from Oklahoma. The Stomp Dance was really beautiful. It was the first time I saw so many people in the forest. It brought like 500 people—with lots of kids, lots of parents, and older people too. I think it caused a lot of organizers to create more family-friendly events in the forest, because it was just so beautiful to see so many families in there.
Q: Yeah, and thinking about the time cycles: generations, the idea of returning to land, it seems like that necessitates intergenerational witnessing.
R: That reminds me, something that Mekko Choban said when he was talking around the fire in the parking lot after the Stomp Dance, that some of the Mvskoke people there that day spoke in their native language. He talked about how it’s been so long since the trees heard that original language. They came here so the trees could hear them talk in their mother tongue again. He said that their ancestors are among these trees, especially some of these trees are really old. Did you see the Mother Tree? That’s like 300 years old. That tree must’ve had relationships with them.
Q: It was just a little acorn.
R: When I was in Palestine this summer, I went to a site the day after settlers in West Bank came and cut down some really ancient olive trees. It happens all the time—but the trunks where like this big, I’ve never actually ever seen such big olive trees. This is because I was born in Jerusalem, and I would go back to visit Israel every summer as a kid. And I feel/sense that the olive tree has something to do with my background, the part of me that’s not American that’s always kind of calling to me, especially when I was growing up and taught to see Israel as my home.
Then, I went to Palestine and saw those ancient trees! And they don’t have trees that old in Israel because it’s a western country. Probably there had been lots of ancient olive trees, but to make space for all the settlers, they probably razed so many ancient trees, and planted new ones strategically and culturally. So all the olive trees I’d seen were smaller, I thought that’s what olive trees lived to be: a shrubby, small, slender tree.
And then I saw the olive trees in the West Bank where there’s an indigenous culture living there, living more traditionally and in connection with the land. And to see the settlers, that they had just cut those ancient olive trees! They claim to love this land, and they destroyed it. And it’s very strategic of them. This is very pointed and very clever. It’s a good try, to sever people’s connection with the earth as a tactic to try to break their will. In order to break their relationship with the land, so that they have less will to defend it, and to cause people to try to give up.
Q: Which is probably not dissimilar to them cutting trees in Weelaunee Forest today?
R: Yeah. And the same thing when Ryan Millsap had a tantrum and came into the park and tore down random patches of trees. It makes like no sense at all, just to be like, “I can do whatever I want! Fuck you protestors!” Just to try to break our will. There’s no other reason to do that. I don’t think he even has any actual site plans that correlate with this deforestation. It’s insane tactics. It’s using the earth to hurt one another. To instill politics on one another and dominate one another. It’s fucking annoying. The trees didn’t do anything. But they get used as as tool.
Q: I’ve heard inklings about the connections between this struggle and the Palestinian struggle. The IDF training the Atlanta police…
R: Yeah, another grotesque similarity is the mock city thing. You know that “Riotsville, USA” video that’s been watched everywhere? A lot of people say they wouldn’t have seen that movie if it weren’t for this movement. It’s really interesting, it tells the story of kind of a precedent to Copy City, because it’s a mock city and they’re trying to hire Black actors to pretend that they’re protesting, and they have the cops trained there. But also, the IDF has mock-Arab villages that they build in their army bases, so that soldiers can run around in a setting that will be similar to where they’re going to be because the Palestinian architecture is different, the ways they plan their cities is different. And so the IDF built one in their bases. And that’s the thought I had when I heard about Cop City, I was like damn—I see that rhythm…
“An invading force comes in, and the first thing they do is destroy water containers. Then you’ll need a whole new container that will need to get filled somehow, people don’t have connections to potable water out there in Palestine, the same way the people in the forest don’t.“
During the early police raids on the forest, they weren’t really going for arrests back then. They were going for infrastructure. And that meant obviously slashing tents and tarps, but also flipping over and destroying the water containers. Attacking the things that people need in order to live out there, infrastructure for people’s basic needs. That is something I saw a lot this summer when I was in Palestine, too. An invading force comes in, and the first thing they do is destroy water containers. Then you’ll need a whole new container that will need to get filled somehow, people don’t have connections to potable water out there in Palestine, the same way the people in the forest don’t. There’s no plumbing or anything, so it’s a lot of work to get water.
