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.

KEYWORDS:

• Infrastructure
• radical care
• mutual aid
• environmental defense
• movements

Environmental, water, and land defenders are under threat.¹ While this has always been true of those on the frontlines resisting colonialism, imperialism, and environmental destruction, the coordinated and sweeping repression of collective action globally today should concern us all (Menton & Billon, 2021; Scheidel et al., 2020). This intensification comes at a pressing time to address the climate crisis, rapid biodiversity loss, consolidation of global agribusiness, expansion of fossil fuels, and the ongoing seizures of land and water by militarized state and corporate power. Further, the global tendency toward increasing authoritarian governance erodes the democratic means through which impacted populations can voice their opposition to these intimately felt and capacious harms (Middeldorp & Billon, 2019).

Amid these interlocking crises, however, we must also address how movements are building what I refer to as infrastructures of care, or the multidirectional and reciprocal systems, relations, and material practices that support and facilitate life.² It is these movements and their infrastructures of care – solidarity, collective action, and mutual aid – that are being rhetorically positioned as targets and terrorists today. By this I mean, the increasingly widespread and draconian means through which some practices of radical care – or what Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart (Kanaka Maoli) and Tamara Kneese (2020) define as the “vital but underappreciated strategies for enduring precarious worlds” – are being rhetorically, legally, and violently suppressed (p. 2). One way, then, of tending to the politics of care is to recognize and interrupt broader patterns of its criminalization within late capitalism, all of which profoundly impact the conditions of possibility for environmental movements.

This essay briefly situates the increased criminalization of environmental defense globally. Then, I consider the contested terrain of defining “critical infrastructure,” as one strategy of political and fossil fuel industry backlash against water and land protectors, particularly, although not exclusively, in the US. Finally, I turn to the necessity of defending and strengthening infrastructures of care within and across intersectional environmental justice struggles.

Contextualizing criminalization

In a 2022 Global Witness report, Dr. Vandana Shiva opens by encouraging us all to read and honor the names of the over 200 environmental defenders who were killed in the year preceding (Global Witness, 2023a). “I could tell you that, around the world, three people are killed every week while trying to protect their land, their environment, from extractive forces,” she writes, “I could tell you that this has been going on for decades.” Such is the alarming condition of the disproportionate targeting of environmental defenders and journalists in the Global South (Global Witness, 2023b; Reporters Without Borders, 2015; Scheidel et al., 2020). These dangers arise as they document and resist ongoing militarism, land and water grabs, fossil fuel extraction, agribusiness, mineral industries, and more, often which financially and politically benefit corporate interests and Global North powers in the imperial core. In addition to the exceptional violence land defenders face is also more everyday anti-Indigenous, gendered, and racialized harm, as well as human and nonhuman disablement and ecological impairment (Cram et al., 2022).

Frontline communities are intimately aware of how their targeting is interconnected. Members of food sovereignty and agrarian justice movements like La Via Campesina for example, intentionally link their experiences across geographies – from the criminalization of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), to the imprisonment of Palestinian leaders within the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, to arbitrarily arresting members of the Indonesian Peasants’ Union, and many more (Graddy-Lovelace, 2021; La Via Campesina, 2022). Instead of treating these events as isolated, mapping connections serves as one tactic through which land defenders can mourn, organize, and care for each other amid pervasive profiteering and the militarized policing that enshrines it (La Via Campesina, 2021). Diversifying tactics of bottom-up organizing is in many cases, the only way impacted communities can challenge matrices of power and how they materialize into local environmental conflicts (Scheidel et al., 2020).

