The path to the forest rave began at a freshly-torched Ram 5500 pickup truck, its eviscerated cab strung up with fairy lights that pointed visitors toward a line of glow sticks leading into pine trees. Early that morning, a muggy Saturday in July, the truck had showed up outside a park in southeastern Atlanta to tow cars and help demolish a gazebo that local anarchists had been using as a zine library. A throng of people fully covered in black and camouflage emerged from the trees, forced out the truck's driver, dismantled most of the truck, and set its skeleton on fire. It was a warning to the police, and the owner of local film studio Blackhall (who had sent the truck), not to enter this contested territory.

According to the police, the park—called Intrenchment Creek on maps and Weelaunee, the Muscogee name for the land, by the anarchists—is private property, part of a reviled land swap with the film studio that would destroy 40 acres of trees and replace them with a complex of sound stages for shooting action movies. Across a creek, the city plans to lease another swath of forest to the Atlanta Police Foundation for $10 a year. That land has a history of violence: after the U.S. stole it from the Muscogee, it was a plantation for almost a hundred years, and then a prison farm. Now, the APF wants to clearcut 80 acres, about the size of 40 Olympic swimming pools, to build one of the largest police training facilities in the U.S. It would cost $90 million and include a high-speed chase area, a helipad and a mock town for simulating urban operations. Opponents call the project "Cop City." Only the police and politicians seem to support either plan.

Locals organizing against the projects (some of whom helped torch the truck) instead want the land preserved for public use. It is the city's largest contiguous forest, acting as bulwark against the floods and heatwaves that climate collapse will continue to visit upon this already famously hot and flood-prone city. Since last summer, dozens of these activists have camped out among the pine trees, some in treehouses, as part of an autonomous movement that calls itself Defend the Atlanta Forest.They have already delayed the projects by several months. For the party promoters who count themselves among these forest defenders, throwing raves is their chosen method of resistance.

"We all have something different to contribute to our vision of this movement, and this is our contribution," says a member of No Lite, the long-running, anonymous Atlanta DIY collective that has produced several raves within the forest defense. In recent years, the collective has watched Atlanta's aggressive courting of the film industry gentrify most underground party spaces off the map. "We've been pushed out of the city into the forest, and the forest is our last hope. If we lose the forest, we have nowhere else to go. That's really how it feels."

Against the backdrop of a global electronic music market valued most recently at over $6 billion, the forest defense parties carry on a decades-long, international lineage of renegade raves as protests. Anarchists living in squats in post-Soviet Berlin originated the city's techno scene, and more recently, ravers in Tbilisi, Kyiv and New York have thrown parties with political aims. Less explicitly protests, but more broadly influential, were the field raves of the Second Summer of Love, which in reclaiming space for unregulated public use pushed against the political repression of Thatcherite Britain without demanding that participants actively engage in politics.

No Lite, says another member of the collective, aims to blend these two tendencies of rave culture. He points to a mid-1990s UK movement called Reclaim the Streets, which organized parties as part of a larger political campaign to stop highway expansions that destroyed open land. "There are scenes from Reclaim the Streets parties where there's lines of police trying to block the roads, and the soundsystem turns on, and thousands of youth flood onto the highway—not because they want to fight the police, or destroy the road. They want to go to this party that's free in a way that nothing else that society offers them. And that's what we're trying to do, create that feeling of an alternative."

It used to be easy to find places to throw raves in Atlanta. All promoters had to do was walk along the abandoned rail line that rings the city until they found a good spot. That changed with the construction of the BeltLine, a redevelopment of the railway into a mixed-use corridor molded after New York's ritzy High Line. Real estate companies have snapped up warehouses to build condos, driving prices up in previously affordable neighborhoods and forcing parties out of their spaces across the city. "The BeltLine has destroyed nearly every warehouse we had,” says Vicki Powell, who has been throwing parties in Atlanta for 30 years and played a set at the July forest rave. "And then we lost a ton of our underground venues during Covid, so we're struggling to find new homes for our events. We're going back to really heavy DIY stuff right now."

In a way, it makes sense that a forest has become the community's last stand for party space. Atlanta is nicknamed "the city in the forest" because almost half of it sits under tree canopy, a rarity in a country where the average city has only 27% cover. Trees rival rap as the biggest source of civic pride. But as far as anyone knows, there had never been a rave in this forest until June 2021. At that point there was no forest defense, just activists organizing against the construction projects, some of whom called for a weeklong, protest-heavy campout to spread awareness of Cop City and the Blackhall development. No Lite, whose members were already involved in the Cop City resistance, announced a rave to cap off the week of action.

