by Matthew Elia
“We know,” Paul writes in Romans 8, “that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together.” We know this: the creation groans from its wounds. But who—who in particular—groans when the whole creation groans? And what is the shape of the wound?
Beneath the forest canopy just southeast of Atlanta, on an unseasonably warm January day in 2023, a young environmental activist named Manuel Terán was sitting among the loblolly pines when six Georgia policemen approached, then opened fire: the autopsy found the tracks of 57 gunshots. Wound paths, it called them.[1] Real people, none of whom faced charges, pulled the triggers of course. But the path their bullets followed did not begin with them. I want to trace, in this essay, the longer path of violence—the path on which they were only the most recent travelers. A lot hangs on how we name the longer history of the wound. What is the path that precedes, includes, then extends beyond the wound paths that perforated Manuel’s right lung, collapsed their right eye globe; and where is it leading now? To name the wound, to hear the groan, I begin to walk the path backward in time.
An Indigenous Venezuelan of Tomoto-Cuica descent, Manuel (who was nonbinary and used they/them pronouns) had adopted the name Tortuguita—meaning: little turtle—while living with others in the Forest, part of an expansive cross-racial movement to resist the Forest’s being torn down to build a proposed $120 million police facility, where militarized officers would be trained to suppress civil unrest by running drills in a mock city layout. Hence the name given by activists: “Cop City.”[2] A broad coalition united quickly to oppose it. The Sierra Club Georgia Chapter, along with 15 other environmental organizations, penned an open letter urging city council to consider that destroying even “a fraction of the total acreage” would compromise the Forest’s natural ability to mitigate flood risks, reduce the urban heat island effect, and lower air pollution by converting carbon dioxide into oxygen.[3]
Organizers aligned with the Movement for Black Lives came out against Cop City with powerful immediacy, having just flooded the streets in the spring of 2020 not only to denounce the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, but two weeks later, Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta.[4] Experts pointed out that the reforms being proposed to the policing system—including massive budgets for increased training through facilities like the Cop City—not only siphon public money away from the sort of investments in community life proven to reduce crime (education, employment programs and public health), but were themselves already part of the very problem to which they are now being proposed as solution: Garrett Wolfe, the officer who shot Rayshard Brooks twice in the back, had “undergone 2,000 hours of training, including sessions on de-escalation tactics, cultural-awareness training, and instruction on use of deadly force. None of this preparation stopped him from killing Rayshard Brooks.”[5]
Two key names thus began to emerge for this single coalitional movement: “Defend the Atlanta Forest” and “Stop Cop City.” With this double-name, the movement joins two crises Christian ethics has often kept separate, two wounds from which a single, whole creation groans: ecological destruction and racial violence. The movement thus joins constructive ethical responses to them too: what Christians sometimes call “creation care” on one hand and the struggle to abolish structures of racial injustice rooted in slavery on the other: prisons, policing, the carceral state. And by joining them, the movement underscores that the struggle was not merely against the building of this particular facility, but rather, as one participant put it, “a struggle at the intersection of climate change, police militarization, racialized police violence, and environmental racism.”[6] Tortuguita and the Atlanta Forest defenders help make vivid and concrete an emerging global reality that few see right now, but which will become unavoidable in the decades ahead: in the climate era, struggles to defend the earth from destruction will everywhere begin to converge with struggles to defend Black, Indigenous, Latine and ordinary people of all races, especially poor people, from militarized police forces.[7] Creation care begins to emerge as an abolitionist project. These will look more and more like one struggle.
But to understand this claim requires that we trace the longer path of the wound, that we hear the groans arising from the wounded earth and, for this, we might trace the path more deeply into the Forest and let the land itself tell the story.
