Criminalizing Care: Environmental Justice Under Political and Police Repression

Abstract

This essay discusses the intensification of threats to practices of radical care, such as collective action, mutual aid, and expressions of solidarity with others resisting ecological violence. I take up the global criminalization of land, water, and environmental defenders–including draconian “critical infrastructure” bills and anti-protest activities–that further link anticolonial, anti-imperial, and critical environmental justice struggles across geographies. Considering the rhetorical stakes in defining critical infrastructure, I juxtapose the state’s designation of primarily extractive industries as critical to its national financial and political project with alternative infrastructures of care that emerge from within everyday movement organizing for more life-affirming ecological relationships and worlds. Recent US-based Defend the Atlanta Forest and Stop Cop City movements, among others, provide illustrative exemplars of this broader pattern of criminalization and solidarity. I conclude by underscoring the importance of strengthening and defending such infrastructures of care in the face of sweeping repression today.