Toward a World Where We Can Breathe: Abolitionist Environmental Justice Praxis

This article contributes to the growing literature bringing together environmental justice (EJ) and abolition, offering the Charles Roundtree Bloom Project in San Antonio, Texas, as a case of abolitionist EJ praxis. I argue that the Bloom Project disrupts capitalist and colonial relations, even if only provisionally, through radical space- and place-making that allow alternative worlds to emerge. “I can’t breathe” has been an embodiment and structure of feeling that reflects the historical patterns of policing and pollution across racialized geographies in the United States and connects historical patterns of racial capitalism and colonialism. I suggest that the Bloom Project is a model of how we can move from “I can’t breathe” to imagining and growing worlds where we can breathe. By foregrounding the work of the Bloom Project, this article moves away from analyses primarily focused on highlighting the ways that low-income communities of color are toxic and toward the ways that communities are imagining and practicing alternative ways of being, embodying the worlds they desire. I demonstrate how abolitionist EJ praxis contributes to the liberation of carceral geographies and toxic ways of relating to ourselves, each other, and the more-than-human world by providing alternative relationalities based on affirming and sustaining lifeways.

W e can breathe. I begin this article with an invitation to imagine a world where Black, Indigenous, and youth of color specifically, but ultimately everybody, can breathe. What infrastructure would have to be put in place, what ways of being would have to shift, what would we have to transform for the affirmation, "we can breathe," to be true?
"I can't breathe" has been the embodiment and structure of feeling that reflects the historical patterns of policing and pollution across racialized geographies in the United States, and more broadly, connects historical patterns of racial capitalism and colonialism. "I can't breathe" became a rallying cry and invocation of the Black Lives Matter movement after members of the New York City Police Department choked Eric Garner, leading to his death in 2014. Garner repeated, "I can't breathe," eleven times. Garner also had asthma, a disease related to exposure to environmental pollution. The historical patterns of policing and pollution have restricted and denied breath and healthy breathing spaces for low-income communities of color (Dillon and Sze 2016, 7). In 2020, George Floyd cried, "I can't breathe," more than twenty times while members of the Minneapolis Police Department kneeled on his neck, resulting in Floyd's death. This happened during the global coronavirus pandemic where nationally, Black Americans have been contracting and dying from COVID-19 at disproportionate rates (Godoy and Wood 2020;COVID Racial Data Tracker 2021), and the Navajo Nation has had the highest COVID-19 infection rates per capita (Silverman et al. 2020). "I can't breathe" is not only an embodiment of suffocation experienced by Black Americans, but it is also an embodiment that resonates with other colonized peoples, including Indigenous peoples in the United States and other settler-colonial countries such as Australia (Belfi 2020;Habtom and Scribe 2020;Harrison 2020;Mosley and McMahon 2020). Racial capitalism and colonialisms create the condition of suffocation.
Informed by my embodied experiences growing up in neighborhoods that were hyperpoliced, hyperincarcerated, and polluted, I am interested in exploring how we create spaces where Black, Indigenous, and youth of color can breathe, and in doing so, how we prefigure and embody alternative worlds where we can all breathe. This study (1) theorizes how we might bridge abolitionist and environmental justice (EJ) praxes to liberate our carceral and toxic geographies to move toward a world where we can breathe, and (2) offers the Charles Roundtree Bloom Project as a case of abolitionist EJ praxis. The Bloom Project is an outdoor healing justice program for youth affected by incarceration in Yanaguana/San Antonio, Texas. I am the founder and director of the Bloom Project, a program of the nonprofit organization Black Outside, Inc. I named the program in honor of my eighteenyear-old cousin, Charles "Chop" Roundtree, Jr., who was shot and killed by a member of the San Antonio Police Department in 2018. The program carries on my cousin's legacy by spreading seeds of healing where his spirit will bloom in new forms. The Bloom Project supports youth who have had an incarcerated parent or caregiver at any point in their life (including jail, prison, or immigrant detention) or have been involved in the juvenile system themselves. It aims to address the consequences of incarceration on youth and their families by (re)connecting them with the land (providing "nature"-based experiences) and providing culturally relevant, critical environmental and social justice education. The program provides a range of outdoor experiences from community gardening and art workshops locally to overnight camping and backpacking trips outside of San Antonio. Every experience is focused on learning and healing in community with the land.
