The National Archives Museum in Washington, D.C., is secured by 40-foot bronze doors, each of which weighs 6.5 tons. On Valentine’s Day 2024, around 1 p.m., Donald Zepeda walked the mile there from his Airbnb to throw paint powder on the Constitution of the United States. He was 35. The parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere was 422.99. He had been arrested 20 times for civil disobedience, including the day before, when he and two others sat in the middle of the George Washington Parkway and demanded that President Biden declare a climate emergency.
Zepeda had dressed respectfully for the occasion: khakis, plaid button-down, gray anorak, black Vans. When he arrived at the archives, he walked to the bathroom, where he removed a small plastic bag of tempera paint powder from his backpack and placed it in his jacket pocket. In the bottle, the powder had looked red, like blood. Now, tied up in this flimsy bag, it looked like hot-pink CAUTION tape.
Zepeda felt, as he often did, anxious, tired, and slightly numb. He got scared about time — how little he, or anyone else, had to do good deeds. His philosophy for trying to save the planet in 2024 was “Do the work, don’t think about the thing,” so as not to “always be crying 24/7.” If you were crying 24/7, Zepeda knew, it was “hard to convince people to do things.” But he also didn’t want to appear “chill and normal and casual.” Being chill and normal and casual would convey that everything was fine. Everything was not fine.
Zepeda’s partner that day was a 27-year-old man named Jackson Green whose nom de guerre is “Kroegeor.” At age 20, in Utah, Kroegeor had broken up with the Mormon Church and had a political awakening. He realized that “You are the king of history if you are a white man in America” and that, because of how greedily American white men live, “the world is fucked.”
Kroegeor quit his job, meandered east, and met Zepeda in D.C. at a recruitment meeting for Declare Emergency, Zepeda’s band of climate rebels dedicated to getting the U.S. to do just that: declare a climate emergency; acknowledge that the crisis is as urgent as a war. The U.K. did this in 2019, and while the declaration came with no specific powers, soon after, the government prohibited new licenses for extracting oil, gas, and coal.
For Declare Emergency’s coming Constitution action, Kroegeor volunteered “to go red” — be a front man, risk arrest.
Kroegeor had shared the Airbnb with Zepeda but walked to the archives on his own lest anyone suspect them. He showed up cheerful, chewing gum, in cargo shorts, Chacos, and a backward baseball cap. While Kroegeor headed to the bathroom to transfer his paint bag to his shorts, Zepeda read what Abigail Adams wrote in a 1776 letter to her husband, John Adams: “Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.”
The Constitution rests in the National Archives’ soaring marble rotunda in a gold-plated case that looks like a coffin topped with four panes of glass. There, in that colossal room, Zepeda looked tiny — a speck of a citizen, as politically powerful as a dust mote. Around 2 p.m., he caught the eye of Ford Fischer, an independent journalist he’d asked to come livestream. They all waited for some tourists to clear the way. It was time. Zepeda and Kroegeor stepped in front of the Constitution, pretended to read for a moment, and turned to face the center of the room. They then raised their paint bags above their heads, ripped the bags in half, and dumped the powder out. They’d practiced this only once — in hindsight, a mistake. Some of the pink powder landed on the case. A lot of it landed on the floor. Much of it ended up on themselves.
Toes pointed outward, eyes downcast, bits of pink plastic bag balled in both hands, Zepeda started speaking in a soft deadpan: “Abigail Adams said we are determined to foment a rebellion.”
A woman in a red jacket stopped to watch; a man in a white one walked away. Others pulled out phones and cameras. Three security guards, sharp in black caps and white shirts, slowly gathered around. Kroegeor reached a hand back onto the Constitution case, grabbed a fistful of powder, and rubbed it between his palms. “This country is founded on the conditions that all men are created equally and endowed with the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” he said, his voice reverberating in the domed hall. Then he got to the point: “We all deserve clean air, water, food, and a livable climate.”
No one seemed to be listening — not the security guards, busy on their radios. Not the tourists, whom the guards escorted out to the far side of those massive bronze doors.
When the cops arrived, they put Zepeda on his knees. Kroegeor, grinning, let his body go limp and lay face down on the floor.
“We don’t want to see our children have to live through the end of civilization, but that’s the path we’re going down,” Zepeda said, kneeling and exhausted, his voice gravelly and just loud enough to echo. He started to plead: “We need to declare a climate emergency, President Biden. Please declare a climate emergency. America, please declare a climate emergency.”
Zepeda hadn’t wanted to go red on this protest, but, besides Kroegeor, none of the other 8.2 billion people on Earth had volunteered.
Four months earlier, a hooded man had scaled the glass pyramid outside the Louvre and doused it with orange paint. Four months after, on the 2024 summer solstice, activists rushed Stonehenge carrying fire extinguishers filled with pressurized cornstarch and sprayed the monoliths with orange powder. These stunts had started two years before, in October 2022, in London’s National Gallery when two young British women threw cream-of-tomato soup at Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers. They then knelt below the painting and glued their hands to the wall. “What’s worth more, art or life?” 21-year-old Phoebe Plummer yelled. “Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people?”
Video of the incident ricocheted all over the world — 1.7 million viewers on TikTok and 7.1 million on Twitter within a few days. In terms of cultural traction per protester minute, this was perhaps the greatest protest in climate history.
Nine days later, two Germans threw watered-down mashed potatoes at Grainstacks, a Monet at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam. Four days after that, a bald man glued his head to Girl With a Pearl Earring, Vermeer’s masterpiece hanging in the Hague. “Do you feel outraged?” the bald man asked, his contempt searing. “Good. Where is that feeling when you see the planet being destroyed before your very eyes?”
The response was immediate, consuming, bitter. Didn’t these people know they were undermining themselves? A blue-suited Piers Morgan summed up the scold position: “Whatever the merits of the cause they are fighting for … it’s eroding by the second with these acts of childish, petty, pathetic vandalism.”
Bill McKibben, author, activist, and climate standard-bearer, was skeptical and unenthused. “The first time someone went and threw a can of soup on a painting, I was like, Okay, I guess we’ll see how this plays out,” he said recently. “By the seventh time, I was like, This is really not helping much.”
Was McKibben right? Was Morgan? The foundational job of climate activists — getting governments and businesses to curtail emissions — was not going well. For 50 years, people had been lecturing, lobbying, marching, sitting, even laying their bodies atop planes to get humans to spew less carbon. In the 1980s, scientists tried to educate, saying, “Look, here is the data. A hotter planet means fire, floods, crop failures, death.” In the ’90s, the big greens — environmental nonprofits like the Sierra Club — joined the fight, deploying mountains of money and armies of lawyers and lobbyists. In the 2010s, with global emissions still rising, people hurled themselves into the gears of the petro-machinery itself, blocking pipelines and handcuffing themselves to diggers. In 2018, with emissions growing still, 15-year-old Greta Thunberg sat down in front of the Swedish parliament. By the end of the next year, she’d ignited a 13 million-strong youth climate movement.
Then … momentum stalled. The pandemic. The January 6 insurrection. This left us where we are now: in “a period of abeyance,” as Dana R. Fisher, a sociologist at American University and the author of Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action, explained to me. The movement is “demobilized.” McKibben used no jargon: We’re at “a low point.”
In a Gallup poll this fall, voters ranked climate 21st on a list of 22 concerns. Corporations have quit pretending to care. “We’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway,” Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, said at the recent AI Energy Summit, arguing it was a bad bet to temper the energy........