Voices from Weelaunee: Conversations from the Struggle to Defend the Atlanta Forest and Stop Cop City

Q: To circle back to the domestic terrorism charges, do any of you feel equipped to give a larger political context for rhetoric on domestic terrorism in the US? And also, the end of liberal democracy in Atlanta?

SCHEHERAZADE: Terrorism has a specific place symbolically in US politics because of 9/11, but also legally it covers a larger range of things compared to many other countries. After 9/11, there was the Patriot Act, and a law called the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act). Basically both of these laws strongly reduced the amount of freedom and privacy of people within the legal territory of the United States. It sharply reduced those rights, and sharply expanded the budget for “counter-terrorism,” which is a dystopian phrase that the State Department developed. They use anti-terrorism in other countries, but in the US they say counter-terrorism. Which means, they’re doing terrorism, according to their framework.

Terrorism, politically and legally in the US, is the destruction of vital infrastructure of the country, which normally referred to things like hydroelectric dams, water treatment facilities, power grids — things that possibly millions or tens or hundreds of millions of people rely on for their biological existence, or for social reproduction in general. It would not refer to things such as government buildings, corporate property, things like that. That is, in the past. But over the years, the interpretation of terrorism has continued to broaden more and more and more.

Essentially, the framework for terrorism politically is no longer strictly attached to Wahhabism/al-Qaeda-inspired jihadis, and is increasingly targeted against the extreme Right. Actually, the majority of people who are targeted for domestic terrorism in the United States are people in the extreme Right: neo-Nazis, anti-abortion fanatics, etc. And that’s for doing things like shooting electrical substations, attempting to poison people with ricin, or these kinds of deranged things. And to tie this back to the 1996 Olympics: the 1996 Olympic games in Atlanta were actually bombed by Eric Robert Rudolph, who was an anti-abortion extremist. Just as an aside.

But after the Charleston massacre — the shooting at the Black church by Dylann Roof, who was directly inspired by many white supremacist shootings around the world — Georgia passed a law called HB452, which is the Georgia domestic terrorism law. The Dylann Roof shooting was in 2015. And the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida was in 2016. House Bill 452 is the Georgia domestic terrorism law which was adopted partially because the old Georgia domestic terrorism law had a quota for deaths. And so, if ten people had not died, it would not be terrorism. The new law was kind of embraced by the institutional Left and the Right as well, but especially the institutional Left, as a way to say, wow that’s crazy, we shouldn’t have this quota. That it should simply be a certain kind of action — to actually remove consequences from the consideration, and recenter motivation and tactics. So it makes a highly technical definition, which really hones in on this vital infrastructure component, and government facilities. So it broadens it a little bit. But no one had been charged under HB452 until now.

Which is why I think Sherry Boston, the district attorney for Dekalb County, is actually just a social climber who is making career moves, and does not intend to convict a single person on this, but intends to overturn HB452 in the Supreme Court of the United States. The Supreme Court could be interested in that because it’s currently controlled by the Right, and the Right is interested in overturning domestic terrorism laws because of January 6th, when there was the kind-of riot at the US capital, resulting in the death of Ashli Babbitt and four others as Q-Anon protestors attempted a kind of fake, symbolic coup d’etat in order to defend the presidency of former US President Donald Trump.

The FBI is not overseeing this, because they’re currently targeting the far-right as their bogeyman for who does terrorism. But the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which is controlled by Republicans, are trying to target “antifa” — or however it is they conceive of the movement. It feels partially like there’s an interdepartmental feud about the definition of domestic terrorism. All of this is designed to go up to the Supreme Court. That’s conjecture, though, that last part.

Q: We’re short on time, but I have a last question. Can y’all talk about the role of music and raves in the forest and in this movement? Both politically and also experientially?

MYRA: Was the first rave in the woods on the creek?

RAPHAEL: Yes.

SCHEHERAZADE: Wow. What an incredible experience. 500 people.

MYRA: Yeah. It was amazing. We had a rave on the creek. There’s this one part where the embankment is kind of big, and it’s sandy, and when the water level is down there’s this smaller crossing — the shoreline is always changing — there was a little bridge across, so there was a fire on one side, and then the dance party was just in the creek, on this sandy bank. It felt like we were at a beach.

RAPHAEL: If it rains, there’s water there. We were in the creek bed.

MYRA: Yeah, it’s a shallow part that becomes a beach, when it’s not raining. It was the first Week of Action, I think fifty people were camping in the woods. And there was a forty-five minute hike through the woods from the encampment, a really nice hike, to get to the rave.

RAPHAEL: There were lights to guide you, and you could hear the .

MYRA: Yeah. And this was a time when there was no repression.

SCHEHERAZADE: There was no repression.

MYRA: Nothing had happened yet.

SCHEHERAZADE: This is before the Left had joined the movement.

MYRA: And so the idea at that point was: people need to come to the woods.

SCHEHERAZADE: No one had even been here.

MYRA: No one had been here. If anyone’s going to care, people need to have a stake in the woods, they need to come here and they need to experience it, to feel and hear it. And camping was part of that. And obviously a lot more people came to the rave. And one of the things that I noticed from the second Week of Action, and the second rave, was that there were ravers who brought tents. Some people were camped intentionally, but the ravers who came just set up their tents off-trail. People wanted to camp.

RAPHAEL: Also, the first Week of Action was during the roaring June days, the lowest COVID has ever been.