How does the Bloom Project's abolitionist EJ praxis create spaces where Black, Indigenous, and youth of color can breathe? How might the practice of abolitionist EJ emerge alternative worlds where we (everybody) can breathe? I explore these questions autoethnographically, through my experiences as director of the Bloom Project and highlighting voices of Bloom youth participants. I argue that the Bloom Project disrupts capitalist and colonial relations, even if only provisionally, through radical space-and place-making that allow alternative worlds to emerge. By foregrounding the practices of the Bloom Project, this article moves away from analyses primarily focused on highlighting the ways that low-income communities of color are toxic and toward the ways that communities are imagining and practicing alternative ways of being and breathing, embodying the worlds we desire. I suggest that the Bloom Project models how we can move from "I can't breathe" to imagining and growing worlds where we can breathe.
The Bloom Project slogan is "Creating spaces where we can breathe." This slogan is an affirmation, a practice, an aspirational goal, and an already realized embodiment, albeit a contingent one. Throughout this article, I use breathing and breathwork as an analytical framework as this work is about sustaining life within and beyond the unbreathable context (Gumbs 2020) created by racial capitalism and colonialism. Moreover, breathing is an inherently collaborative process; thus, I find it an apt frame for theorizing and analyzing abolitionist EJ praxis. First, I use breathing to define carceral geographies as toxic geographies, underscoring the toxicity of carceral logics from an EJ lens. Then, I analyze my experiences and the experiences of youth participants in the Bloom Project to theorize abolitionist EJ praxis as breathwork. Finally, I close the article with a discussion on composting justice, where I propose a conception of justice that is based on our capacities to heal.
This article contributes to the growing field of Black geographies and the emergence of new frameworks within the EJ field (Pellow 2016;Pulido, Kohl, and Cotton 2016) by highlighting Black, Indigenous, and youth of color experiences and agency in cocreating and prefiguring abolitionist presents and futures. Black geographies articulates a practice of geography that prioritizes the spatial capacities of Black communities rather than pathologizing these experiences (McKittrick and Woods 2007;Bledsoe, Eaves, and Williams 2017). This article contributes to critical geographic knowledge on race, nature, and the environment by providing insight into how we might not only theorize more socially and environmentally just worlds but materialize them in collaboration with marginalized youth using a desire-centered, community-based approach. Youth and community-centered geographic knowledge that prioritizes the spatial capacities and potentiality of youth and communities of color rather than merely problematizing youth and their communities make space for important theory building that can offer new insights in geographic thinking and then be (re)applied on the ground. Reciprocal, desire-centered, community-based scholarship is still underrated in geography; thus, this article can serve as an example of what community-based scholarship can look like in the discipline, especially for scholars who are working within communities of which they are a part. I used "embodied or somatic inquiry" (Jones 2019) to record and analyze my autoethnographic experiences of Bloom Project events and trips. I also used embodied inquiry to analyze Aven's podcast interview. This means that my observations and analysis are attentive to feeling and knowing in the body. In my autoethnographic journaling, I chose to be attentive to feeling, focusing on the feelings that came up for me during the Bloom Project events and trips. Embodied inquiry comes from a tradition of feminist theorists that values knowledge from lived experiences and recognizes our bodies and feeling as significant sources of knowing (Lorde 1984;Collins 1986; Gom ez-Barris 2017; brown 2019). Lorde (1984) taught us that the possibility of freedom lies in our capacities to feel, not in our abilities to think. Our bodies hold wisdom. brown (2019) defined somatics as "a path, a methodology, a change theory, by which we can embody transformation, individually and collectively. … It helps us to develop depth and the capacity to feel ourselves, each other and life around us" (17). I chose to use somatic or embodied inquiry as an analytical frame because through my abolitionist praxis I have learned that we internalize capitalist and colonial ways of being; we carry these systems in our bodies. I believe we can unlearn and heal these relations through somatic inquiry and practice. Furthermore, somatic inquiry is important to my conception of abolitionist EJ because prefiguring the worlds we desire requires that we are in tune with our bodies, the presence of connection, and the connections we long for. Using somatic inquiry as an analytical frame helps me examine and understand what abolition geographies feel like.

