Atlanta Activist Tells Her Neighbors: “You Are Your Environment!”
By Dorothy Terry
Jackie Echols didn’t need another crisis to add to her dossier. As president of the South River Watershed Alliance (SRWA), she was already working hard to clean up a river — almost forgotten by locals — that flows through Fulton, DeKalb, Rockdale and Henry counties in Georgia. South River traverses a mostly low-income African American community and has long been polluted by sewage spills and hemmed in by landfills, truck yards and industrial sites.
But the mission to clean up the South River became even more challenging for SRWA when another issue arose, one that has gotten national and even international attention: a controversial police and fire training complex officially known as the Atlanta Training Facility but dubbed Cop City by its opponents.
SWRA contends that the project, originally announced in 2017 and begun in spring of 2023, further compromises the already environmentally fragile Intrenchment Creek. The creek runs through South River Forest and is one of the river’s major urban tributaries. Sediment from the construction site is filtering into the creek and flowing into the South River.
In August 2023, SRWA filed suit in federal district court for an injunction to stop the project. The lawsuit claims construction at Cop City is violating the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Water Act by “allowing sediment from the site to degrade water quality and aquatic habitat in Intrenchment Creek and lessen the aesthetic, scenic and recreational values of the area.”
The Clean Water Act regulates discharges of pollutants into U.S. waters and controls pollution by setting wastewater standards for industry.
The lawsuit notes that, despite a 2017 city of Atlanta report recognizing the area that encompasses the South River watershed as a conservation corridor to be protected from new development, and identifying the city-owned, 300-plus-acre former Atlanta Prison Farm as the largest tract to be protected, the city council later voted to authorize Atlanta Police Foundation, Inc., to construct the Atlanta Training Facility on the Old Atlanta Prison Farm site.
Protest organizers had submitted a 116,000-signature petition to the City of Atlanta in December 2023 calling for a referendum to stop the Cop City construction. However, concerns were raised about the validity of half the signatures, prompting protesters to question the city’s methodology for validating petition signatures. New signature validation rules adopted during a contentious Feb. 5 city council meeting will allow the referendum procedure to move forward.
Meanwhile, construction at Cop City continues.
Echols at first wondered why they would build such a thing in an ecologically sensitive area. But as soon as she asked the question, she knew the answer. “No one else in Atlanta would stand for this,” says Echols. “They don’t care about the impact on the [Black] folks who live over there. It’s environmental justice on steroids.”
With this lawsuit, Echols and her group join a growing list of activists who have for the past two years been challenging the 85-acre, $90 million facility. In addition to environmentalists, demonstrators have included police reformers, faith leaders and members of Indigenous tribes. A protestor, Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, was killed by police in January 2023. Autopsy reports indicate he was shot 57 times while seated with his hands raised. Police say he instigated a shootout.
Echols has mostly stayed away from the demonstrations, however, believing a more constructive battle can be fought in the courts.
In addition to the lawsuit, in October 2023, SRWA has also filed a Title VI Civil Rights Act administrative complaint with the EPA, maintaining that constructing the training facility on this site is not only an environmental injustice but environmental racism.
Environmental racism is race-based discrimination in environmental policymaking, enforcement of regulations and laws, and targeting communities of color for the siting of toxic and polluting industries resulting in disproportionate harm.
Echols bristles at what she describes as a “toxic facility” being erected to mimic urban neighborhoods where police are being trained to control the mostly Black residents.
Black and other people of color make up 76 percent of the population residing in south and southeast Atlanta and comprise most residents that live closest to the facility.
Acknowledging that “you just can’t separate them,” in reference to the confluence of environmental and social justice issues surrounding Cop City, Echols says, “I spend a lot of time bridging that gap among Black folk who live in this community.”
She tells residents who express apathy to environmental issues: “You are your environment. What’s happening with Cop City is happening in your environment, and you can’t survive over here without a healthy environment.”
In addition to the pollution of the area’s waterways, Echols says smoke from training fires that will constantly be set at the facility could also negatively impact air quality for residents.
As the EPA filing and the Cop City lawsuit play out (a judge heard oral arguments on the training facility suit in November 2023), SRWA is involved in continuing legal battles on two other fronts. A fight with the EPA that began in 2010 to put more teeth into a consent decree issued to DeKalb County to clean up sewage spills that affect the river is ongoing. And in 2020, the group filed a lawsuit against the city for what it views as an illegal swap of 40 acres of public parkland along the river to private developers. “They can put anything there, including a landfill,” laments Echols.
Despite these challenges, Echols is continuing to do what she’s always done in her more than two decades as a water warrior — trying to get more people out on the river to raise awareness about the importance of maintaining healthy green spaces.
“The first money we raised as a group, we bought up kayaks and paddles and life jackets,” she recalls of SRWA’s early years. Undaunted by DeKalb County officials who initially told them they couldn’t paddle on the polluted river — SRWA organizes water-quality tests with the help of students from Georgia State University — Echols estimates the group has since led thousands of mostly African Americans down the river.
“Many of them have never kayaked and don’t swim,” says Echols, “but once they get on the river and see what it’s all about, they are converted. They love it.”
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Dorothy Terry is a journalist/writer with Anthropocene Alliance, an organization representing more than 250 front-line environmental activist groups in 41 U.S. states and territories.
