“Starting in April 2021, a bold movement set out to defend Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta, Georgia, where local politicians and corporate profiteers want to build a police training compound known as Cop City”
“In the following assessment, participants evaluate the strategic hypotheses that the movement has produced and tested over the past two years and reflect on the risks and possibilities of the next phase of the struggle”
“For background on the events that are analyzed below, consult “The City in the Forest,” which covers the first year of resistance, and “The Forest in the City,” which details the second year”
“Protesters in Palestine, Hong Kong, Myanmar, Chile, Equador, Peru, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Iran, and beyond communicate with one another in a global language of refusal, explicitly referencing each other in instructional online protest guides”
“Memetic resistance enables large numbers of people to participate in such activities without theoretical coherence, shared goals, relationships of trust, or longstanding organizations”
“contagious and reproducible tactics can spread rapidly between contexts—across languages, oceans, continents, and worldviews”
“The model is always wrong. Even if all one hopes to accomplish is to spread the tactics and gestures of revolt, mere forms, styles, and instructional guides will not suffice. Methods that work in North Africa cannot be automatically grafted onto the suburban sprawl of Los Angeles”
“All of the headway that the movement to defend the forest has made can be credited to an experimental and problem-solving mentality. Wherever people have held to rigid dogmas, those have obstructed the movement”
“There is no “Defend the Forest Model.” There is only reality and those prepared to confront it”
“By no fault of the forest dwellers, supporting the encampments came to stand in for mass strategizing and action. Some people came to conflate the effectiveness of the movement as a whole with the well-being of the camps”
“Something similar occurred among the police, as well, who became obsessed with the people living among the trees and dedicated a disproportionate amount of effort to clearing them out”
“The period of small-scale, intensive encampments on the land is probably over. But the need to physically defend the forest has not passed. Therefore, other strategies will have to emerge to fill this need”
“The rationale behind direct action is that people can enact the changes they want directly without waiting for permission. Sabotage is a form of direct action with a long history in this country and across the world. It has been used in a wide array of struggles. Freedom fighters depend on it whether their struggles take place in factories, plantations, prisons, schools, offices, slaughterhouses, shopping centers, pipeline corridors, forests, or elsewhere. Sabotage is especially empowering for those facing intense repression or powerful adversaries, because saboteurs are not dependent on safety in numbers. Instead, they can rely on the element of surprise, the cover of night, intimate knowledge of their targets, the arrogance of law enforcement. Generally speaking, the saboteur wants to use methods that demand the least time, special skills, and effort and that minimize risk to participants and bystanders while resulting in the maximum consequences for the target”
“The infrastructure of control is vulnerable—and nowadays, it is everywhere. Direct action demonstrates this”
“Effective sabotage campaigns can cripple authoritarian regimes, apartheid states, colonial exploiters, entire economies”
“New tactics, new strategies, and new formations are developing within the movement. These will combine the most resilient methods of the previous phases with new content and approaches that have not been explored until now. It is important that all of the participants develop their own reflections, their own priorities, their own aspirations and ways of understanding the situation”
“The courage, clarity, focus, and inventiveness of individuals has contributed at least as much to the experiments and victories of this movement as the formal decision-making of organizations and collectives. The more comfortable everyone feels innovating, the less that dogma or adrenaline alone will structure what comes next”
“Colonial domination in the global periphery translates directly to authoritarianism in the imperial core”
“In astronomy, necroplanetology is the study of planets that are being destroyed, or of the wrecked debris that indicates the previous existence of a planet. A terrestrial necroplanetology would recognize Cop City as an assault on something unique and irreplaceable. Not only is our own planet being destroyed—the planet that bore us, that gives us life, the only planet that could be our home—but the same process is eroding our capacity to imagine any relationship to the Earth other than the violence represented by Cop City”