*
Before Manuel became Tortuguita, before Cop City was proposed, indeed, long before Atlanta became Atlanta in 1845, the name of the place was Weelaunee. Meaning “brown water,” this is the name the Indigenous Mvskoke people gave to the river still running through the Forest, one of their original homelands.[8] The Indian Removal Act of 1830 separated them from it at gunpoint. Roughly half died in the forced transfer. “I was the witness,” wrote famous French observer Alexis de Tocqueville, “of sufferings which I have not the power to portray.”[9]
Amid the violent dispossession, the land was being reimagined. It became, in the minds of white settlers, something called property—fungible, sellable, divisible into square plots, without the intimacy of relation. Changing hands among various settlers, two such plots eventually fell to George P. Key in 1855, who “operated the property as a farm, and at one point had as many as 19 enslaved people working and living on the land—making his one of the farms with the most enslaved people in DeKalb county.”[10] An adjacent plot was sold to another slaveowner, Elijah Henry Clark, an ordained Methodist minister.[11] Here the precise shape of the wound starts to emerge with brutal clarity: stolen Black life, working stolen Native land, for the profit of white Christian masters. The longer path of violence coming into view is, in key part, simply the story of western Christian life in modernity: an emerging plantation system of enslaved production, secured through the separation of indigenous people from land, catalyzing what would become the world system of global racial capitalism.[12]
After the Civil War, in the wake of the legal abolition of slavery, the patterns of relation which slavery had put in place did not magically disappear. Slavery’s racial hierarchies—of unequal vulnerability to violence, persistent wealth inequality and exposure to poverty, skewed life chances—are what Saidiya Hartman has called “the afterlife of slavery.”[13] Among the best-studied sites of this afterlife is the postwar practice of “leasing” people convicted of crimes (often on charges spurious, frivolous, or both) as an incarcerated labor force for agricultural profit, so perhaps it is unsurprising that this is precisely what happened to the land: George Key’s slave plantation was sold to the city in 1911 and became the Atlanta Prison Farm.[14] There the state extracted value from incarcerated laborers tending livestock and crops and, as late as the 1980s, newspaper accounts compared the conditions to “slave labor,” leading the ACLU to sue the city for unsanitary conditions and brutally unconstitutional practices of punishment, including leg irons and solitary confinement.[15]
Yet this system—dominant though it was, persistent though it remains, even in the wake of the legal abolition of slavery—never triumphed unopposed. It never reigned without facing manifold resistance from below: from everyday acts of interpersonal defiance to massive organized rebellions; from fugitive flights of individuals to enormous marronage communities in the swamps and forests. There Black and Indigenous communities pursued fraught and imperfect experiments in social life, as well as alternative ecologies in the shadows of the colonial monocrop plantation complex—what recent scholars have explored as “a totally different form of living.”[16]
It was this tradition of coalitional anticolonial resistance that Manuel invoked when they started going by Tortuguita: a name borrowed from the Indigenous military commander Mihšihkinaahkwa, “Little Turtle,” who claimed several key victories over the U.S. settler state in the late 19th century, in key part by uniting disparate tribes into a confederacy. It was this tradition that writers like Barbara Ransby invoke when, in Making All Black Lives Matter, she describes contemporary Black movements of resistance as “modern maroon spaces.”[17] And it was this tradition that was on display when, in March 2023, a contingent of Mvskoke organizers returned to their ancestral land to deliver an eviction notice to Mayor Andre Dickens, demanding the return of the land, the cessation of “violence and policing of Indigenous and Black people in Mvskoke lands,” and the declaration of “solidarity with the Black residents of Atlanta in opposition to continued genocide via Cop City.”[18]
*
The struggle over Cop City made international news. Yet it has not been a significant site of attention for Christian theological reflection or for the study of American religion. I’ve tried in vain to find any reference to it in academic journals like American Religion, The Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, The Journal of Religious Ethics, or Political Theology, or in public facing magazines like Christian Century, Christianity Today, Commonweal, or America. The present essay is a small contribution amid this general neglect. Meanwhile, mainstream and secular press have exhaustively explored the dynamics of the Stop Cop City movement, yet struggled to recognize it as, in key part, a contestation over the sacred. Yet this dimension, what Justin Farrell calls “the sacred roots of environmental conflict,” is precisely what calls out for analysis, not only in the key role of prominent Atlanta clergy in providing a kind of theological cover for Cop City, but also in the central role of the sacred imagination in those opposing it.[19] As Mvskoke member and interfaith leader Mekko Chebon Kernell writes, the journey they undertook to deliver the eviction notice was “much more than just a physical return to a specific location; it is a spiritual and cosmic decolonizing initiative,” one that thus involved the stomp dance, ceremonial offerings and singing, the visitation of sacred sites throughout the region, and education in the history of “centuries of colonial violence against creation.”[20]