MYRA: Oh right, yeah! People were so excited.

RAPHAEL: A month prior, there was a one-band show indoors at a venue that was about to be demolished. It was one band, and less than a hundred people went. Then we had the first proper show in Atlanta in a long time, there were four bands. There were 300 people in a space that could could comfortably fit eighty. And eventually the police came, not because of the movement, probably because of a noise complaint.

MYRA: And why don’t we know? Why don’t we know why the cops came? Because they left!

RAPHAEL: Oh right! Half of the crowd stayed inside and moshed, and the other half ran outside and just gave pure grief. Not just like “fuck twelve” but also targeted, mean things to say, about their lack of hair, etc. And also just throwing rocks and bottles at them. And they quickly left.

MYRA: I think it was the rocks.

S: And hundreds of punks.

MYRA: And they only had one or two cop cars.

RAPHAEL: Since then, music has continued to be a vital part of it. As I said, the base of support for the movement is DIY music subculture. And for context, that’s not just punk and hardcore, that’s also hip-hop, it’s also various genres of electronic music, house, indie rock, jungle, noise… And there’s shows all over the country that are fundraiser shows for the movement. And there are shows here all the time, of all these genres, some taking place in the woods, some taking place elsewhere. There were two big apexes. During the fourth Week of Action, there was a three-day music festival in the forest, probably 1,000 people attended over the three days. During the most recent Week of Action, there was a two-day music festival that the cops ultimately interrupted with their raid, but probably 1,200 to 1,500 people attended. It was in the far west corner of the RC field, which is an open area with not a lot of trees, but it was nestled into a little peninsula of the treeline. That’s where the South River Music Festival was. The most popular artists, by Spotify metrics, had a little over 2 million monthly listeners. And others had dozens. It was great.

MYRA: I can’t remember if it was the second or third Week of Action, but the music was really great, there was a multi-genre show. And afterwards people just starting setting up and doing shows. I heard it referred to multiple times as the last remaining DIY venue. It was in the forest. This patch of woods became known as the Living Room.

BUD: I think for a lot of anarchists, they consciously or maybe subconsciously separate their political and social lives. We have made an extensive effort to not do that. There was a really intentional effort to go outside of thinking about just purely identity politics, but also all of the different subcultures that we want to be a part of this movement, that we want to encourage people to be a part of it. It even goes beyond different music subcultures, it goes to different factions of people. There was a big intention toward that, but also people are genuinely part of these subcultures to begin with. So it wasn’t forced. And it never felt forced, it felt really natural and beautiful because of that.

SCHEHERAZADE: We also need new ideas, and we get them from music. I think a lot of the struggles of the past ten years have expressed a shared intelligence globally: that large sections of unorganized humanity can spontaneously flood city centers, plazas, shopping districts, over a single grievance, and that a single thrust of mobilization, a mass encampment, could topple a regime or a political order, and create new social forms capable of contesting other indignities. That’s basically the idea that humanity has cycled through, a lot of times in lots of countries, beginning with Tunisia and Egypt and then going to a lot of other places too. There’s other ideas that reacted to that idea, including smaller, less ambitious territorial ideas, or site-based initiatives, that give up the idea of regime change and replace it with these other segmentary ideas that make a lot of other things possible. All these ideas have expressed themselves in a lot of different ways. And I really believe that we need new ideas. Because those ideas didn’t work. Or, they worked, but then they produced civil wars that people couldn’t end, or new forms of dictatorship, or they didn’t even lead to substantial reforms — let alone the transformation of daily lived experiences.

People need to find new ideas. You can’t find new ideas just in the realm of thinking based on reflection and idea-making. Politics can’t help you produce new political ideas. So, music, we’re really connected to musical things. And people need to be able to come up with ideas, and they’re going to have to reach outside of politics for that, somehow, in earnest. Not as a cynical appropriation, of medieval theater or whatever. And so I think the movement is really offering a lot to us, because of the experiences we’re having with each other and because people are giving us these musical experiences as well.

PART TWO

Q: This is your conversation; we can talk about whatever you want. But we’re hoping to hear about life in the forest, and about what brought you here to Atlanta and to participation in this struggle. To start with, can you each talk about the political or cultural reference points that led you to end up here? From your own life experience, historical context, subcultures…

BUSHEL: My first personal reference point was Occupy. But I actually largely missed that and was out of the country during that time. Afterwards, over the next several years I was involved in probably five different pipeline struggles, as well as protests around Ferguson. And then Standing Rock was a very important reference point for me, and definitely informed how I think about land defense and things in the forest here. In terms of reference points outside my own experience, I’ve also been really influenced by land-based peasant and Indigenous-led struggles in Central and South America. Like the uprisings in Bolivia over the last couple decades, and MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, Landless Workers’ Movement) in Brazil, and things like that. I have balanced the oppositional stuff that I do with working on farming and land-based stuff, so those things are intertwined for me. And that plays out in my analysis of the forest. The last thing I’ll say that’s been a big part of my development has been migrant solidarity struggles on both sides of the border — solidarity work with the migrant caravans showing up in Tijuana and other places.

I guess I’ll also say that the most important reference point feels like the [George Floyd] Uprising, obviously. Very much what’s happening in Atlanta feels like a continuation of the Uprising. Atlanta, in addition to Minneapolis and a couple other places, are the places where the Uprising has really stayed alive and the torches remain lit.