There’s also the huge Jewish aspect of this movement. That’s been awesome! All of the Jewish forest defenders, we’re exiled from our Jewish community because they’re all liberal Zionists at best. The synagogues all around Atlanta that we grew up in, we don’t find ourselves belonging to them. And so to find each other belonging in the forest, we’re making the forest our place of worship. What brought us together as a radical Jewish community in the first place is the anti-Zionism. And then, the forest gives an outlet to practice Judaism that’s not related to Zionist institutions.
I tried to find the radical Left in Israel. I wanted to know, where is the radical Left with Jewish Israelis? If I had grown up there, what would I end up doing? What are people like me doing there? From afar, it’s hard to imagine that there’s any sort of Left there. I knew it existed, but the Left that I found was really small, and really burnt out. And, I just thought a lot about the strategy they had, compared with the strategy that this movement has. It was really interesting to those activists in Israel to hear about Atlanta’s pressure campaigns and direct actions.
There are radical Jews living in villages in the West Bank, and have such a level of trust with local people who otherwise don’t have any trust for any Jewish person out there. They’ve managed to create these networks of mutual aid and solidarity across the region. They are an emergency response team. If soldiers or settlers are harassing Palestinian people, or if villages are getting breached by settlers, or whatever’s happening—it’s multiple events per day. So people in this mutual aid/solidarity network can hop in the car and go there. This confuses the soldiers and settlers, because they’re like, “Wait, you’re one of us, but you’re on their side, and I don’t know what to do! You’re in our way but I can’t hurt you because you’re a Jewish person!” It diffuses the situation, which I think is cool. But, they’re very much in a cycle of reaction. And so I was comparing that a lot with my experience here, and how I feel like this movement has always been on the offense, and that has felt so powerful. We always feel like we’re winning, because our enemies are always responding to us, instead of the other way around. House demolition in the West Bank happens every day, and it’s not soldiers who come on the bulldozers and demolish the houses! It’s workers: people and companies who have names, with CEOs and addresses. And so I’m saying this to people there, and just—I don’t know. The Left in Israel is really disconnected from global anarchist dialogue, theory, or writings. And so they might not have access to some strategy and analysis of what happened in different radical movements throughout history in different parts of the world. It felt meaningful to come from Atlanta into their world, and to have conversations about what I see here. One of the things that is definitely lacking over there is that they weren’t really writing or printing things, there was no printed materials or zines—that’s been a huge part of this movement here in Atlanta. Coming from here, I saw a lot of lack, and lots of ways to improve what people are doing over there. It would be cool if we were more in dialogue, especially because we reference Palestine a lot in this movement. Maybe that’s something to do: create networks, channels of communication between people doing work over there and people doing work over here. It’s complex.
Q: I wish I had the background right now to ask more pointed questions about the Palestine connection. It’s very potent, and definitely part of the ideas that formed this interview project: Being able to create more dialogue and share more ideas. We’re hoping to share the feelings that really help us to understand what is at stake in the struggle. And at the end of the day, we’re all on the same planet, and the stakes are getting higher every day. Every day there’s trees olive trees cut down in Palestine, and the world is burning and there’s less and less water.
There’s so many threads of this conversation that we could go on and we’re both very tired. To try to leave it on an exciting note, I wonder if we can circle back to the forest. Going back to the point about how plants inform our politics, a lot of that has also been through foraging for me as well. Certainly about food autonomy, and trying to stay tethered to cultural memory about food systems and how to subsist. But also, importantly my history with foraging has been a lot about medicine. I’ve noticed there’s a lot of herbalism that goes on here which is wonderful. But the other thing that is striking to me about this movement is the entanglement between direct action militancy and psychedelic realism. Psychedelic plant medicine deeply informed my own politics, and came before theory for me; I had some political understandings as a young person, but it wasn’t until I was introduced to a certain way of relating, a certain way of getting right with myself through the medicine that I was able to understand what to do with my life in this world.
