“Trees give life. Police take it”: Building and Fighting for Abolitionist Life-Worlds, from the Weelaunee Forest to Georgia's Jails

Abstract

DeKalb County, Georgia has been mired in a struggle to defend its forest against the development of a militarised police training facility known as “Cop City”. Drawing on autoethnographic research as a criminalised forest defender and the Stop Cop City movement's social history, I show how forest defenders created abolitionist possibilities beyond policing and prisons within two spaces of struggle: the Weelaunee forest, where forest defenders built and fought for a life-affirming, cop-free ecosystem; and inside Georgia's jails, where forest defenders incarcerated for alleged participation in the struggle built solidarity and fought for collective survival. The movement's strategy of “building and fighting” using insurrectionary, autonomous, and procedural abolitionist tactics has accomplished what abolition geographers call the radical place-making of abolitionist life-worlds. Wielding eco-defence and disruptive protest while prefiguring worlds where criminalised people and communities prevail even in the deadliest of places, forest defenders have undermined carceral state power.