With little experience throwing a party quite so far off the grid, their setup was light: a folding table, two CDJ-700s, a two-channel mixer, speakers and a single generator nestled in the creek gully separating the two contested land parcels. About 500 people showed up, mostly locals, many of whom had never been to the forest but left the party furious about Cop City. "Some people camped out for the rave and just never left," a forest defender who gave his name only as Joey remembers. That's a bit of a simplification, the organizers say—the encampment still would have happened without the rave—but it meant that raves have always been part of the movement.

Every week of action since then has included one. The most recent parties happened across a three-day music festival co-curated by collectives from around the city. For the first time, bands appeared alongside DJs—a reflection, says one member of No Lite, of the rapid growth of the forest defense over the last year: "It wasn't until now that there needed to be a cultural event this big, because the reach of the movement has been so great." Atlanta's DIY music scenes have porous boundaries, with ravers, punks and rappers rolling through each other's parties indiscriminately, so the festival's organizers chose not to cluster sets by genres. Attendees were just as likely to hear techno at 5 PM as they were hardcore (punk, not rave) at 3 AM. "We didn't want people just coming out to see one particular performer, or for one chunk of time or style of music. We wanted people to be in the forest and participate," says another No Lite member.

With only one stage to host many genres, each scene's choreography clashed joyfully with the music of another. Ravers swayed and two-stepped to hardcore. Mosh pits and skank circles broke out during techno sets. Between performances, and sometimes during, people got on the mic to remind the crowd that their presence had a purpose—to defend the forest. Once the music started up again, chants sometimes swelled up from the crowd, a delayed response to the speeches: "Stop Cop City!" or "A-T-L, hoes!" or "Fuck twelve!" (slang for the police that Atlanta rappers spread nationwide.) Very little about the night conformed to what an experienced raver might expect from a party. There were no club-ready looks or buzzy touring DJs. But there was a crackling feeling of joy, and the undeniable thrill of breaking the rules.

DJ Chooch, who is from Atlanta and pumped Marie Davidson's "Balade Aux USA" through the pines during an afternoon DJ set, joined the lineup partly because they see Cop City as a threat to the local scene. "Our parties are already so policed, and building a training facility would make that even worse," they say. Playing at a free party in a forest makes them feel connected to the long history of generator raves in the U.S. Southeast, which hasn't gotten the same recognition as the same history in the Midwest. And it also makes them feel connected to the international tradition of raves as reclaimed spaces of resistance. "It's what I want from dance music—open to everyone, uncommodified, existing in actual community," they add.

The forest defense is what anarchists call a temporary autonomous zone—a place to experiment with different ways of organizing a community, or even a society, that are not possible under current structures. Philosopher Hakim Bey created the term around the time that rave culture was exploding in the late 1980s, defining it in one instance as "a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the state can crush it." The concept has been associated with underground parties ever since. In Energy Flash, Simon Reynolds names illegal free raves as "a perfect real-world example of the temporary autonomous zone."

In the TAZ of the forest, everyone is expected to support the encampment in some way, whether through cooking, maintaining the camp, offering skills like first aid or meeting facilitation, or just completing a task when asked. But there is no one in charge. A flyer distributed during the festival explained the movement not as a fight over a piece of land but as "the collision of two competing ideas of life and the future," two ways to organize the world. In one vision, governments and police are allowed to cut down forests over community opposition and build a thousand Cop Cities amid accelerating environmental collapse. In the other, forests grow, climate change slows and parties abound, "our communities [held] together by music."

Stacks of the manifesto sat on the bar all night at the rave, with glow sticks gently guiding guests to read them. The bartender was a promoter named Olive, who throws a queer party called SXTEM in underground spaces throughout Atlanta. In between popping open cans—$1 off for bringing her five pieces of trash—she explained that a renegade rave is an ideal place to practice autonomy. "Without the infrastructure of the club, people very quickly learn how to stop waiting for help and start asking what they can help with," she said. "We start returning to our core humanity and challenging the forces that seek to take these places away. It goes beyond partying. It's so much bigger than us."