We Came to the Forest

Host Matthew Shaer walks listeners into the South River Forest outside Atlanta, where a grassroots encampment tried to stop construction of a massive police training complex that critics named Cop City. The nine-episode series from Wondery, Campside Media, and Tenderfoot TV centers on Vienna, a delivery driver turned activist who found friendship, purpose, and a surprising romance among the tree-sitters before a January morning raid changed everything. Shaer spent months talking with protesters, neighbors, officers, and family members of the activist known as Tortuguita, whose death during the raid became a flashpoint in a much wider fight over policing, land use, and dissent in America. The reporting is careful and textured. You hear the creak of platforms in the canopy, the rustle of state troopers moving through brush at dawn, the voicemails of worried parents. Shaer does not flatten anyone into heroes or villains. He lets contradictions sit. Some episodes trace the long history of Black neighborhoods displaced by earlier construction on the same land. Others follow the legal machinery that labeled forest defenders as domestic terrorists. Listeners who liked Serial or S-Town will recognize the patient, scene-driven approach. It is a story about what a person owes the place they love and what they are willing to risk when bulldozers show up. Expect moments that are tender, funny, infuriating, and very hard to shake.