Methodology
I chose to do autoethnography because my research questions and interests have come from my embodied experiences. Autoethnography allows me to place myself inside of the research, rather than only seeking knowledge from outside of myself. Doing autoethnography requires a high level of vulnerability (Lac and Fine 2018) and lends itself to an intimacy (Bloch 2022) that is traditionally kept out of academic research. This research is personal to me, and I realize that the Bloom Project is not just providing a service outside of my own needs but is a space of healing for me, too. The Bloom Project's mission is to create a space of communal healing for youth affected by incarceration, and one of the ways we do that is by disrupting the practices of trauma suppression, disconnection, and silence that often affect youth in this context by providing a space where our youth can process issues relevant to their lives. Doing autoethnography is an opportunity for me to examine my own perspective and affirm for my inner child and the youth I work with that their perspectives matter. My goal is to uplift the lived and felt experiences of youth of color who rarely get to have their voices, ideas, feelings, and experiences heard and validated. Centering knowledge from these youth's embodied experiences acknowledges their expertise and their position as holders and producers of knowledge and wisdom.

Carceral Geographies Are Toxic Geographies
Breath Is Life; Breath Is Spirit I define carceral geographies as places and spaces of enclosure that restrict and deny breath. Carceral logics of policing, criminalization, caging, disposability, and punishment extend beyond prisons. Carceral geographies include the spaces where we live, work, learn, play, pray, and do time (e.g., prisons, plantations, reservations, military bases, segregated cities and towns, schools, etc.; Gilmore 2017; Rodr ıguez 2019; Heynen and Ybarra 2020). Carceral geographies are toxic geographies because they restrict and deny breath. The logics of carcerality are toxic ways of relating to each other, ourselves, and the land.
A growing movement of communities, activists, and prisoners are using an EJ framework, identifying police and prisons as toxic to communities (Braz and Gilmore 2006; Californians United for a Responsible Budget 2016; Swain 2019; also see Fight Toxic Prisons). Keeping in mind the carceral logics that underpin and create carceral geographies, I extend the idea of police and prisons as toxic and argue that our practice and embodiment of carceral logics are toxic. I am not making an argument about the toxicity of physical sites, but about how the carceral logics of punishment, policing, criminalization, caging, and disposability permeate our communities and our embodiments-how we relate to ourselves, each other, and the land. I am concerned with how an abolitionist EJ praxis can help us to sustain lifeways beyond carceral geographies.
To think beyond carceral geographies, the rest of this article highlights how the Bloom Project is building an abolition geography of care, healing, interdependence, and easy breathing with and for our community and the land. EJ tends to focus on the toxicity of places, but we need also to perceive the potentiality of places (Dillon 2017). Pellow (2016) proposed critical environmental justice studies, which provides a framework for us to think about the potentiality of places and the indispensability of racialized people in fashioning socially and environmentally just futures. Following Dillon's and Pellow's Black geographic practice of prioritizing the spatial capacities of Black communities instead of pathologizing them (McKittrick and Woods 2007; Bledsoe, Eaves, and Williams 2017), I focus on how the Bloom Project is proactively forging healthy breathing spaces for youth affected by incarceration.

The Charles Roundtree Bloom Project: A Case of Abolitionist EJ Praxis
Engaging with scholarship bringing together abolition, decolonization, and EJ into conversation (Pellow 2016(Pellow , 2019Dillon and Sze 2016;Heynen 2016aHeynen , 2016b; Daigle and Ram ırez 2019; Heynen and Ybarra 2020), in this section I conceptualize abolitionist EJ and explore the worlds that emerge through the Bloom Project's practice of abolitionist EJ. To demonstrate the Bloom Project's abolitionist EJ praxis, I highlight my experiences and the experiences of youth participants from Bloom Project events and trips from 2021 to 2022. Although abolition and EJ are the focus of this article, I engage with work that also centers decolonization because I do not believe I can ethically discuss the imperative of abolition and EJ in the United States without uplifting the import of decolonization. We cannot think about abolition in the United States without also thinking about decolonization, and vice versa. Although Tuck and Yang (2012) and other scholars have argued that decolonization is incommensurate with abolition, in alignment with Tongva and Acjachemen scholar Sepulveda (2020), who suggested that Black and Indigenous incommensurability is produced through the logics of White supremacy, I understand abolition and decolonization as intimately interconnected assertions for life. Following Daigle and Ram ırez (2019) and Simpson (2017), I am politically invested in how abolition and decolonization can be in "constellation." The Bloom Project's abolitionist EJ praxis is in solidarity with the project of decolonization in the United States, which requires the return of land and Indigenous lifeways. The Bloom Project curriculum uplifts the interconnection of Black and Indigenous struggles, and we intend to continue to collaborate with Indigenous comrades in Yanaguana/San Antonio toward our collective liberation.