The rave culture that has persisted in the forest movement has been interesting to me for this very reason, but now I’m especially interested knowing that Psilocybe ovoideocystidiata grow in the forest. Something about the medicine being in-place.
As a movement that has welcomed this way of being and relating in the forest, I can imagine that there has been a dynamic—maybe a friction, or no?—between different forms of activity and activism. Is that a dynamic you noticed, has it been easy to navigate, how do you perceive of this dynamic informing the movement?
R: It’s definitely informed the movement! The rave culture has created containers that are safe to trip in, and to be drunk in. It’s an actively militarized zone! And yet, when there are parties, people feel safe enough to do drugs because we’re around each other. At the same time, there are times when I’m like <uuuhh>, I’m at this party and if anything bad happens we’re gonna be on drugs. Probably people were on drugs at the March 5 music festival when it got raided. So. That is a scary thought, if I was on drugs—I just don’t know how I would end up after that. I’m not really the one to theorize about this, there’s a little half-sheet that someone wrote up about how “this is not a music festival”. We’re defending our ability to be joyful together in nature. It’s not just a music festival. We need to experience all the potentials of sharing responsibility for this space, and what it can bring to us if we defend it. That’s been really important.
When there’s music, that’s when the people in the forest are the most in numbers and the most diverse. In a moment like an action camp, if there’s music, people from the city come, teenagers, kids and college students all come. Music is what brings people. Music is an entry-point to radical politics, and so it’s needed. It had to be this way. I don’t know what this movement would look like without that.
At the same time, I’ve heard of several instances when friends got really paranoid because they decided to take drugs in the forest, and I’m at the point where I can’t be under the influence of anything there. Last time I was high in there I was really paranoid, hearing voices and cops. So maybe we’re past that point where it’s safe to be high in the forest, for now…
Q: Yeah because they closed the park, and it’s not inhabited by human friends. If I was high, I would be so turned around right now without the camps as landmarks and without friends around. That has its own eerie presence.
And also, high people in the forest probably are hearing cops, just considering the proximity to their shooting range, and the helicopters alone!
R: Yeah, that’s eerie even when you’re not on drugs.
I don’t know what it is, but, walking alone in the forest at night, feeling a presence, not the cops but the forest. There’s been so much dark history there. Sometimes I’ve felt something in there, like “It’s time to turn around and walk the other way!”.
I did trip on mushrooms once by the creek and it was glorious. But that was back in the day. It was pretty calm them.
Q: Were they mushrooms you foraged in the forest?
R: No. I’ve only figured out that those grow there in the last few weeks. I collected a bunch in a little cup, I was carrying them around the music festival and was like “Look! I found magic mushrooms!” And then, all of a sudden, we were getting raided by cops. And I was running, looking for my friends, and I was like <aaahh> I don’t know what to do, I need to get out of here! And I had this cup of mushrooms in my hands, and I’m seeing cops tasing someone and tackling someone, and I’m looking at my cup of mushrooms and was like—oh no I can’t get caught with these. So I dumped them.
It was a funny story to tell people after. I did go back and find them. I haven’t tripped on them yet. I kind of wanted to at the music festival. I’m really glad I didn’t.
I’m excited to, though! I feel like I’m gonna be high on Weelaunee! I’ve never took magic mushrooms that I foraged myself. I have friends who went to places in Mexico or Colombia to eat the mushrooms there, but to find them in the place that you’ve had such a connection to for two years, and have seen throughout the seasons, for two full years, and watched it…
Q: I believe that when you found those mushrooms, that is the forest presenting itself to you. Being like, we’re together. We’re in this. Like a pact. And offering you medicine for everything that has happened and has yet to come. That’s really beautiful to me. I’m really glad you found them.
R: I’ll let you know how it goes.
Q: Oh hell yeah. That’s a really special thing.
R: Right before this, we were just talking about how we all haven’t done psychedelics in a long time, because you need to feel calm and in a safe place to do that. And it’s just crazy here every day.
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