Criminalization is also intensifying in the US, Canada, and Western Europe, where many of the corporate culprits of extraction originate. Since 2017 alone, 45 US state legislatures have considered 269 new bills restricting basic domestic rights to freedom of speech and assembly, with more pending at the time of writing (International Center for Not-For-Profit Law, 2023). Such laws have become reactive tools to quell public dissent, especially since the ascension of global solidarity movements against anti-Blackness and police violence in the summer of 2020. In the UK and Europe, climate activists are also now subjected to a range of public order laws and even more severe crimes, as they use direct action to call attention to the climate emergency within a largely stifled media economy (Lakhani et al., 2023). Public smear campaigns often accompany, calling the radical flank of the movement “too extreme” (Fisher & Renaghan, 2023). As Amy Westervelt (2023) cautions, seemingly innocuous acts of rhetorically dismissing climate activists as “annoying” or as “outside agitators” also play a role in the public’s consent to their criminalization and subsequent abandonment. Such narratives may inadvertently align with more coordinated astroturfing to manufacture support for extractive projects, which also frame these controversies in ways that legitimate the expansion of fossil fuels (Chang et al., 2023). For example, this occurred in the Canadian-based Enbridge’s media campaign against the Line 3 land and water protectors, some of whose charges were only dismissed in September 2023 in a rare and surprising affirmation by the court (Climate Defense Project, 2023).

Among these anti-protest laws are harsh new “critical infrastructure protection” bills that impose felony charges such as domestic terrorism and conspiracy on persons perceived to trespass or destroy facilities designated as “critical infrastructure” – namely, petroleum refineries, pipelines, natural gas stations and storage facilities, railways, and roads, among others depending on the jurisdiction (Crockett, 2022). In the US, these laws both target environmental activists and further tether corporate fossil fuel interests as “critical” or compulsory to the functioning of the nation-state. Some US states like Georgia have expanded their definition of critical infrastructure to include “any other vital public service” and threaten severe penalties on perceived co-conspirators charged by association (Ga. Code Ann., 2023). Doing so allows prosecutors to cast wider nets, intimidate, and indict others who may express nonviolent solidarity as well. In 2017, the first US bill of this kind was proposed in the state of Oklahoma, in the wake of resistance to Energy Transfer Partners’ Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) by Indigenous and allied water protectors defending the sovereignty of the Standing Rock Sioux (Crockett, 2022). Modeled after this bill, the fossil-fuel-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) soon wrote template legislation to be applied, modified, and spread swiftly throughout other state legislatures.

“Critical infrastructure” defense has also justified violence against First Nations and allied movements in northern British Columbia, Canada, such as the Wet’suwet’en peoples in Unist'ot'en territory. As Anne Spice (Tlingit member of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation) articulates: “The settler state shapes narratives around infrastructure projects that make them out to be a part of the natural advancement of the nation-state while masking the violence they cause to Indigenous land and bodies, especially the bodies of women and girls” (2018, p. 49). In doing so, Spice argues, tar sands oil and fracked gas pipelines are not critical but invasive infrastructure that further “delegitimize Indigenous claims to territory” (p. 46). Other assertions of US sovereignty over Oceania in the name of security, Tiara Na’puti (Chamoru) and Sylvia C. Frain (2023) explain, accelerate the build-up of military infrastructure “destroying the environment and contributing to the climate crisis” (p. 115).

Extreme measures have come to a head in the criminalization of the struggle to Defend the Atlanta Forest and Stop Cop City, or decentralized movements to stop the construction of a $90 million militarized police training facility in the South River Forest (or for the Mvskoke/Muscogee (Creek) people, the Weelaunee Forest) near Atlanta, Georgia, US. Since 2021, residents and broader networks have rallied against what activists refer to as “Cop City,” linking the destruction of the forest ecosystem, threat to the watershed, and environmental racism (contamination, flood risk, pollution, and the creation of a heat island near a predominantly Black and divested community), to the militarized expansion of policing, the repressive carceral surveillance state, and its international transference around the world (Atlanta Community Press Collective, 2023; Defend the Atlanta Forest, 2022; Pellow, 2023; Shahshahani, 2023).³ They also expose the project’s public-private funding and a wholesale refusal to allow the public to democratically decide whether the facility should be built at all. Even beyond the local context, their activism and analysis have drawn further critical connections among climate justice, abolitionist, and anti-imperialist struggles (Climate Justice Alliance, 2023; Pellow, 2021).