San Antonio, located in Bexar County, Texas, is one of the most economically segregated cities in the United States, and leads in spatial inequality, which means disparities in access to resources, health care, educational attainment, municipal services, and even disparities in life expectancy between the city's wealthy and poor neighborhoods (Munson 2017). Bexar County has the highest asthma rates of all major metropolitan areas in Texas and ties Travis County for most childhood asthma hospitalizations (Gibbons 2018). Asthma hospitalization in Bexar County is consistently highest among non-Hispanic Black people (Ugalde and Agha 2021). Also in Texas, there are nearly 700,000 people under correctional supervision (Kaeble and Cowig 2018) and nearly half a million children who have had a parent incarcerated (Annie E. Casey Foundation 2016).
Whereas Black people make up 9 percent of the population in Bexar County, they make up almost 17 percent of the jail population and nearly 18 percent of the prison population in Bexar County. This is the unbreathable context in San Antonio.
These statistics help paint a picture of why the Bloom Project is needed in San Antonio. In 2020, the Bloom Project had twenty-two youth participants between the ages of eleven and twenty, and the majority of the youth identify as Black (68 percent Black, 24 percent mixed, 4 percent Latine/Hispanic, and 4 percent Indigenous/Native American). One hundred percent of the youth in the program have had an incarcerated parent or caregiver at some point in their life. I started the Bloom Project because I know intimately the traumatic effects of having incarcerated parents and caregivers, and after finding healing through connecting with the land as an adult, I wanted to create a space of communal healing for youth going through similar experiences. The consequences of having an incarcerated parent include social and emotional challenges, critical health outcomes, housing instability, financial hardship, lower educational opportunities and outcomes, and changing caregivers, including being funneled into the foster care system (Coronado 2020). Understanding the ways the incarceration system affects our lives, we are collaboratively envisioning and prefiguring alternative possibilities for our lives, our communities, and our world.
Abolition and EJ are spatial and embodied praxes that connect different groups of people, places, and issues in struggle. Abolition is not only about the abolition of prison facilities and police forces (which have a direct impact on land and land management) but the abolition of the carceral logics that underpin our society, including our ways of relating. Abolition is a praxis of refusing the carceral logics of punishment, isolation, and criminalization and reimagining, healing, and transforming the ways we relate to land, each other, and ourselves. Abolitionists are invested in understanding and unveiling the ways in which struggles are connected and bringing these intersections to light in an effort to build solidarity and bridge movements in a common struggle. EJ seeks to address environmental issues by centering race, class, gender, and justice. Like abolition, EJ has been a site of convergence, where different groups, issues, methodologies, and movements come together (Sze and London 2008;Dillon and Sze 2016;Pulido and De Lara 2018). Abolitionist EJ praxis is bridge work-connecting across differences. 1 We do bridge work in the Bloom Project by teaching our youth interdependence and discussing how different struggles for justice are connected. We do bridge work by confronting and undoing the borders, walls, and cages that attempt to separate and isolate us and prohibit coconspiration toward our collective liberation. In 2021, our curriculum theme was migration. One of our 2021 sessions was a clay workshop at the 1906 Art Complex in San Antonio. We began the session in a small gallery space that had three walls. I posed a series of questions to the youth: What is a border? A wall? A cage? When are borders/walls/cages helpful? When are borders/walls/cages harmful? They mentioned national borders, prisons, caging animals, and the walls of a house to protect us from the elements. One youth saliently pointed out that "a cage is kind of like a border." This youth's observation aligns with Davis and Dent's (2001) assessment that "the prison is itself a border," an analysis that came from prisoners, who note how prison walls function as a border between prisoners and the "free world" (1236-37). Loyd, Burridge, and Mitchelson (2009) wrote, "Understanding the prison as a border enables us to tie the present intensification of border fortification and expansion within long and unique histories of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism" (85). Understanding the prison as a border more clearly reveals the connection between the U.S. immigration and prison systems, which function similarly in how they reinforce borders and binaries of good and bad, deserving and undeserving. This youth's observation is an example of the bridge work the Bloom Project encourages, refusing the ways capitalism and colonialism seek to separate and isolate groups of people, struggles, and connection to land and other species.
