Ruth Wilson Gilmore — “Where life is precious, life is precious.”

<p>To say that Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a geographer, which she is, is not to convey the vast and varied ways in which she is influencing the makings of the future. She's a mentor and teacher to a new generation of social activism and creativity. She's a visionary of “abolition,” and that has become a fraught and polarizing word in our fraught and polarized public discourse. But when Ruth Wilson Gilmore speaks of “abolition,” she is working with a long, long view towards making a whole world, starting now, in which prisons and policing as we do them now become unnecessary, unthinkable. In this sense, abolition is not primarily a matter of what to get rid of, but what to build and to orient around — being present, for example, to human vulnerability and to the ingredients that make for deep human flourishing. </p><p>Meeting Ruth Wilson Gilmore and drawing her out in this way is an exercise in muscular hope — and in understanding the passion of a new generation that is shaping what we will collectively become.</p><p>Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, and American Studies, at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she is also director of the <a href="https://pcp.gc.cuny.edu/about/">Center for Place, Culture, and Politics</a>. She grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. Her paternal grandfather was a janitor at Yale who helped organize the first blue-collar union at that university. And as a tool and die maker for the firearm manufacturer Winchester, her father played a central role in organizing the machinists at that company in the mid-1950s. She has co-founded several organizations, including the California Prison Moratorium Project, <a href="https://criticalresistance.org/fighting-imprisonment-overview/">Critical Resistance</a>, and the <a href="https://ccejn.org/">Central California Environmental Justice Network</a>. She has authored and co-edited several books, including <a href="https://bookshop.org/a/10066/9780520242012"><i>Golden Gulag</i></a>, <a href="http