And it is this—the prospect of shared theological vision of creation—which brings us back to our opening scene. After police initially claimed Tortuguita shot at them first, the family commissioned an independent autopsy. It found that, far from attacking officers, Tortuguita was likely seated cross-legged, in a prayer position.[21] “Manuel loved the forest,” their mother said. “They meditated there, the forest connected them with God…I never thought that Manuel could die in a meditation position.”[22] One of their friends, who’s since become a friend of mine, the Reverend Matthew Johnson, wrote: “I pray that the mother of the slain, Belkis Terán, a devout Catholic, knew who her child truly was, despite the misinformation swirling around their death…May the bullet holes through their palms, holy stigmata, be a reminder that their child was a servant of God.”[23] And at the memorial service, Manuel’s father found in Saint Paul’s words the crucial frame for understanding what their child was up to in the forest: “The Bible says in Romans that the creation is suffering of childbirth pain, the creation is anxious for the redemption of the Lord. Manuel was suffering the same distress as the creation. They cried when a tree was torn down. Manuel was happy looking at how a recent planted tree was little by little growing, like a parent happy to see how their children are growing.”[24]
Who groans when creation groans? In the climate futures now emerging, some of the most vital and insurgent forms of American religious life will be where Tortuguita was—praying from inside the path of the wound. It is an open question whether Christian pastors and lay people and everyday citizens, especially those whose contemporary social position aligns them not with the history of Black and Indigenous resistance, but with those whom they were resisting, can defect from their ongoing place in the tradition of Christian mastery represented by George Key’s plantation. If so, it will look like defecting from the plantation, discerning the wounds of creation in the lands where they live, and seeking out spaces of solidarity with the work of the Spirit who groans prayers with and for a wounded world.
Matthew Elia is currently associate professor of Theology, Race, and Environment at Saint Louis University. His first book, The Problem of the Christian Master: Augustine in the Afterlife of Slavery (Yale University Press, 2024), was named a 2024 Choice Outstanding Academic Title, and he is currently at work on a second book, provisionally titled We Are Each Other’s Harvest: Ecology, Race, and the Human Condition. He was born in the Mississippi Delta and raised in Memphis.
[1] The record of the DeKalb County Medical Examiner’s autopsy may be accessed here: https://saportareport.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/teran-autopsy-report-via-lawyers-Copy.pdf. The phrase “wound paths” occurs on page 28.
[2] Most reporting shows the figure $90 million, but more recent work has revealed the higher figure of $120 million. About $30 million comes from taxpayers, the rest from the privately-controlled Atlanta Police Foundation (APF), a powerful constellation of corporate-backed interests including UPS, Wells Fargo, Home Depot, and more, which provides additional financial resources to police without public oversight or accountability. For these details, and much else, see the foundational body of writings on the movement I describe in this essay: Micah Herskind, Mariah Parker, Kamau Franklin, eds., No Cop City, No Cop World: Lessons from the Movement (Chicago: Haymarket, 2025).
[3] The open letter, “Sierra Club Georgia Chapter, 15 other environmental organizations, urge Atlanta City Council to protect the South River Forest” (August 12, 2021), is accessible here: https://www.sierraclub.org/georgia/blog/2021/08/SouthRiverForestLetter. The city’s own urban planning department had already designated the Forest one of Atlanta’s “four lungs” in 2017. The report, titled “Our Future City: The Atlanta City Design,” is accessible here: https://www.atlantaga.gov/home/showdocument?id=30594.
[4] Brooks himself, in turn, was only the latest in a line of police killings in Atlanta stretching from Oscar Cain Jr. in 2019 to Deaundre Phillips in 2017, to Deravis Caine Rogers in 2016, to Alexia Christian in 2015, and in 2006, to Kathryn Johnston—a 92-year old Black grandmother killed in a botched drug raid. Micah Herskind and Tiffany Roberts, “The Failure of Police Reform,” accessible here: https://aas.princeton.edu/news/failure-police-reform.
[5] Micah Herskind and Tiffany Roberts, “The Failure of Police Reform,” accessible here: https://aas.princeton.edu/news/failure-police-reform.