One fifteen-year-old youth, Aven, was interviewed about her outdoor experiences for the Dancing on Desks podcast and discussed how participating in the Bloom Project has allowed her to break down this good-bad binary and shift her perception of people in her life. She said: At one of our recent Bloom Project events where we went, not out of town, but like an hour or two away. … Being out there, being able to talk to people, having no choice but to let my guard down … and putting my trust in other people. … Being in the Bloom Project … shows me that not everything is always bad. Some people do bad things but that does not mean that they're bad people. So I feel like that trip made me see some people different. (Cooper and Thesing 2022) This trip facilitated a space where Aven could let her guard down and open herself up to connecting and building trust with others. Aven gained a more complex and empathetic understanding of people. I would argue that disrupting the good-bad and deserving-undeserving binaries is the foundation to building abolition geographies because resisting these binaries moves us away from the thinking that certain groups of people are disposable. Building abolition geographies requires vulnerability, trustbuilding, and holding complexity. Teaching our youth to break down the binaries that sustain carceral geographies is one way we imagine and move toward worlds beyond borders, walls, and cages. Angela Davis (1974) said, "Walls turned sideways are bridges." By creating safe and brave spaces for vulnerability and trust-building, the Bloom Project is building bridges in our communities instead of borders, walls, and cages.
At our clay workshop, we made individual pinch pot planters, a collective coil pot, and painted tiles that will be used to make a bridge. Working with clay was messy and more difficult than I imagined. I felt insecure and frustrated while making my pinch pot because of all the cracks that kept forming in my pot. At the same time, I felt determined and reassured because I was not the only one struggling and some of the youth's pots were coming out much smoother than mine. To preface making our pots, we reflected on home-what it means to us and the kinds of homes we want to create for ourselves and with each other. Acknowledging that home might not always be a safe or consistent place, I invited the youth to ground themselves in the idea of our bodies as our homes and Earth as the home that we all share. Our pots were homes we were creating for our plants. Gilmore (2017) declared that "Abolition geography starts from the homely premise that freedom is a place" (227). Freedom is a place that we make in community, with what we have (Gilmore 2017, 239). Our clay workshop taught me that making abolition geographies is a practice of creating home with(in) each other. Freedom is not a place that we find, but that we create with our hands, hearts, minds, and Earth. To make our collective coil pot, each one of us had to make a coil of clay and layer one coil on top of another. Each coil is uniquely made. The process was messy, and the coils varied in width and length. Home making and world making in community happens not from a singular vision of freedom, but a layering of our desires one on top of another. This kind of bridge work of imagining and making home together enables "abolition geography-how and to what end people make freedom provisionally, imperatively, as they imagine home against the disintegrating grind of partition and repartition through which racial capitalism perpetuates the means of its own valorization" (Gilmore 2017, 238). Whereas colonialism and capitalism separate and alienate, making abolitionist geographies involves recognizing home in each other. When we do bridge work, recognizing the interconnectedness of the structures that create our unbreathable contexts, then we can unravel the layers of our oppression and begin to practice coiling the worlds we desire.