שְׁכִינָה: There are these reference points like Standing Rock, or like the ZAD. It’s really dangerous to make those reference points, because they’re just different enough that you can’t necessarily understand this struggle based on that. And people import these ideological conflicts that really don’t fly here because they’re from a different situation. But it feels like there are a lot of examples, observations you could make about how things went down in 2020 and how things played out, that are directly applicable here, like social dynamics and strategy. You know what I mean?

612: I guess I’ll say something about my trajectory and how I got here. I wasn’t always interested in politics growing up, I was pretty apolitical. It just wasn’t on my radar. When Occupy happened, I went to some protests in Baltimore. Those were some of the first protests I ever went to. Then I started getting more interested in politics and the world around me, and started reading anarchist theory at some point, and started to really identify with what I was reading in that literature. It was putting words and terms to feelings and ways that I’ve always been. And then at the time of Occupy ICE, in the city that I was living in, there was a two-month protest camp. That was the first time I had ever seen a protest camp. I think that was 2018? I spent a little bit of time there — I didn’t camp, but I did visit there often. And then the Uprising happened, and during that time I had met someone that I started dating for a while, and they were an old-school Northwest tree sitter and lifelong activist. They were at Ferguson, Standing Rock and all these places. And I heard their stories, they told me everything they did with their life, and it just sounded so interesting. I had never done any forest defense before I came out here, but I have spent a lot of time in forests and in nature. And this struggle here in Atlanta seemed really interesting because it’s the intersection between anti-police struggle and forest defense. This intersection between the two is kind of unique, I feel. I don’t know if we’ve really seen anything like this before. So I came out here when I could, which was the end of last year. I spent three weeks here and fell in love with the people I met here, and the forest.

Part of my background is also in antifascist organizing and counter-protesting in the Northwest. Soon after Trump took office, these groups started popping up, like Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer, and the white supremacists started feeling more emboldened to come out. And so that was kind of my start to on-the-ground activist stuff.

Q: As people from the Northwest, I’ll just say that it’s really nice to be here and to feel like no one is concerned about fascists. I mean there’s police fascists. But there’s a baseline level of paranoia around armed militias in the Northwest, that has been so heightened. It’s funny to see that — because there’s so much state repression here — but people are so chill and less paranoid than most people most of the time in the Northwest, where there’s much less active repression, but there’s these extra-state actors.

612: Totally. Yeah I feel like if the same struggle was happening somewhere in the Northwest, it would be much more at risk of a three-way fight, where we’d be seeing IEDs in the forest placed by militia-types and chuds, and drive-by paint balling or whatever, maybe worse.

BUSHEL: My understanding just from Atlanta is that the white supremacist right wing is pretty scared to come here, because of how powerful Black power is in Atlanta. There are a few exceptions to that. Like in 2020, white supremacists attacked the Wendy’s, which was a center during the Uprising. But, that seemed to be at a dramatically lower scale than in other places. I would want to hear more from people who were actually around, but I think it might also have to do with the last time the right wing tried to have a big mobilization at Stone Mountain, which was very successfully shut down.

שְׁכִינָה: It’s so nice hearing these stories about where everyone is coming from.

🐞: I found out about Stop Cop City through my radical reading group. We had just read The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, and we were pretty stoked about alternative ways of living described in it and some of the ideas of what’s possible that came out from reading that as a group. Then a friend of mine asked if I wanted to go to a rave in Atlanta, and I was like, cool that sounds sick. I had never done any forest defense before that. Just some Black Lives Matter protests. And then we went to the festival really not having very much context, and it was so crazy! A friend of mine who came with me, we both shared the experience of not really knowing why we needed to go. We had read about Cop City, we knew about the festival, and somehow our bodies were just telling us that we needed to be here, it felt extremely important for us to be here. There was intense anticipation and excitement over something that we just really didn’t know anything about. And then when we got into the forest, we were walking there together, we both had the experience of being like, fuck yeah! Yes! Yes! We’re here! And then meeting people, and seeing how things were going down, and looking at the way people were living, gave us the analytical reasons why. The intellectual explanation of what we somehow knew ahead of time. Very strange.

Q: I had a very similar experience in my body.

🐞: Really?! We have to be here!

BUSHEL: Yeah, I had that same exact experience. I remember having a conversation with Tortuguita within a week of them arriving, and they described the same thing. They knew that this was where they needed to be.

שְׁכִינָה: A couple starting points for me, I was first getting more activated around radical politics during the 2014 Ferguson riots. And also learning about the history of environmental sabotage, shit like the Monkey Wrench Gang and the deep history of that — that it had been going on for a long time, and not just by a tiny militant subculture, but by a decent number of people. That was really eye-opening to me at the time, because it introduced a more direct line of engagement with the world. Obviously, people putting their life on the line in Ferguson raised the stakes of what I felt was possible, like the degree of engagement that I felt responsible for. I was like, if they’re doing this, then it’s important that they’re not the only ones. Also the prison strikes by the Free Alabama Movement, I think it was in 2016 and 2018. I knew how fucked up prisons were for a long time, but it was different having that sort of antagonism present, that drew such a direct line to the brutality of slavery. Not just the brutality of slavery but also the ways at hand to defeat slavery at the time, and are still relevant now. It’s really inspiring to see people taking such clear action with such a clear intervention point. And then Standing Rock was very beautiful. I think I’m a little too attached to Standing Rock. I spent a long time trying to kind of salvage the potential that Standing Rock promised and then didn’t fully deliver.

