Somewhere in a Forest
Eco-horror and resistance in the modern South.
Welcome to Southern Gothic Week. Every day this week, I’ll be publishing essays that cover a range of topics related to the American South. This is the third post in the series — stay tuned for more.
Only the most inconsequential, impotent oil-fucking creep could look at the terrible, sweeping breadth of the natural world and think it’s as genocidal as him. In the sense that eco-horror both is and is not about us, both is and is not about our power and projection and how we feel about ourselves.
We’re both nature and not. We’re beyond nature — supernatural — having controlled, sublimated and disciplined our natural. Nature reminds us of this lost humanity. It returns to you, however briefly, everything urbanization and modernity took from you. When you stand in the shadow of the Smoky Mountains, you feel human and for a second you’re confronted with the undeniable fact that, unlike nature, you will die.
Marvel, if you can, if you’ve somehow retained even an ounce of an attention span, at the earth’s disobedience — and it will gaze back at you with apathy and defiance. It’s our obedience that separates us from the natural world and its unchecked excesses.
Because why does this shark keep ruining our business? And why am I sick when all I did was eat these oysters? And it’s flooding in Florida, which okay, that’s what they do there (that and meth), but now there’s a goddamn alligator in some girl’s basement. What the fuck.
Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead opens with a warning: “Something evil is lurking deep within the wooded mountains of Tennessee.” Having stood in those very mountains outside my grandparents’ Appalachian home I can confirm the South is a breeding ground for eco-horror.
We’ve talked this week about the wild and unruly. Of rednecks and rurality. And how stories like Deliverance and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre warn about stepping off the path most taken for fear of being consumed by all that wild.
Like The Ruins, with its sentient Mexican vines that quite literally get under the skin of some American tourists, eating them from the inside out. Kind of like kudzu, that invasive Southern weed that covers everything in sight. In Godzilla and The Host, it’s the fear of retribution. In films like The Birds, Tremors or Frogs, it’s infestation. In The Beach House or with the rape tree in The Evil Dead, it’s contamination. In Annihilation, it’s — well.
But, what if you could beat death? Eco-horror tells us if you can resist infection, if you can outsmart the woods, if you can beat the shark, you just might live forever. It’s long made a feast of our anxiety around the fact that we are organic matter, that we’re inextricably tied to the land around us, to the rhythms of nature. That what we do to the earth will echo back to us in our own fate.
Fear of the natural world is rooted in a fear of chaos — of what might happen without order if power fails. What would happen to us without strict systems of power to keep us safe and who would we be without civilization? These are stories about power. Who wields it; and what becomes of us after.
*
I have to tell you about one of the wildest things I’ve ever seen on the internet. So, this guy came to Atlanta and for some reason beyond the scope of my understanding of the world decided to vlog it. And the entire video, he just kept going on and on and on about how beautiful it is here. I just can’t get over how beautiful it is. And, like, I love my city but I was super confused. My brother in Christ, you’re standing in a gas station parking lot off a residential street in south Atlanta. It wasn’t until halfway through the video that I understood — he meant the trees.
From Peachtree to the shaded hills of Piedmont Park, the “City in a Forest” has one of the best urban tree canopies in the country. And, sure, I’ll admit we’ve been known to marvel at the way the light filters through the leaves on Ponce or stop to smell the magnolias in Decatur. You could even say we’ve dilly-dallied under a copse Dogwoods on a summer day. It is beautiful sometimes. The kind of beauty that brought a guy with a vlogging camera and a Patreon to his knees.
But this is, after all, an eco-horror story, and with all that beauty comes terror. In the race to the end of the Anthropocene any and all nature ultimately finds itself caught in the jaws of power. Where there’s life, someone wants to tear it down. But who? Who would want to tear down Atlanta’s trees? Who would do something like that?
This is an essay about Cop City.
*
The Weelaunee Forest has a long, embattled history. For decades, the Muscogee (Creek) land has slowly been wrested from the hands of its people and passed through the machinations of power from a plantation in the Antebellum South to a city-owned prison farm through the ‘90s. Now, it’s the most recent weapon in the government’s war against its own citizens.
Since it was announced to the public in 2021, the Atlanta Police Foundation’s plans to clear-cut 85 acres of the forest for a “public safety training center” has received thunderous, non-stop opposition from activists, residents, lawyers, environmentalists and more.
In 2023, a complaint was filed with the EPA’s Office of External Civil Rights Compliance over the destruction of the nearby ecosystem that’s home to mostly Black and Latino communities, as well as a lawsuit against the city from the South River Watershed Alliance in regards to violations of the site’s Clean Water Act permit.