How do we grow our capacities to recognize home in each other and imagine and build abolition geographies? Doing abolitionist organizing work for seven years and paying attention to the moments in the Bloom Project that felt has taught me that deep listening is a key practice in how we increase our capacities to build bridges to grow abolition geographies. Gumbs (2020) asked, "How can we listen across species, across extinction, across harm" (15). She defined listening as being "not only about the normative ability to hear, it is a transformative and revolutionary resource that requires quieting down and tuning in" (Gumbs 2020, 15). During the first night of the Bloom Project's camping trip at Big Bend National Park in 2021, we cultivated a moment of deep interspecies listening. We were sitting around a campfire and eating s'mores. The youth were chatting and laughing. I was tired but happy with how the day went. After a while, because it was getting late and we needed to wind down, I asked everyone to play the silent game so that we could all just listen. One of our trip leaders noticed that some of the youth had a hard time sitting in silence, and out of genuine curiosity, she asked the group if they felt uncomfortable with silence. A few of the youth admitted their discomfort with being in silence and one of them shared their difficulties with being still in general. After that conversation, most of us looked up at the starry sky as we sat in silence. I heard the crackling of the fire, giggles from some of the youth across from me, sounds of the plastic wrappers from one of the youth making a s'more, and the vastness of the desert. I have returned to this moment several times since that trip. This moment stands out because I felt connected through our shared quiet. I felt a tingling sense of wonder and gratitude from the experience of our collective and communal listening.
We cannot do bridge work without deep listening. At the same time, our trip leader's question reminds me that listening does not always feel easy. Spaces of collective listening can generate deep connections. Why does silence or quiet make us uncomfortable? What constellations (Simpson 2017)  The next morning after breakfast, we had a circle to reflect on our first night at Big Bend and set intentions for the rest of our time there. One youth shared that sitting at the campfire and star gazing was their favorite part of the day because it gave them time to reflect and that their mindset about their life was already shifting. For many of the youth, this was the first time they were able to see a dark sky full of stars. This youth was not only taking in the night sky and listening to the land, but was listening inward, and that was impactful for them. This space of collective listening to the land and listening inward allowed the formation of new desires, ideas, or feelings for this youth. Rather than the colonial desire to know, by (mostly and eventually) surrendering to the quiet and listening, we cocreated a space of introspective and extrospective reflection and wonder, opening ourselves up to a humbler relationship with the vast land and starry sky. What might the land reflect back in us when we listen deeply? Deep listening requires opening ourselves up to an unknown, to an elsewhere perhaps, which is different from the colonial desire to know and the capitalist desire to extract value.
The roots of the contemporary abolition movement, which calls for the abolition of the prison industrial complex (PIC), trace to the struggles for the abolition of slavery in the West. Slavery was and is essential to the logics of colonialism and racial capitalism. As a struggle against racial capitalism and colonialism, abolition matters for our bodies and for the land. A settler-colonial, racial capitalist society produces relationalities to land and bodies as property that can be extracted and converted into exchange value. For example, when one becomes a prisoner, they are considered property of the state. Thus, abolition means the abolition of property (Tuck and Yang 2012;Walcott 2021). Walcott (2021) argued that "Black people will not fully be able to breathe … until property itself is abolished" (11). The abolition of property means refusing the colonial and capitalist relations of property and extraction that organize our society. As a worldending and world-building project concerned with transforming relations, abolition is a movement of reclaiming our bodies and practicing ways of being with others (including the land) that are before and alternative to colonial, capitalist, and carceral relations.
At the level of embodiment, one aspect of abolishing property means ending the practices of policing Black bodies. Knowing the extent to which Black youth are policed in schools, at parks, and in their families and neighborhoods, in the Bloom Project, we affirm our youth for who they are and all that they bring to our community. We do not expect our youth to be perfect and we do our best to create a learning environment free of policing. We encourage our youth to show up as themselves and bear witness to our youth in all their beauty. One way we encourage this openness and sense of freedom to show themselves is through circles. Circles come from the practices of Native Americans, First Nations, and Indigenous peoples (Turtle Island/North America) and they are a process for open exchange and story sharing. We build on the First Nations and Indigenous (Turtle Island/North America) model of talking circles, using circles for acknowledging Native land and peoples, for setting intentions and sharing reflections, for bearing witness and processing. Circles allow for reciprocal exchange through mutual recognition of each other as we share and listen. By practicing relations of reciprocity and care as opposed to the carceral and capitalist relations of policing and extraction, we give each other the gift of witnessing and being witnessed. In describing how the Bloom Project has affected her, Aven said: The Bloom Project helped me be more free. Like I was free before, but it helped me like show people who you are, don't hide. (Cooper and Thesing 2022) In a society where to be Black and be outside can mean being surveilled, policed, criminalized, and murdered, it is especially important in the Bloom Project and Black Outside, that we proactively protect our youth and cultivate spaces outdoors where they feel a sense of belonging and freedom to explore, play, and express themselves. 2 In July 2021, Black Outside, Inc. took twelve youth backpacking from all three of our programs-the Bloom Project, Camp Founder Girls, and the Brotherhood Collective-in the mountains of Colorado in Cheyenne and Arapaho ancestral lands. A group of seventeen Black people backpacking in Arapaho National Forest was significant, as only 1 percent of national forest visitors identify as Black (Cooke et al. 2018).