B: I’ll briefly say, I’ve had a much shorter path, I’m much younger and newer to things. But I got involved doing things in the Mountain Valley Pipeline struggle. The culture around that very much formed how I approach things, and was my direct line to here.

MOTE: I also vibe with that. I feel like my path was mostly through anti-pipeline campaigns, especially one in particular. The people that mentored me were old Earth First! types, and so I understand my place in the movement as being the latest person that’s part of this whole Earth First! thing that goes back several decades, and now sort of questionably even exists at all. That’s how I got into things all the way, and that’s definitely how I ended up here.

Q: This is a good segue into talking about land defense, and specifically the land defense in the forest. I live in the woods, though in a really different way, and I also come from a context that is extremely inspired by land defense. So I have a lot of questions about how Atlanta is doing this, because it’s so different than any of my own reference points. I’ve never seen this before, this urban eco-defense. And for some people in this struggle, it seems like the eco-defense part is a way to talk about police, which of course is really important. We can talk about intersections, but the more I see it the more I can’t even see a crossroads, they just can’t actually be separated. It’s totally enmeshed and the same thing. Which is so beautiful.

From afar, I heard that there was old growth in the Weelaunee Forest. And then I heard that the state narrative is, “No, it’s only invasive species.” And then I heard people here say, “I love our trash forest!” So I just want to ask, on your own terms, about your relationship to the forest, or how your relationship to the forest started and changed over time throughout the movement and through being here.

BUSHEL: I really love our trash forest. I am personally very inspired by understandings of ecology and the anthropocene, and contamination, the word Ana Tsing uses in The Mushroom at the End of the World. The ecosystem of the Weelaunee Forest includes the people who can’t afford the dump fees and the hour-long wait at the dump, and so they come and they dump their trash in the forest. They are part of the forest ecosystem. The forest is full of trash. People have dumped trash there for so long. Intrenchment Creek is full of trash and full of all these contaminants, and it’s full of sewage because the overflow system in Atlanta, whenever more than one-tenth of an inch of rain occurs they just put all the shit into the overflow drains and it goes into places like Intrenchment Creek.

Obviously, we see a vision for the forest in the future when all of those things can hopefully be healed and remediated and addressed. But we want to defend the trash forest. We want to defend the invasive species. I understand that there’s this idea that we only want to protect the old growth, this bureaucratizing of conservation. For the Bayou Bridge Pipeline in Louisiana, when they clearcut everything in a 165-mile line to make this pipeline, some of the environmental liberal NGOs made a deal to save the old growth, and it saved one tree. It saved one cypress tree that was technically decided to be old enough. And the pipeline company wrapped all this colored tape around it to make sure it didn’t get cut down, and they made this big thing about how they were saving the old growth. And it’s entirely possible that that tree is going to be shocked by the total deforestation that occurred to all the other trees around it. And because of all the soil that’s going to get washed away through that process, trees are not going to get newly established there anymore. And so yeah, there’s a few old growth trees in the Weelaunee Forest, but if those are the only ones we’re trying to save…

We actually need every little bit of tree cover and photosynthetic living material — including the kudzu — that we can get, in the city, to sequester carbon and prevent erosion and prevent flooding. And also we need it just to be alive, and to feed us in those other ways. They provide us with the feeling of being able to be part of an ecosystem.

J: I really agree with a lot of that. I had never been to Atlanta before hearing about this movement, and I really vibe with what you were saying earlier about the way that this defense is different, because it’s a scrawny, baby forest. But after living there for a period of time, and seeing that this land has been disturbed really recently, it’s obvious, it shows — there’s the pine stands, everything is young — but it’s so alive. It’s so very alive there, and there’s so much there. There’s salamanders and newts and owls, and opossums, raccoons — and these are just the animals I’ve personally seen and experienced community with. There was a turtle that must have lived nearby because it crossed my tent path every morning, we knew each other. So, young forests are just as important as old forests. We need to let the earth be, it is healing itself. All of these things are working together to heal it. Maybe it’s full of privet and wisteria, but those things are holding the forest down. And if that forest didn’t exist, shit would be so much more flooded. Did you see how flooded the roads are today after three days of rain? It’s already so bad.

Living there and being with all of these creatures in community — during the Week of Action we were there in defense and in celebration of the land. At one point, we were partying, because there was this crazy chaos wedding where people decided they were going to marry the people to the forest. And someone said to me, “This is the first time in hundreds of years that this land has not been a site of pure suffering.” From colonization to slavery to the prison farm. The forest has rested, and has the potential to be a place where people join to celebrate and build community.

Y: Can I jump off of that? Not to get too mushy, but when people are like, oh this is new growth, this is a trash forest, and make the whole argument about old growth, it reminds me a lot of when people say, “Well, anarchism is never going to work because people are so screwed up.” And it’s like, well yeah the forest has been really, really damaged by its history, and people have been really, really damaged by their histories. But anarchism, or belief in this struggle, is not a belief that it’s going to be this utopia or that things are going to be perfect. It’s a belief in orienting ourselves better towards a world where we can heal ourselves. And where the forest can heal itself. We are able to heal ourselves, and it happens a lot faster than you’d think. And I think that we got to see that here. I think that’s so much what you’re talking about, like how quickly it comes back and how there’s an ecology there. And also how much, when people get these tiny little spaces that are, in certain ways, outside of their relationship with capitalism, how much that changes them, and how much they’re willing to fight for that.