Another well-reported opposition effort involves local activists petitioning the government to allow residents to vote on a referendum on the project. To force the vote, they needed to collect around 60,000 signatures — instead, they handed over 116,000. (According to an article from The Guardian, this is “twice as many voters as any elected official in Atlanta has earned in [a] generation,” and while I didn’t independently verify this, if true, let me just say, l-o-fucking-l.) The city, however, claimed they turned them over too late, despite a federal judge’s previous decision to extend the submission deadline. At the time of writing this, it’s been a year since the signatures were submitted. The city still refuses to count them.
*
Then, in August 2023, Attorney General Chris Carr filed an indictment against 61 activists opposed to the construction of Cop City, invoking the state’s RICO (or, Racketeering Influences and Corrupt Organizations) law. Originally signed into law in 1970, the federal RICO Act was created to help law enforcement go after mafia organizations by allowing them to group crimes — no matter how unrelated — under one organization as opposed to targeting individuals.
The 109-page indictment, which provides no proof for the charges it claims were committed, is a stunning, surreal text that rivals any gothic tale for its macabre, downright magical content.
First, there’s the specter at the center of the indictment, which argues that an organization it calls Defend the Forest (or sometimes, Defend the Atlanta Forest because even the state can’t keep track) is responsible for all the crimes it’s alleging. It claims, “Defend the Forest is a self-identified coalition and enterprise of militant anarchists, eco-activists, and community organizers.”
But there is no enterprise called Defend the Forest. “Defend the Forest” or “Stop Cop City” are ideas. It’s the equivalent of calling “Free Palestine” a criminal organization and then prosecuting anyone wearing a keffiyeh (cough cough, for all my coal mine-heads, allow me to introduce you to this canary I just met).
The indictment states, “Defend the Atlanta Forest is an unofficial, Atlanta-based organization that frames itself as a broad, decentralized, autonomous moment that uses advocacy and direct action to stop the ‘the forest [from being] bulldozed in favor of police and sold out to Hollywood.’”
It then goes on to say, in the state’s own words, “Defend the Atlanta Forest does not recruit from a single location, nor do all Defend the Atlanta Forest members have a history of working together as a group in a single location.”
Okay, so, in other words: It’s a broad, decentralized, autonomous movement.
The text also does a good job of sweeping the entire diversity of progressive thought under the identity of “anarchist.”
So, who are these anarchists? And what qualifies them as engaging in racketeering? Well, per the state, “Some of the major ideas that anarchists promote include collectivism, mutualism/mutual aid, and social solidarity.” The indictment seeks to cast doubt on everything from “possessing spray paint” to making zines (lock me up, I guess!) to, as stated above, mutual aid — which it calls “money laundering.” The latter was so grotesque and baseless that as I was writing this essay, the money laundering charges were completely dropped from the case.
When it isn’t giving you a definition of anarchy that reads like it was written by someone who went to the Ben Shapiro school for book reports, the indictment paints a rather ambitious portrait of the movement and its tactics.
It says, “Viewing their own violent acts as political violence, violent anarchists attempt to frame the government as violent oppressionists, [sic]” — the word you’re looking for is oppressors, dumbass — “thereby justifying the anarchists’ own violence. Indeed, the belief is that the government is engaging in a form of violence by denying individuals basic needs through capitalism, government action, and law enforcement by police.”
Well, yes! Indeed that is the belief. It’s a pretty stunning observation from the government that the government’s neglect of — or even downright antagonism toward — its people is violence. Maybe we should let them cook.
In a passage more coherent than most of the indictment, the state directly quotes a local activist who points out:
“Just as with tactics that directly engage the system, much of the militant direct action has also heightened contradictions” — I know a dialectical materialist when I see one, chat — “and exposed hypocrisies, thrusting fundamental questions into public consciousness: Are we more concerned about the ‘violence’ of destroying construction machinery and police property, or about the violence of capitalist exploitation, environmental devastation, and police murder?”
Beyond the absurdity of directly quoting a Marxist who’s advocating against the destruction of the environment in your legal document that’s vilifying leftists, this inclusion is telling of the state’s real aims.
The indictment only makes the vaguest of references to the “environmentalists” who are fighting alongside the “anarchists” opposed to Cop City. In fact, the Weelaunee Forest is known as one of the city’s “lungs.” It fights pollution, filtering air and creating oxygen, and its trees help absorb rainwater which mitigates flooding. I know what you’re thinking, “How bad could the flooding and air pollution in Atlanta be?” Well, this is what writers call foreshadowing so put a pin in that!