Access to parks and green space is an EJ issue, as low-income communities of color in urban areas have less access and proximity to such spaces. Beyond facilitating mere access to outdoor spaces, in the Bloom Project, we create an environment where youth feel free and a sense of belonging being in those spaces. Sometimes this sense of freedom and belonging is expressed through mountain gritos. On our Colorado trip, when we were about halfway into our arduous five-mile hike to our campsite, one of the Bloom youth erupted with a joyous grito, or yell, that dispersed into the air and trees. I immediately chuckled, feeling a deep sense of pride and delight. It felt satisfying and beautiful to bear witness to this youth feeling free enough to do his grito hiking in this national park, a colonized space where policing is built into the environment. A world where we can breathe is one where we can freely express ourselves without (fear of) being policed.
After backpacking up and down mountains in Colorado, many of our youth felt like they could do anything. Aven shared: When we got back from that Colorado Trip, couldn't nobody tell me anything! I thought I was the-maaan, when I went to school, I said, "I just hiked a mountain. I can do whatever I want!" I just thought so highly of myself after that cause I did not think I was gone make it. (Cooper and Thesing 2022) Aven embodied confidence, audacity, and an increased sense of agency after the trip. A Black girl with the audacity to not let anyone at school tell her anything about herself is an expression of "affirmative refusal" (Daigle and Ram ırez 2019). It is a refusal to be told what this Black girl can and cannot do, and it is an affirmation that she can be who and how she wants. Daigle and Ram ırez (2019) wrote, "Refusal is liberation from the violent fractures of settler colonialism and white supremacist structures. Yet, liberation also builds on refusal through a resounding affirmation and embodiment of alternative relationalities" (80). Aven's embodiment was a refusal of property, a refusal of policing, and an affirmation of her Black girl freedom.
Abolitionist EJ is a praxis of affirmative refusal, saying no to carceral logics and dwelling in the with and for (Moten and Harney 2013). 3 It is not a praxis of appealing to the state for redress or recognition. Abolitionist EJ is healing with the land as we practice life-affirming relationalities with ourselves and other humans and nonhumans. Abolitionist EJ praxis is breathwork. Breathwork is inherently collaborative, from the biological mechanics of air entering our nostrils, filling up our lungs, and exiting out of our mouths, to our ecological interdependence with plants that provide us oxygen. Through our bridge work in the Bloom Project, we teach our youth interdependence-that the way we relate to ourselves, others, and the land matters and informs our capacities for collective healing and liberation. A world where we can breathe is where we can inhale fresh mountain air and exhale mountain gritos. A world where we can breathe is one where we feel free to be and show the complexity, fullness, and audaciousness of who we are without being policed for our existence.

Compost, Not Conclusion
Recent scholarship bridging EJ and abolition critiques the EJ movement for being absorbed by "moderate appeals to the liberal state for inclusion and redress" (Pulido and De Lara 2018). EJ's reactionary approach of appealing to the state to address environmental harms has limited justice. This reactiveness is not unique to EJ; rather it speaks to a broader critique of movements for justice. Tuck and Yang (2016) interrogated the limits and desires of justice. They argued that justice is a colonial temporality, "always desired and deferred, and delimited by the timeframes of modern colonizing states as well as the self-historicizing, self-perpetuating futurities of their nations" (Tuck and Yang 2016, 6). Tuck and Yang (2016) gestured toward a decolonial elsewhere beyond injustice, beyond the colonial temporality of justice. Similarly, abolition pushes us to build solutions outside of the state and critiques its ability to provide us justice and healing. Abolitionists are asking, how do we address harm in our communities without involving the state and how do we create the conditions where certain harms hardly exist in the first place?