Q: Hell yeah. You all are totally making me cry.

J: I spent some time in the woods, sitting and reflecting about the history of domination in this country, and it’s extremely significant that killing the forest is like killing the people. The whole master-slave relationship of man over nature — it’s power incarnate, the way they’re trying to build a police militarization center, here where organically things are growing and healing. So, I feel like it’s so enmeshed for me, that abolition means freeing, rewilding, decolonizing, letting go of the structures of power that have played out here in history.

BUSHEL: That reminds me, another big influence on me in this struggle is lessons of the Black vitalist current, represented by the MOVE family. They weren’t even talking about capitalism and anti-capitalism, but really framing things as a life and anti-life struggle. They were doing that a long time ago, really ahead of the curve on a lot of that stuff. I think that’s been very animating of the struggle here, because it speaks to the truth that it’s not even an intersection of different struggles. It is just true that everywhere that we are trying to stop the destruction of the Earth, it is the police who are there, stopping us from stopping it. And if we are going to succeed and survive, the first thing we have to do is destroy the police.

שְׁכִינָה: At the end of the day that’s my reason for being here. If the police were gone tomorrow, people would just go and stop the machines that are destroying the Earth. In a matter of weeks.

MOTE: We would simply win.

Y: They have so much on their side, but they’re still not that good at stopping us, you know? I mean it’s like, jeez, they have access to so much more money and technology.

שְׁכִינָה: Yeah, if anything, they’ve come across as incompetent throughout the course of this.

BUSHEL: One hundred percent. One of the biggest things I’ve learned in other struggles that I’ve really tried to share with newer folks here, is that ninety-nine percent of the time, our tendency is to overestimate the intelligence of the police and the state. And sure, the one percent of the time that we underestimate them, they fuck us up really bad. But it’s definitely not the norm. And it certainly hasn’t been in this struggle. Their learning curve has been shockingly, stupidly slow. They’re just really reliant on certain types of brute force that they have access to. But a lot of times when they are bringing those things to bear, it is ultimately just strengthening the movement.

שְׁכִינָה: Yeah they’re extremely complacent as an institution. This thing caught them extremely by surprise, in terms of how potent it’s been.

Q: You say they have all the money and technology, and yet we also have all these things they can’t imagine, making meaning and connection together and sharing daily life. They also seem completely captured by their own sense of time. I heard that the forest was declared closed when I arrived here at the end of last week, but they waited to officially close it until the beginning of the work week on the next Monday. The movement is on a different rhythm, there aren’t work weeks and weekends, which I think speaks to these totally incompatible visions of the world.

One of the lovely things being here is witnessing the baseline level of sharing, which makes being able to exist with a certain distance from the economy possible, so you can do other things with your time. Can you talk about the practices, habits and relations that allow you to be here doing this and going so hard?

J: One thing is that in pretty much every communal space, there’s free food, which is really incredible and important. Atlanta is the most food-generous, mutual aid kind of space. People are sharing food everywhere constantly. It’s wonderful.

Bushel: For me, existing in Atlanta is definitely made possible by this sense of a communal way of life, or a commune, that people here have been investing time in prior to this struggle. And so many more people have come into connection with that through this struggle. There’s really good free grocery infrastructure, and that’s complimented by this general sense that any house I go to, I can expect that all the food is open to be shared with anybody who’s there. People who have food stamps or assistance to get food are freely sharing that with everybody. When we had a camp in the forest, a lot of people put in effort to get not just the essentials, but also nice things like chocolate, coffee and candy, by any means necessary, and bring them to share in the camp kitchen for everybody.

שְׁכִינָה: People in the woods have eaten pretty well through the course of this. A lot of people have come to the woods because people just bring them infinite free food, every day. Sometimes it’s even prepared. There’s a huge machine feeding this, and that’s been really essential. To expand on food too, all kinds of domesticity have been vital to me feeling ok when I’ve been in Atlanta, and something I’ve really focused on even when I’ve been living in the woods. I try to make it feel nourishing. Whether that’s keeping everything organized and clean, or making sure people have what they need to take care of their health. It’s the sort of work that can go unnoticed, except when it’s not there and you’re miserable.

J: People who have been raised in a capitalist system have all kinds of baggage around labor, so I wouldn’t say all the labor gets done in a super egalitarian way all the time. But I think that it is usually done in a pretty honest way, which is cool, and a step in the direction of how to be fair. In the woods, there is space to rest. I don’t think it would be possible for people to exist in a communal way without having tension about how work is getting done, especially the domestic work. Everyone here is queer and has different gender baggage going on too, so I think that the way that things go is not always perfect, but I do feel like there has been a decent culture of not forcing labor onto people who don’t want to be doing it, or making people take on amounts of work that are too much, but that they choose to do.

MOTE: For me, part of the answer is disappointingly that it’s kind of difficult to be here. The food situation is extremely figured out thanks to long-term organizing that’s been happening here, and also food stamps. So that solves a problem for me. But otherwise I often find that I spend resources to be here to a certain extent, and it’s kind of difficult. It just is what it is. I think there’s some things that we could do better, and I think there’s some things we do really well. Government benefits in Georgia are garbage. My benefits are better, though out-of-state, so if I want to go to the doctor, I have to drive a thousand miles. That’s the only option, because other places want cash up front. This makes being here difficult. And also, just not having income. Everything just fucking costs money.

