I freakin' love it. The Left coast doesn't have a monopoly on
loons. They're turning up all over the place; even, oh my goodness: GA. lol

"FOREST FIGHT

The Battle for ‘Cop City’

In an Atlanta forest slated for development, an activist movement has
built a community — and they're vowing to defend it by any means necessary

BY JACK CROSBIE
SEP 3, 2022 9:20 AM

WHATEVER THE EXCAVATOR driver had in mind for his morning, it’s pretty
clear it wasn’t this. It’s not yet 8 a.m. on a Saturday in late July,
and he’s dodging rocks and full cans of rosemary-grapefruit seltzer
being flung from 20 yards away, and screaming at the impassive DeKalb
County cop next to him to intervene. “Pull your gun out!” he yells in desperation. “Pull your gun out!”

The driver is here in Atlanta’s South River Forest on behalf of Ryan
Millsap, a real-estate tycoon who’s been granted permission to bulldoze
a huge swath of trees and put up a soundstage for the city’s booming
film industry — “Hollywood Dystopia,” as the band of masked protesters hurling projectiles have taken to calling it. Millsap’s plans cover 40
acres of parkland on the eastern bank of Intrenchment Creek, which
roughly divides a 300-acre pocket of this forest that has become a battleground. On the western side of the creek, the nonprofit Atlanta
Police Foundation has laid claim to 85 acres of woods, which the Atlanta
City Council voted last September to flatten in order to build a $90
million police- and fire-training complex that’s come to be known as
“Cop City.”

What the city didn’t expect was that the land would become home to a
band of environmentalists and anarchists, loosely united under the
banner Defend the Atlanta Forest, who are combating those plans at every
turn. The “decentralized autonomous movement,” as they call themselves, consists of hundreds of local and out-of-state activists, several dozen
of whom live full time in these woods, in a ramshackle network of tents
and treehouses erected dozens of feet off the forest floor. By day, the
group hosts meals procured through donated food and prepared via
collective action, as well as teach-ins on resistance tactics and
philosophies, skill shares, guided hikes, and other community events. By
night, on the weekends, the scene often shifts to musical performances featuring local bands and DJs — a distinctly Atlanta mix of trap,
hardcore, and electronica — plus a bar and substances of every sort, a
chance to mosh for freedom and dance in defiance.
[snip]

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/defend-atlanta-forest-copy-city-climate-change-defund-the-police-1397188/

TB

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)