Never mind that the urban tree canopy helps cool our Southern city, which only gets hotter by the day. It’s vital to the wildlife, the people and the landscape — yet, when he was interviewed by The New Yorker in 2022, Mayor Andre Dickens said, “If you stood there, you would see lots of building foundations, lots of asphalt from where the parking lot was, et cetera. There’s still a forest, it’s just not a forest where this is right now.” Ohhhh, okay. Got it. There’s not a forest there, actually. Well, just forget it then. The cops need a parking lot after all.
*
But first, let’s consider the coconut tree. From what context did Cop City emerge?
The RICO indictment traces the beginning of the struggle to the summer of 2020, which saw the murder of George Floyd by the Maryland Police Department and the murder of Atlanta resident Rayshard Brooks by two APD officers (which the indictment lets us know was “justified” — cool, thanks). The officers who shot Brooks in the back were initially charged with felony murder and aggravated assault, though the charges were later dropped.
This, along with the protests that followed, created a tense atmosphere both within the city of Atlanta and the APD. At the time, 11Alive wrote that an APD report claimed that in August of 2020, 28 cops resigned and 11 retired. The police claimed this was a direct consequence of the growing anti-police sentiment in the public as well as a lack of support from the city for their use of excessive force.
In a 2020 article from CNN, the Southeast regional director for the police labor union said, “[The officers] don’t know how to do their job now because if they do their job and they do what they’re trained, and they … do what their policies and procedure say, it doesn’t matter, because if the mayor doesn’t like the way it looks, she fires. If the district attorney doesn’t like the way it looks, he charges.”
In reality, following Brooks’ murder, then-mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms gave Atlanta officers a pay raise.
The police union rep goes on to say, “We are one bullet away from dying and one mistake away from an indictment.”
In a completely unrelated note, one definition of irony is when what is stated is the opposite of or in direct conflict with the reality of the situation.
Anyway, his beautiful mind then produces this bon mot: “Why risk it? I can go be a manager at QuikTrip and make just about as much money, without the stress.” (For the record, we at Suburban Gothic are always pro quitting your job, but especially if you’re a cop.)
This pressure from the police comes alongside a crime wave panic exacerbated by Atlanta’s wealthy Buckhead neighborhood’s threat to secede from the city because of crime rates.
It’s in this climate that the APF, a private nonprofit, has coopted 381 acres of forest and thrown over $115 million — more than $30 million of which comes from taxpayers; while the rest is taken care of by APF’s corporate backers, like Delta, Home Depot and the Koch brothers — into the largest police training site in the U.S. in order to train cops in “de-escalation techniques.”
Of course, it will actually be for shooting ranges and urban warfare training, using the genocidal tactics the police have swapped with the IDF thanks to Georgia’s GILEE program. The government, the police and corporate interests are razing a forest to birth a warfare playground where a militarized arm of the state will learn the means of violently oppressing any and all political dissent, all while penalizing everyone who aspires to anything higher than to lick the boots of power. They’ve declared war on progressive thought and would rather commit to internationally trafficking violence than to providing for the communities they’ve been charged with serving.
They see the environment as expendable and the people as dangerous criminals in need of discipline. Horror is rarely about violence. It’s about fear. The violence is a metaphor for our fear of pain, of loss, of death. Eco-horror plays on anxieties that run from climate change to our alienation from the land. These films give us a cathartic space to feel fear without engaging in danger.
The threat of violence underpins the entire RICO indictment. The state wants to convince you that activists collectively organizing feels violent. That seeing solidarity feels like violence. That any kind of resistance to their aggressive consolidation of power feels like violence. But, you know the difference between something that feels violent and actual violence?
In January of 2023, multiple law enforcement agencies raided an encampment of Weelaunee forest defenders and shot activist Manuel “Tortuguita” Paez Terán — who according to an independent medical examiner’s report was most likely seated in a cross-legged position with their hands raised — at least 57 times. The troopers’ actions were deemed “objectively reasonable” by a special prosecutor, so no charges were brought against the Georgia State Patrol SWAT officers responsible.
The state doesn’t think violence is bad — it simply wants the power to unilaterally decide when and how violence is used.
Shame. Shame on them. To sell your own diseased, leprous soul after you've let it go to rot is one thing — but to sell out the people you swore to protect, to sell out your own community, to criminalize solidarity and aid? And for what? Home Depot? The Koch Brothers? So you can have more oil to light the world on fire? Shame.
Humans are always the villains in eco-horror, nature’s just fighting back. Eco-horror maintains that if there’s chaos, if there’s resistance, if there’s destruction, it’s a direct result of the terms dictated by power. And the terms that power creates are almost always violent ones.