BUSHEL: That brings me to something I was thinking earlier. It’s true that me being here is really facilitated by the good food infrastructure, and the level of communal housing. Another thing that allows me to be here is that, during the Uprising, I was physically and financially in a position where it was very difficult to participate. I was living like a thousand miles away from anywhere where anything interesting was happening, and I didn’t have a working vehicle, and I had all these other financial limitations.

So I really oriented myself over the following two years towards trying to be more prepared the next time I wanted to be someplace. I feel lucky that I’ve been able to lay some of that groundwork, and I can be here, and I have the support to do that. One thing that I’ve also noticed is that there’s a certain element of the communal life here that involves not just people sharing food or housing, but also actually collaborating on earning money in different ways. People get in on different hustles together. Selling blood plasma, exploiting weird loopholes in online sports betting to make a thousand dollars, or other things that I don’t need to mention.

One thing that’s really exciting to me, and something that I’ve tried to cultivate, fully apart from the struggle, in my life elsewhere, is this sense of teaming up. Not just for the reproductive labor side of things, but for our interactions with the market — where we’re actually going to get our fucking money, and the ways we can be smarter and more effective by doing that together. That has been cool to see.

Q: Last week, Dekalb County declared the park closed. And today there was a big raid on the forest, and they put up a bunch of barriers to block Weelaunee People’s Park, and they installed flood lights and are presumably preparing a way to start clearing and other operations. There’s been a really interesting rhythm in this movement. It’s been an interesting exchange of blows and counter-blows, that have developed their own rhythm and logic. It feels like an ongoing war, in which both sides have their own pace. Could you talk about the current moment? What’s happening now, what do you think is coming? How do you feel?

BUSHEL: The rhythm really speaks to how I think about this. There are times when they act, and we react. And there’s times when we act, and they react. This moment of closing the park, to me, still feels like them being in reaction from the effectiveness and strength of the Week of Action and the action that happened there, during which their entire construction site was destroyed. Their immediate reaction to that was to arrest twenty-three concert-goers and charge them with domestic terrorism. Looking back on that, and seeing the media response, their additional reaction has been to say, oh, it kind of looks bad when we keep charging people in a public park with domestic terrorism — let’s make it not a park anymore. So it’ll be better next time. And that’s kind of where I see this as coming from.

I also just see it in the broader pattern of the movement. Potentially, this is another misstep or overreach on their part. Every single time that one of the movement adversaries has attempted to take away the public park, it’s been an opportunity for us to actually maintain and increase our control over those spaces. The Weelaunee People’s Park was declared and created after the first attempt by Ryan Millsap and Blackhall Studios to shut down that portion of the park. And then later attempts to shut down the park also led to lots of new support and energy coming into the movement, people from Atlanta coming in to defend their park. And I don’t think that now will be any different. I think that people will rise to the occasion and once again take back the People’s Park, and even more so assert that Intrenchment Creek Park is dead, long live Weelaunee People’s Park.

שְׁכִינָה: It feels like we’re winning right now, to me. And I think it feels that way to a lot of people who I respect. I agree that the police are trying to catch up with what the movement has been doing, and are reacting. I think they’ve overextended themselves by arresting random concert-goers and charging them with domestic terrorism, and like you said earlier they’re complacent, and used to being in a position of absolute power. I don’t think they’ve fully adjusted to their actual position of weakness right now, and they are overextending. It’s just not going to go well for them. They’re just looking worse and worse.

In France, 30,000 people just stormed one of the megabasin sites where industrial forces were privatizing water and redirecting it into some private reservoir. It was stormed and sabotaged, people fought the police. And we’re moving in that direction right now. I think America is becoming more like France specifically, in how unpopular the police are becoming. Not just by militants or people of color, but by everyone. And that’s very beautiful, and gives me hope that the world won’t burn quite as badly as it might otherwise.

MOTE: Two weeks ago, when it was the Week of Action and hundreds and hundreds of people came here, there was a day where a group of people stormed the Cop City construction site and thoroughly destroyed it, and torched the machines, torched the building, all of their shit was just completely fucked. And then afterwards they arrested people at a concert. But it feels to me like the movement is going toe-to-toe with the state, and no punches are being pulled on either side. This is reflected in how the state is charging people with domestic terrorism, and in one case, murdered someone in the forest. I don’t think they can try any harder to repress the movement, besides rounding people up and just killing them. Which seems, for the current moment, implausible. Thankfully. Hopefully. But the fact that they’re charging people with domestic terrorism, for nonsense, like anyone they grabbed it’s just domestic terrorism — to me this means that they’re extremely concerned about the direction things are heading, and have pulled out all the stops in terms of police repression. Whether or not I think they will ultimately succeed in their efforts remains to be seen. I don’t know if we’re going to win, but if we were to win, this is what it would look like beforehand.

Q: One of the constant watch phrases of this struggle is this is not a local struggle, which is really true and really resonates within the US, and people have started to understand that more and more. There’s comrades all around the world who are living out their own specific struggles, but all of us and all these struggles are linked existentially by the existence of the police and the destruction of the Earth. I’m curious what y’all would want people elsewhere in the world to know about here? And also, how you could imagine this struggle being in relation with struggles around the world, and on a longer trajectory?

