Eco-Radical, Singer, Criminal, Cult Leader: Inside Carbon Nation
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I t’s July Fourth, and Eligio Bishop is pacing his cell at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison, with a phone pressed to his ear, wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts. The 42- year-old is locked in his cell nearly 24 hours a day, seven days a week. His only company, he says, are rats and roaches that sometimes bite him while he sleeps. “If there was hell on Earth,” Bishop says, “this is it.”
Bishop’s cell is small and austere. The one indulgence he’s permitted are phone calls, in 20-minute increments, every few days. For someone who loves talking as much as Bishop, it’s a lifeline. A guard rolls the phone cart into his cell, and if nobody else wants it, Bishop can string together these 20-minute calls for hours, which is how I end up spending nearly four hours across two days talking to him.
Bishop is serving life without the possibility of parole after being found guilty in March of rape, false imprisonment, and revenge porn. He claims he’s innocent. In fact, it’s one of the first things he tells me on the phone: “I’m a controversial figure because what I stand for goes against the power structure.”
Since 2016, Bishop has led an itinerant eco-cult known for most of those years as Carbon Nation. Calling himself “Natureboy,” he’s promoted a grab bag of beliefs including veganism, polygamy, nudity, astrology, and sleeping and shitting outside. “What I stand for is very simple,” he says. “The human race needs to stop living the way we’re living — for our own survival. I promote living in tune with nature.”
Bishop contends that melanin, which produces skin, hair, and eye pigmentation, has almost supernatural powers enhanced by the sun. As such, he preaches the benefits of leaving the U.S. to live in the tropics, particularly for Black people. He traces issues plaguing Black Americans — racism, poverty, illness — to the fact that, as he puts it, “this isn’t our natural environment, but we’re still fighting for our rights within it.”
Between 2016 and 2022, Bishop and a rotating core of about 10 to 20 followers hopscotched through Central America, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, California, Nevada, and Texas, before landing in the Atlanta area. His role evolved from master teacher to tribal chieftain to God himself.
“I’m going to tell you this right on the phone,” he says during our July Fourth call. “I am the king of the Earth. I’m the Messiah. I’m God returning. I’m Christ.”
Content retrieved from: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/carbon-nation-eligio-bishop-atlanta-cult-1235253419/.
