What does Dr. Kush Naker, a 33-year-old doctor of infectious diseases from London, share in common with 61 protesters currently facing racketeering charges in Georgia for protesting a planned 85-acre police training facility through an Atlanta forest?
Both were upheld by climate activists as an example of “egregious” ways in which the law has come down especially hard on those protesting humanity’s self-destructive over-reliance on fossil fuels. In May 2023, Naker was arrested at the coronation of King Charles III for simply wearing a shirt for Just Stop Oil, a British environmental activist group that wants the United Kingdom to eliminate new fossil fuel licensing and production.
On the other side of the Atlantic, a group known as “Stop Cop City” is being targeted by prosecutors who describe the activists as “militant anarchists.” The protestors goal is to halt the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, nicknamed Cop City, which is a proposed police and firefighter training facility to be constructed in an Atlanta urban forest. Its opponents cite both social justice and environmental reasons for why this construction should be halted.