BUSHEL: I was really inspired at the Weelaunee Food Autonomy Festival that just took place in the forest near the end of the Week of Action. There were a bunch of seeds that were brought from so-called Brazil, from a collective called Teia dos Povos, which is a radical Indigenous struggle to defend their territory. Folks who came to the food autonomy festival had recently traveled there and talked about the movement to defend the forest here in Atlanta. And those folks specifically sent seeds with the understanding that they would be shared with people from all over who had come to the forest at that moment. There were also seeds that were brought from Rojava, and that felt really meaningful. Both of those struggles have been incredibly inspiring for a lot of people here and in the forest. Things like this give people here the courage to do what is necessary, looking to those other struggles that are in even far more intense situations of repression and violence.

MOTE: There’s two things that I want people throughout the world to understand. One, you’re more likely to win if you have more people on your team, in the literal sense, not metaphorical sense. You want to come to the forest and have a music festival? That’s great, because it’s your forest too. You want to canvas the neighborhood? That’s awesome and really important. Whatever your role in the movement is, if you’re against the thing we’re against, go do it. And at the very least, I’m not going to criticize you, at least not publicly. I’ll just let you exist in the same movement ecology.

And two, which I think is at least as important, people don’t want to join something if it looks like it’s losing and they don’t understand it. So I think you should be able to explain your tactics to a regular person on the street. Really early on in this movement, some of the first stuff that happened was that construction machinery was sabotaged and the Atlanta Police Foundation building was smashed up. I think for lots of people, it was possible to understand that as a tactic, like, here are your enemies, and you’re going to where they are and destroying the shit that they need to do the thing that you don’t want them to do. And that makes sense to people. It’s legible, as we like to say. Historically there’s been a lot of other tactics that certainly had their uses, but I think increasingly, stuff like intentional arrests, lockdowns, tree sits, etc. are understandable to some people, but regular folks don’t get that shit. But they do understand like, oh, you’re setting fire to the construction equipment? That makes sense to me, I know how fire operates. You want their machines to be on fire. It seems like you’re doing the thing, it seems like you’re winning. I wanna be a part of it. Throughout the movement, there’s been a very strong chorus saying that we are not defeatists, we are playing to win, and we are going to win. There’s no compromise on that front. And I think people find that inspiring.

שְׁכִינָה: Which takes courage in the context we’re in, with the way that property damage is treated by the courts in America. I’m always really shocked to hear about how it’s different in some places in Europe, where you can burn a bulldozer and get convicted of burning a bulldozer, and be out of prison in a couple of years. It seems kind of ridiculous, but, actually what’s ridiculous is the American context. So that’s just to say, reading between the lines, a lot of people are animated by the specter of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the great violence that was done to the Indigenous societies of Africa at that time. The American empire has it coming to them.

BUSHEL: To speak more to the line this is not a local struggle, I think about it on a couple different planes. In one sense, just the phrase Stop Cop City evokes so much more than this particular project of Cop City in Atlanta. Cop City evokes the feeling of living in a police state. And so in that sense, there’s this easy universality that you spoke to earlier, the way the police operate so similarly all over the world.

But Atlanta, in particular, is really historically situated, going all the way back to slavery and the Civil War. More recently, the role that Atlanta played in the 2020 George Floyd Uprising is really important. After the Uprising, they had a shortfall of police. They couldn’t hire enough police because so many people don’t want to be cops anymore after 2020, and everybody hates the police. And rebellion and hatred of the police is so normalized and still fervent in Atlanta following the Uprising, that the balaclava is regular street fashion, in a way that I don’t see in other places in the United States

So this entire project is specifically the response of the elites in one of the most economically important cities in the South — kind of the capital of the South, that is also the capital of the Black bourgeois — and their reaction to the Uprising was to try to have this glamorous police training facility. It just shows their moment of weakness now, that they’re so out of touch that they thought they could put this thing on this site of their old prison farm, over the bodies of the escaped prisoners who were murdered when they were caught at the prison farm, and buried on the land and have never been recovered. And they think they can build over that and bulldoze all of it, and that people will actually thank them for training the police to be more whatever-the-fuck, you know, tactful, when they’re kicking down people’s doors with automatic weapons.

It doesn’t even need to be explained why the George Floyd Uprising was not just a local occurrence to the United States — and for that reason I say it should also be apparent that what’s going on in Atlanta is at a critical point of weakness for all these systems. We know that the US method of policing is very specifically being exported all over the world, through specific contractors and corporations that bring these trainings and expos and technologies from the laboratories in the US and Israel/Palestine, and export them to Brazil and all these other places, where this new form of policing is taking hold.

S: Something that I see spreading and being refined here is a move away from the logic of complaint and demand to the people in power, trying to pull on their hearts and appeal to their good conscience to make the right decision, and actually looking at, ok what is propping up this project, what are the critical nodes that make it possible? How do we economically and logistically isolate them? So that, if anyone is stupid enough to work on this project, all of their other operations become impossible. There have been moves to replicate that in struggles in Philadelphia, in Nevada, and probably elsewhere. It feels important.

שְׁכִינָה: There’s a lot of specifics about tactics that are relevant. Not just why this is important, because the police. America is tied into the police state elsewhere for all these specific reasons. But also there’s lessons learned through trial and error here that are applicable elsewhere. One thing that feels really present is that people involved with this are interested in escaping some of the traps of leftist or right-wing politics, and are really cognizant of that. And that’s been part of it — talk about having a lot of people on our team, and that being a main thing, rather than being leftist. It’s important to not be too trapped in all that.