Eco-horror asks of us, Does the earth remember? Power desperately hopes it doesn’t.
*
It was hard to finish this essay because as I wrote, the ground kept shifting beneath us. Hurricane Helene ripped through the South, obliterating parts of North Carolina, Tennessee and beyond. It also flooded Buckhead, leaving cars submerged and homes damaged, turned streets into rivers right through Atlanta in the neighborhood that chose Cop City over our trees.
Then a chemical plant about 20 miles from my apartment caught fire, releasing a noxious cloud of chlorine gas that continues to linger in the air to this day. City officials almost refused to address it until they couldn’t ignore it, and even then they preferred cryptic half-answers to any direct action, choosing to protect their own interests over us. The climate collapse will be quiet — and then loud all at once.
Their calling card for the disaster became this one phrase from the EMA: UNLIKELY TO CAUSE HARM TO MOST PEOPLE, which just means, “well, we don’t know and it doesn’t matter anyway.”
I've never heard a more perfect slogan for fascism. Who's in which group and how can you distinguish yourself as “most people”? What will you have to align yourself with to be on the right side of that distinction? And how long will it last? They do not care about most people. They don’t care about any people. They’ve made that very clear.
In response to these disasters — and other imminent ones, like the second hurricane barreling toward Florida as I prepare to publish this — Southern communities rallied to provide aid and assistance to our neighbors. While Republican lawmakers seek to limit FEMA aid and downsize the National Weather Service entirely, while Congress failed to approve additional FEMA funding days before Helene hit, while cops stood outside grocery stores to keep hungry people out, we were supporting local funds and sharing drop sites for disaster relief.
For weeks my timeline has been alternating images of where my tax dollars are going (Israel dropping bombs on Lebanese men, women and children) and where they’re not (the total devastation of the Southeast), and it’s not lost on me that both are directly tied to our insatiable greed for fossil fuels. And I can’t explain to you why you should care, other than sometimes I feel like screaming in the middle of my kitchen but I can’t because my lungs are filled with chlorine gas.
Our leaders should care about Southern lives. Our leaders should care about Black lives. Our leaders should care about Palestinian and Lebanese lives. Everyone deserves better than these grifters, liars and thieves. As long as prisons exist, our fraudulent political class should be intimately familiar with the inside of one.
The inherent irony of the RICO indictment is that it rejects a simple, basic truth: Ideologies don't kill people; killing people creates ideologies.
*
The earth and its people are not responsible for what power projects onto us. The South’s natural abundance helps make it great and we’re so close to it here. The systems that oppress us, oppress us both, at once, in tandem. As Atlanta's lungs choke, so do mine. From the Weelaunee red oaks to the olive tree, it’s clear we, as living, breathing, organic beings, are directly bound to the environment and any attempts to destroy or control one results in the desolation of the other.
There’s another connection between us and the earth, one that slots in hope where there was horror. Just as the land is apathetic to any attempts to break it, just as nature refuses to lay down and die, just as it finds ever-new, ever-successful ways of resisting destruction, so do we.
They want to feed us to failing systems they erroneously think will cover them, but the roofs are already caving in. They've paved over our trees and poisoned our air and think they can still breathe money.
And, when the rivers rise to meet their doorstep, it still won't be enough to wash the blood off their hands.
*
It’s midnight and I’m alone in my grandmother’s house in the backwoods of south Georgia and I’m full of terror. I can’t see beyond the small halo of light from inside the house. In the dark, the bats and snakes and other garden life I greet with glee in the day suddenly take a sinister shape in the shadows. There’s something humbling about the sound of your own racing heart syncing up with the cicadas. I make a deal with myself that if I can stand on the back porch and stare into the loud, faceless Georgia night, then I must be brave enough for what’s to come.
I don’t know what we’ll face tomorrow, but I know I worry less about the South than other places when it comes to resistance. Because I live somewhere in a forest. Step outside and you’ll find the embrace of the oaks and the sweet magnolia leaves, the dogwoods and the Southern pines, and you’ll know exactly what we’re fighting for. I stood on the edge of night, beneath the trees, stared into the void and heard my own heart.
And as I look, I wonder, how can we meet each other? How far can we grow? Whose skin could we get under today?
Resources:
An Annotated Version of the Indictment Against Atlanta Organizers
https://defendtheatlantaforest.org/
Previously on Southern Gothic Week
Our Southern Gothic
The South is a thing I feel when I can’t feel anything at all.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Redneck
Or, the rise of a new working-class hero.