One of the more sweeping examples of these movements’ criminalization, occurred in September 2023, when the state government of Georgia indicted 61 participants under its RICO (Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations) act. The indictment is especially alarming for the ways it frames practices of mutual aid and social solidarity – the backbone of all organizing – as constituting a coercive criminal enterprise. This expansive criminalization followed earlier domestic terrorism charges and militarized raids on forest protectors. Joanne Barker (Lenape) reminds us that the “representational technology” of “terrorism” has long been powerfully effective in defining the subjectivity of Indigenous peoples in the service of the state’s imperial goals (2021, p. 5). Such language is consistent with wider “green scare” and “ecoterrorism” rhetorics that, as David N. Pellow (2014) describes, shape regimes of perception that can be used against a broad range of tactics and voices, including current movements to Stop Cop City.

Atlanta’s Kamau Franklin (2023), founder of Community Movement Builders put it this way: “What took place was an escalation by the authorities of the state of Georgia, the city of Atlanta, on the infrastructure of the movement” itself. In other words, such an indictment is a profound intimidation strategy to break up much broader public and organizational networks of solidarity already powerful in their movement. This is certainly not the first time mutual aid has been suppressed, given the targeting of The Black Panther Party, The Young Lords, Food Not Bombs, and No More Deaths/No Más Muertes, or restricting the redistribution of shelter, food, water, medicine, and access to public space (Spade, 2023). However, these strategies signal threats to much broader tactics of creating livable conditions amid compounding crises, as well as the persistence of wider intersectional movement organizing.

Defending infrastructures of care

What does it mean, then, to affirm care amid its sweeping repression? Further, what does the criminalization of infrastructures of care reveal about the threats they pose to the existing structures that are cruelly shaping our world?

I come to these questions considering Phaedra C. Pezzullo’s (2024) invitation to hold the dialectic of crisis and care that shapes the ethical obligation of our discipline. We are invited to do so as care rhetorics multiply – from those rooted in collective care and interdependence to those benefiting from the pastiche of carewashing within neoliberal capitalism that is fundamentally “uncaring by design” (The Care Collective, 2020, p. 10). Indebted to the former, my contribution considers the essential function of care, always, but especially in times rife for the institutional and public delegitimization of these forms of collective action.

Conflicts over which infrastructures are “critical” to the state and capital, versus those that support human and more-than-human life, are also conflicts over what relations will be nurtured and supported or suppressed and destroyed. As I have collaboratively written elsewhere: “At the heart of infrastructure struggles are contestations over belonging and what inhabitants need to thrive” (Gordon & Byron, 2021, p. 870). Classification is a cultural terrain in which “the state also has the power to determine what is infrastructural and what is not, and to determine which forms of infrastructure will thrive and which will [be forced to] disappear” (p. 867). Such an argument follows numerous critical infrastructure scholars who hold that infrastructure not only facilitates the movement of things (objects, ideas, feelings, economies, socialities, and sets of relations) but is imbued with and enables power (Anand et al., 2018; Hallinan & Gilmore, 2021; Larkin, 2013; Simone, 2004). Thus, the rhetorical stakes of delimiting critical infrastructure in the service of the extractive, militarized, and corporate-captured state matter significantly to environmental communication, especially when its employment is used as a strategy of domination and to further silence dissent.

Rather, I argue, we must affirm, strengthen, and defend infrastructures of care. Since 2020, conceptualizations of infrastructures of care and others akin have been emerging in feminist, abolitionist, and anti-colonial scholarship, reflecting the multiple and pluriversal epistemologies and relationalities of life-giving infrastructure instead (Alam & Houston, 2020; Escobar, 2020; Gilmore & LaDuke, 2020; Kaba & Ritchie, 2022; LaDuke & Cowen, 2020; Tomiak, 2023). Building on this work, I consider infrastructures of care as movement infrastructures, or the myriad forms of mutuality and solidarity that link and sustain translocal organizing, including for land, water, and ecological defense. Infrastructures of care may emerge from the “localized practices for addressing and preventing harm” or through meeting each other’s needs through collective and reciprocal mutual aid (Ansfield, 2023, p. 189; Reese & Johnson, 2022; McKane et al., 2023). They are constituted by relational tactics of organizing and they foster everyday spaces of refuge as well (Hayes & Kaba, 2023; Lopes et al., 2018). As such infrastructures of care have always been foundational to movements for environmental and climate justice, as well as the multiplicity of struggles that intertwine and intersect.