Q: That’s very interesting. We talked with other comrades last night about escaping the trappings of the Left in this movement. From a distance, it seems like this movement is doing that so well. That must be a conscious effort, though I imagine it’s also specifically cultural.

BUSHEL: It’s also the space created by the 2020 Uprising and realigning anti-police sentiment beyond Right and Left. I hear stories from local friends in Atlanta who are part of the movement who work in construction or things like that, and all their coworkers are kinda-right-wing-leaning white guys, and they all are like, Cop City is fucked up and shouldn’t be built. They think it will be built and they think it’s probably pointless to oppose it, but they don’t support it.

Q: From a distance, this is one of the many things that has been inspiring about watching this struggle over the last couple of years. It’s just so evident that the movement here is operating from the realm of power, focused on what is possible and on winning and generating strength, rather than operating from the realm of having the right ideas and opinions and demonstrating them to the world. That’s actually very rare. That is getting outside of leftism in a way that is very hard to do — or just outside of American politics. Obviously it’s successful because people are attracted to something that is strong and winning, as you’re saying. People are attracted to things that work, more than they’re attracted to ideas. It’s beautiful to see.

שְׁכִינָה: To be appropriately humble, I think shedding the unproductive parts of leftism is an ongoing project.

MOTE: This is something that really drew me here, initially, when I first visited Atlanta quite a while ago, that it seems like the movement here has a vitality that is lacking in other parts of the Left, including the anarchist Left. People are very clearly experimenting and playing with new forms of opposition and struggle, as opposed to merely repeating the past ways of doing things. And naturally, we’re learning that some of the things we’ve done didn’t work out so well. And other things are working out really well. What gets me is the fact that it doesn’t feel dead. It’s not mere rote repetition. It’s active experimentation. And that to me is the essence of vitality and liveliness, when things are constantly changing. And when movements reach a point where they’re not changing, and are just kind of stable, or whatever, they’re actually dead or declining. For better or for worse, things are alive here in Atlanta. We’re still trying.

PART THREE

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, so you can’t get into the forest safely right now, 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 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. We 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 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 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. We found the Bradford pear orchard in there. And then finally we 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 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 posted some message to the effect of, 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 screenshot 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. People 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 soon after Rayshard Brooks was killed and the Wendy’s was 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.

Q: How long 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 became my whole life, essentially. Me coming to Atlanta was an experiment, because I’m not usually a sedentary person. I told myself, alright, 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 coop 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’d 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 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’d 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 to this movement was foraging and relationships with plants and the forest. And one of the things that’s been so clear here, talking to you and others, is that the anti-police social movement part of the struggle does not just intersect with the forest movement, they’re inextricably enmeshed. Do you feel like the relations you’ve built with the human community here through this movement have been facilitated by your relations with the nonhuman, with the forest?

R: The forest is 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. 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: I think a lot about how the forest is our commons. We don’t have commons anymore! There are 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 my own 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 from far away because they’re so moved by the struggle, and we need to support them. Sometimes paranoia prevents people from providing that support to others. Also, it takes a lot of capacity to support the movement in this way. Recently my housemates have become burnt out from providing the house as a resource for people, coming to do laundry and shower all the time, so they said we need to not do this anymore. And I just don’t like hanging out at home anymore! That’s what made my house such a magical place for me. 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 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. 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 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 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 it 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! If they knew it was a fig tree — they must not have known, because that’s gotta be good for your property value right? 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 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. It reminds me of when the police terrorize people. They have to block 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 it that come 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 the land was stolen.

Q: That reminds me, have you been around for any of the activities with the Mvskoke (Muscogee) 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 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 of something that Mekko Chebon said when he was talking around the fire after the Stomp Dance, that some of the Mvskoke people there that day spoke in their native language. He talked about how long it’s been 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 that 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 the West Bank came and cut down some really ancient olive trees. It happens all the time. But the trunks were like this big, I’d 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 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 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 for 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 try to cause people 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 no sense at all, for him 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. The trees didn’t do anything. But they get used as a tool.

Q: I’ve heard inklings about the connections between this struggle and the Palestinian struggle. Like the IDF training the Atlanta police.

R: Yeah. Another grotesque similarity is the mock city thing. You know that Riotsville, U.S.A. movie 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 a kind of precedent to Cop 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 are 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.

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 anti-Zionism. And 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 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 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 were 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 to ask more pointed questions about the Palestine connection. It’s very potent. And definitely part of the ideas that formed this interview project — we want to help create more dialogue and share more ideas. We’re hoping to share the feelings that help us to understand what is at stake in each others’ struggles. 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 olive trees cut down in Palestine, and the world is burning, and there’s less and less water.

I’d like to circle back to the forest. Plants have informed my politics a lot as well, and foraging has been a big part of that. Working toward food autonomy, and trying to stay tethered to cultural memory about food systems and how to subsist. But also, a lot of my history with foraging has been about medicine. I’ve noticed there’s a lot of herbalism practiced in this movement, which is beautiful. But the other thing that is striking to me about this movement is the entanglement of 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 to know that Psilocybe ovoideocystidiata grows in the forest. The medicine existing there feels like some sort of sign that the forest and the forest protectors are in communication. 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 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, uhhh, I’m at this party and if anything bad happens we’re gonna be on drugs. Probably people were on drugs at the March 5th music festival when it got raided. 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, but there’s a little half-sheet that someone wrote about 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 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 then.

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, carried 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, ahhh! 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 trip 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 taken 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.