Holding the limits of justice delivered by the state, in my conception of abolitionist EJ, I propose a justice that is not based on appeals to the state but rather centers on how we create healing in our own communities. Aven described the intergenerational healing that happens from participating in the Bloom Project:  (Cooper and Thesing 2022) Aven participates in the Bloom Project not only for herself, but for the generations before and after her. She understands that the experiences in the Bloom Project are ones that her mother and grandmother did not have the opportunity to experience and that her younger cousins, nephews, and nieces can learn from. Aven pointed to the possibility of intergenerational healing from participating in the Bloom Project-healing for herself, healing for her mother and grandmother through the stories she shares with them, and healing for her younger cousins, nephews, and nieces through the practices she can pass on to them. This intergenerational healing exceeds the colonial temporality of justice.
What do we need to compost to emerge the worlds we want to grow? The Bloom Project composts state-based justice and grows abolitionist EJ through intergenerational and communal healing and proactively working toward and prefiguring worlds where Black youth can breathe. Compost is a process of decomposing organic matter and turning it into valuable fertilizer to enrich soil. I also think of compost as a process of transforming the past to grow the future or transforming what no longer serves us into something more valuable. Compost as a metaphor teaches us that abolishing capitalist and carceral relations is not about elimination, but rather transformation. Compost is a process of world-ending and world-building. Considering the various tensions and possibilities of bridging abolition and EJ, I render abolitionist EJ as a praxis that necessitates both contending with the interconnected injustices of colonialism and racial capitalism and imagining and practicing the worlds that we desire, where we are and with what we have. We will never be able to redress the premature loss of Black life that occurs as a result of existing within "the weather" of anti-Blackness (Sharpe 2016), but we can create healing on our own terms, refuse the structures that oppress us, and affirm the lifeways that sustain us. 4 In the Bloom Project, we do not start with our traumas or unjust experiences with the carceral system; we start from our desires and longings. We are organizing ourselves to be with each other for the purpose of connecting, communing, healing, learning, playing, and breathing. Abolitionist EJ praxis is breathwork-breathing together, conspiring toward worlds where we can breathe. It is through this praxis that the Bloom Project creates spaces where we can breathe.
The Bloom Project's abolitionist EJ praxis teaches us that our capacity for creating a more socially and environmentally just world is in part based on our capacity for healing in community with the land as our teacher and coconspirator. 5 I hope readers learn how geographic thinking on race, nature, and the environment would benefit from further knowledge (co)produced by and with Black, Indigenous, and youth of color. Furthermore, I hope that this article provides insight for deeper work on the ground to continue making spaces and emerging worlds where Black, Indigenous, and youth of color can breathe, and ultimately where we can all breathe. experiences from our time spent together in the Bloom Project. Thank you to my advisors Camilla Hawthorne and Lindsey Dillon for their feedback and mentorship, my professors Naya Jones and Debbie Gould for feedback on earlier versions of this article, and the reviewers and editors of the special issue for their time, energy, and constructive feedback.
Notes 1. My conception of bridge work draws on a lineage of abolitionists, queer Black women, women of color, and Indigenous women, including my own scholaractivist-artist work (Lorde 1984;Braz and Gilmore 2006;Moraga and Anzald ua 2015;Gilmore 2017;Thompson 2018; Davis and Dent 2020). 2. We primarily serve Black youth; however, youth who do not identify as Black also participate in our programs. 3. Moten and Harney (2013) described being in "the with and for" as studying with people in service of (for) a project, which is opposed to the "the antagonism of within and against" (acting within/against institutions). 4. In her text In the Wake, Sharpe (2016) defined "the weather" as "the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack" (104). 5. Translated from Latin, conspire means to breathe together. See Simmons's (2017) work "Settler Atmospherics," and Habtom and Scribe's (2020) article "To Breathe Together: Co-conspirators for Decolonial Futures."