Largely missing from dominant accounts of environmental defense is the deep ecological and collective care that motivates their actions, the losses environmental defenders have endured, and the supremacy they are up against. Let’s return to, for example, Spice’s (2018) recounting of a conversation with Wet’suwet’en land defender, Freda Huson, the spokesperson of Unist'ot'en Camp. Contrasting pipeline infrastructure to all that sustains Indigenous life, Huson underscores about the latter, “All of that is part of the system that our people depend on, and that whole cycle and system is our critical infrastructure” (p. 41). Such a statement, Spice observes, “contests the very category of infrastructure itself, asserting alternative ontological and epistemological modes of relating to assemblages that move matter and sustain life” (p. 45). As such, care is not outside of, but is fundamental to, opposing extractive, invasive infrastructures. We could also argue that radical care is part of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2017) calls “infrastructures of feeling” through which possibilities for agency, organizing, and liberation can “change ourselves and the external world. Even under extreme constraint” (p. 238).

Challenging the now pervasive narrative of criminality is imperative for environmental communication scholars, and for the endurance of intersectional environmental and climate justice struggles today. Such rhetorical strategies have life-or-death consequences. Consider, once again, the Defend the Atlanta Forest and Stop Cop City movements. We must, for example, bear witness to and mourn the heart-wrenching police murder of Manuel “Tortuguita” Esteban Paez Terán – a 26-year-old Indigenous queer and non-binary forest defender on January 18, 2023. Tortuguita was tragically shot 57 times by Georgia state troopers while peacefully protesting the construction of Cop City. Having been sleeping in the forest, they were shot repeatedly while sitting cross-legged in their tent with their hands in the air. In a press conference, Tortuguita’s mother Belkis Terán (2023) shared her child’s love of the forest and the painful loss so many sustain:

[They] loved the forest, it gave them peace. They meditated there. The forest connected them with God. I never thought that [Tortuguita] could die in a meditation position. My heart is destroyed. I invest so much time, care, and dedication to educate my children to become active members of society. I gave them love and compassion as tools to make the world a better place.

Articulating love and compassion as tools for designing a more just world, Terán underscores the role of care in a movement that has been largely vilified by the state. Now informally adopted as the “mother of the movement” to Stop Cop City, Belkis Terán continues to invite others to memorialize her child through collective grief, optimism, solidarity, and mutual aid (Berríos Polanco, 2023).

Radical care, therefore, is movement infrastructure. It is the relations and collective practices that facilitate a more just and sustainable world – from ensuring that everyone has basic needs like access to food, clean water, housing, and equitable health to opposing increased militarism, underdevelopment, extractive industries, land grabs, and accompanying state repression. For these movements, as Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba (2023, p. 59) affirm, “Caring for each other [is] a form of cultural rebellion.” Care can “challenge dehumanization and the erasure of atrocity while allowing us to hold on to each other and our humanity amid disasters daily and acute” (p. 59). As environmental communication scholars we have an ethical obligation to intervene in these crises and the deeply uneven harms they reproduce. We also have an obligation to resist this consolidation of power and refuse to abandon those criminalized by it as well. Of course, this does not mean movements should be unified, nor does it negate the importance of addressing power inequities, agonism, or divergences, to which all movements should attend. Yet, if we take seriously that these different forms of criminalization are interconnected, so should be our infrastructures of care.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Tiara Na’puti, E Cram, and Sam Silva for reading an earlier version of this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I use these terms with some caution, which in this essay describe a range of actions and communities. For more on the purpose/limitations of “environmental defender” see Verweijen et al. (2021).

2 Here I am thinking with and indebted to articulations of life-affirming infrastructures by feminist, abolitionist, and anti-colonial scholars and activists who I engage more later in this essay.

3 Writers and researchers with the Atlanta Community Press Collective (www.atlpresscollective.com) also underscore and historicize the site’s former use as the Old Atlanta Prison Farm, the displacement of the Mvskoke/Muscogee, and other forms of racialized dispossession and punishment that would continue should Cop City be built.