[6] Matthew V. Johnson, Jr., with an introduction by Joy James, “A Letter of Concern to Black Clergy Regarding ‘Cop City,’” Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture (Spring 2023).
[7] I have analyzed this convergence much more extensively in Matthew Elia, “Climate Apartheid, Race, and the Future of Solidarity: Three Frameworks of Response (Anthropocene, Mestizaje, Cimarronaje),” Journal of Religious Ethics 51, no. 4 (2023): 572–610.
[8] Though much of the research I consulted refers to the Indigenous inhabitants as “Muscogee” (or “Muskogee” or “Muscogee Creek”), the current spelling being used by some contemporary members of the tribe, in order to recover something closer to the original, is “Mvskoke.” The history here, as with all violent colonial histories of naming, is fraught and complex. For a discussion, see: https://pci-nsn.gov/neighbors/community-matters/decoding-mvskoke/.
[9] Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 113.
[10] See “History of the Atlanta Prison Site,” a report prepared by staff of the Atlanta History Center (May 30, 2023), 6. Accessible here: https://www.atlantahistorycenter.com/app/uploads/2023/09/WEB_ATLPrisonFarm_Report_09222023.pdf#:~:text=The%20site%20of%20the%20Atlanta%20Prison%20Farm,later%2C%20for%20use%20as%20a%20prison%20farm.
[11] See the archival research of anthropologist Mark Auslander, available here: https://markauslander.com/2022/08/04/what-these-trees-have-seen-slavery-post-slavery-and-anti-blackness-in-the-south-river-welaunee-forest-zone/.
[12] There are many paths into a deeper understanding of this story. The best theological introduction to this story remains Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). For a concise, even-handed critical introduction to the analytic framework of “world systems” in the influential work of sociologist and historian Immanuel Wallerstein, to which I allude here, see Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 48-52.
[13] Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 6.
[14] For a classic examination of the convict leasing system, see Angela Y. Davis, “From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison: Frederick Douglass and the Convict Lease System,” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Joy James (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998).
[15] Sean Keenan, “The land slated to become the controversial “Cop City” training center has already lived many lives,” Atlanta Magazine, October 7, 2021, accessible here: https://www.atlantamagazine.com/news-culture-articles/the-land-slated-to-become-the-controversial-cop-city-training-center-has-already-lived-many-lives/>.
[16] See Justin Hosbey and J. T. Roane, “A Totally Different Form of Living: On the Legacies of Displacement and Marronage as Black Ecologies,” Southern Cultures 27, no. 1 (Spring 2021), as well as Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York: New York University Press, 2014).
[17] Barbara Ransby, Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 149.
[18] See No Cop City, No Cop World: Lessons from the Movement, 87-88.
[19] See Justin Farrell, The Battle for Yellowstone: Morality and the Sacred Roots of Environmental Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). For the role of clergy in providing theological cover and a powerful theological counter-narrative, see Matthew V. Johnson, Jr., with an introduction by Joy James, “A Letter of Concern to Black Clergy Regarding ‘Cop City,’” Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture (Spring 2023).
[20] See No Cop City, No Cop World: Lessons from the Movement, 81-82, 84.
[21] The video may be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT-Lqv5n-ak&t=1272s.> The autopsy here: https://media.unicornriot.ninja/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/2023-03-07-Second-Autopsy_FINAL.pdf>.
[22] https://www.vice.com/en/article/cop-city-activist-shot-hands-up-tortuguita-death/
[23] Matthew V. Johnson, Jr., with an introduction by Joy James, “A Letter of Concern to Black Clergy Regarding ‘Cop City,’” Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture (Spring 2023). This scene also echoes one from Leonardo Boff’s Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor, about the work of Chico Mendes, murdered representative of the forest peoples in the Amazon, a ‘modern St. Francis,’ whose participation in resistance struggles involved “the famous ‘standoffs,’ a strategy by which the rubber tappers, together with their children, old people, and other allies, stood peacefully in the way of those clearing the forest and their machines, preventing them from toppling trees…” (101-2).
[24] Micah Herskind, Mariah Parker, Kamau Franklin, eds., No Cop City, No Cop World: Lessons from the Movement (Chicago: Haymarket, 2025), 212.
